All Souls, Amadeus, and Antonio Salieri, the "Patron Saint of Mediocrities Everywhere", Part 1

   As many of my friends know, I deeply enjoy watching and collecting good movies.  If asked my favorite, without a doubt, I point to the 1984 Academy Award winner, Amadeus, which is a drama based on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as seen through the eyes of one of his rivals and contemporaries, Antonio Salieri.  While the account is a fictionalized dramatization of the rivalry between the two men, it speaks so deeply to the human heart, the human desire to encounter and possess the divine, that the story is, so to speak, probably better than the truth.

   The story opens with a despondent Salieri (F. Murray Abraham, Academy Award winner for Best Actor in this role), now an old man, crying out in the darkness of night, "Mozart!  I confess I killed you! ...Forgive me Mozart!"  After hearing a scream behind the locked doors of his apartment, we find that he has taken a knife to himself in an attempt at suicide, after which he is whisked away to an asylum and patched up.  The next morning a priest comes by on his rounds and begs Salieri to offer his confession and make peace with God.  Salieri proceeds to narrate the story of his rivalry with Mozart (Tom Hulce), from the very beginning.

   Salieri remarks how he was never encouraged to develop his musical talent; his father  "didn't care for music".  The child prodigy Mozart, on the other hand, was carted all around Europe, performing 'like a trained monkey' for courts of royalty and ecclesiastical nobility, under the encouragement of his father, who taught him everything he knew.  Upon his own father's death (which Salieri interprets as a 'miraculous gift'), Salieri finally has the freedom to take up his muse and with much success rapidly rises through the ranks of the musical elite, becoming the court composer in Vienna, writing more then 40 operas, and winning wide acclaim as one of the most accomplished composers in Europe.

  It isn't until some years later, when Mozart appears at a concert at the palace of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, that Salieri and Mozart formally meet.  Mozart is to direct a concerto, and Salieri muses whether the radiant talent of someone with Mozart's reputation might be "written on [his] face"... "who could he be?"  And so, the camera pans across a room full of young men, dressed in waistcoats and finely-powdered wigs, engaged in polite conversation.  One face after another, Salieri scrutinizes the room, looking for signs of one blessed by divine favor.  A loud, boisterous rogue fiendishly chasing a woman momentarily distracts Salieri, until in his wanderings he finds himself alone in a room, surveying sweets and treats to be served at the event (Salieri was noted to be a 'sweet-tooth' in real life).  Into the room comes the young rogue and the object of his pursuit.  Along with Salieri we witness a vulgar, bizarre, flirtatious exchange between this couple.  Meanwhile, as the party continues in another room, the whisper goes out, "where's Mozart?"   A few moments later, in the distance, we hear the opening cadences of the glorious concerto, and the young rogue jumps up, shouting, "they have started without me!"

   Salieri remarks as an old man, "That was Mozart!  That giggling, dirty-minded creature I had just seen crawling on the floor!"  Put-off by the young man, Salileri was nonetheless captured and enraptured by the unspeakable beauty of his musical output.  In the years that followed, Mozart would come to Vienna and gain fame and notoriety by way of his music that Salieri could only see as a divine gift... a gift he desired and sacrificed everything for... his industry, his humility, even his chastity.  But he determined that he had not received 'the blessing' of the divine music which animated Mozart... a music which was written as no other: finished, complete, perfect, as if dictated from the mind and voice of God himself.   "I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty."  After being insulted and shamed by Mozart in the court and in public, and after discerning that a prima donna of his affections was fiendishly deflowered by this man-child, Salieri declared himself an enemy of God... for what good god would speak through the gross immaturity of such a beast?  "There is no God of mercy," Salieri confesses, "just a God of torture."  At a crisis point, we see him praying, begging, "Dear, God, enter me now.  Fill me with one piece of pure music.  One  piece with your breath in it, to show me that you love me.  Show me one sign of your favor, and I will show mine to Mozart."  After a final spiritual crisis which he discerns as God's final rebuff, Salieri decided that his job in life was to destroy this impertinent little man who was an insult to all that is just and good and holy.  Looking upon the crucifix, Salieri laments, "We, you and I, are enemies... because you choose as your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy... and give me for reward only the ability to recongize the incarnation."  Setting the crucifix on a burning fire, he continues, "Because you are unjust... unfair... unkind... I will block you.  I swear it.  I will hinder and harm your creature on earth as far as I am able!"  And so the movie proceeds tit-for-tat, until Salieri determines that the best way to get at Mozart would be an act of psychological warfare, ending in Mozart's murder.  In this he could "finally triumph... over God!"  (In the scenes where Salieri is an old man in confession, the early morning and day has now given way to the intense darkness night... it has been quite a long confession!)

   Shortly following the death of Mozart's father, observing the anguish in Mozart's heart over  his father's passing as expressed in the opera Don Giovanni, Salieri covertly commissions a musical setting of the Requiem (funeral) Mass, which he plans to receive and publish as his own composition.  He's not quite sure how to kill Mozart, squeamish about the prospect of actually having to physically end his life.  "First I must obtain the death Mass, then I must achieve his death... it's one thing to dream about it, but quite another... when you have to do it with your own hands."  But in writing the Requiem (along with the intense need to write for the opera in order to bring money into the house to pay large debts) Mozart begins a slow journey into insanity, ill-health, drunkenness,  and even estrangement from his wife.

  After the premiere of The Magic Flute, we see Mozart collapse.  Upon being returned to his home with Salieri's assistance, he seizes the opportunity to push him over the edge... he 'delivers' the message to Mozart that the Requiem must be completed... tonight... and thus begins a scene which is perhaps one of the most spiritual in all of cinema: Salieri receives the dictation of music for the Confutatis, a section of the foreboding liturgical sequence, Dies Irae:

Latin	English (in poetic translation)
Confutatis maledictis, Flammis acribus addictis: Voca me cum benedictis.	The wicked are confounded, Doomed to flames unbounded: Call me with thy saints surrounded.
Oro supplex et acclinis, Cor contritium quasi cinis Gere curam mei finis	Low I kneel in submission, Like ashes is my heart’s contrition; Help me in my last condition.

Tune in tomorrow for part 2 of "All Souls, Amadeus, and Antonio Salieri, the 'Patron Saint of Mediocrities Everywhere'."