All Souls, Amadeus, and Antonio Salieri, the "Patron Saint of Mediocrities Everywhere", Part 2

   Yesterday in part 1, I retold the story of the 1984 movie, Amadeus, ending with a clip of the amazing dictation of the Confutatis from Mozart's Requiem (K. 626).  While this is, at best, an apocryphal story, like many such stories, the drama is perhaps a greater illumination of the truth of the human condition than actual historical events.  In Salieri, a rival of Mozart who so desperately longed to be touched by God through music, we peer into the human heart's most desperate longing, its most urgent imperative, that of "amadeus," which means "love of God".

   The wound tormenting Salieri as he listened to the inspired music of  Mozart was that of envy.  Envy is more than simply the desire of something that belongs to another.  Envy, at its core, is sorrow over another's good... when the good of another person is perceived as an evil or privation to me.  There is merit in desiring good things--in wanting to have the talent to play piano like a concert pianist, or to be the top of one's class at high school or college, to have friends and admirers like a celebrity, or to own a nice car like the neighbors.  But such desires can easily lead us to do destructive, jealous things to others, while hallowing out in our own souls the ability to love that which is good.  Thus envy is a dangerous, seductive sin.  According to Dante, only pride is more serious and insidious an enemy.   In more subtle forms, envy is expressed through gossip (destroying another's good name), diminishing another's good fortune (discounting the good of something that belongs to another... "Having a Timex is just as good as having a Rolex... all they do is tell time, anyway"), or turning away from the good altogether, ("Johnny is so much better at baseball than I am, I think I'll play basketball instead").  These more subtle forms of envy tend to point to narcissistic wounds living as parasites within our souls... parasites fed by our own sense of inadequacy, and inflamed by a corrupted sense of justice that the goods of another should, in righteousness, instead belong to us.  The classic antidote to envy is the "cardinal virtue" of 'fraternal love'-- a love that rejoices in the good of others, and in doing so rejoices in the gifts of God.  Such virtue is most difficult to obtain, as it requires a deep surrender of self-interested desires.

    And so, after watching nearly two hours of Salieri being mercilessly wounded by envy, we come to the final reel, where he is finally toe-to-toe with his antagonist, who is dying in bed before him.  The text before them says, "Confounded are the damned, doomed to unending flames.  Lord, call me among the blessed.  I kneel down in prayer, my heart contrite as ashes; carry me unto final health."  Before laying out the first notes, Mozart pauses for a moment, looking off into space, and then focusing on Salieri  Mozart asks,

   "Do you believe in it?"

   "What?" asks Salieri.

   "A fire which never dies, burning you forever?"

   Salieri, perhaps with a great deal of self-knowledge, replies, "Oh, yes."

   "Possible?"

   Salieri refocuses the attention of Mozart and in a moment, Mozart conjures up the very flames of hell in a fitting tone-poem: trumpets and tympani accenting downbeats, violins feverishly running up and down the scales, and the martial rawness of the men's voices, proclaiming, "Confutatis!  Maledictis!  Flambis acribus addictis, Confutatis maledictis!"  Suddenly this frightful scene is punctured by the angelic song, "Voca, voca me. Voca me cum benedictis!"

   I think that Salieri knew what hell was about.  He had been there, and the curtain was parted even further that evening as Mozart dictated that section of the Dies Irae.  Hell is not about horned monsters in red jumpsuits carrying pitchforks.  It might not have even been about the specific sins and shortcomings of life in themselves.  Hell is fundamentally the eternal alienation from God.  Mozart, laying before him in final agony had yet to experience the depths of that kind of alienation, and was, perhaps, at a crisis of faith.  "Oh, yes."  Salieri believed in the flames.  Indeed, the 'voice of God' heard in the inspired music of Mozart had tormented Salieri, who was still trapped in that deep spiral of envy.  God would not 'send Salieri to hell,' but rather, Salieri's corrupted desires in envy and his wounded pride transformed the experience of God's glory into hell for him, and there he would stay. "Confounded are the damned!  Doomed to unending flames!"

   But as he writes the notes, assembles the lyrics, and scores the Confutatis, for once, and perhaps the only time in his life, the voice of God, mediated through the dying Mozart, invites Salieri to participate in something... divine.  But in this participation, Salieri still did not possess that voice in and of himself.  He was not to be the instrument of God's glory... just the secretary.  God was not about to let him, a mere "mediocrity", share in the smallest part of his glory.  God himself would 'kill' Mozart to seal Salieri's fate.  "[God] kept me alive to torture.  Thirty-two years of torture... thirty-two years of slowly watching myself become extinct.... my music growing fainter... all the time fainter."  While perhaps embracing the satisfaction of contributing to Mozart's demise in a small way, the joke would ultimately be on him: Mozart was dead, but his music would live on, assuring Salieri's defeat as a forgotten man and composer.  Over thirty-two years, his life would become a testament to the completeness of his defeat.

  It seems that in that moment, after the trauma of a failed attempt at suicide (perhaps as a final failed attempt to escape the judgement of God), and after the retelling of his story in confession, a revelation comes upon the elderly Salieri.  In his struggle and enduring woundedness, he finally discovers that he was not to be a champion of divine music, but rather the 'patron saint' of mediocrities everywhere... an example to all those who would never measure up to their greatest dreams and aspirations, of those who will never know the blessing of God's favor... perhaps even of those who fought God and lost.   As one who has suffered and lost, as one who has finally discovered himself and his humble place before God at the end of that struggle, he (and not the priest) can finally offer an authentic 'absolution' to other 'mediocrities' -- an act of mercy and simultaneous self-forgiveness which brings about deep internal reconciliation and peace.  It is an act that would not be possible without the deliverance of re-telling the story and encountering God's mercy in a transformative way. [It is not a sacramental absolution, of course, but the same kind of 'absolution' that flows from compassion for others like him who struggle for self-acceptance and healing in the midst of woundedness... it is like the peace found in and offered by former alcoholics or drug addicts who make it their mission to assist others in overcoming addictions.]  The cackle of Mozart's insane laughter is no longer a mockery of Salieri and his woundedness but is instead an affirmation of the divine joke that Salieri now 'gets'... his new destiny is to rest in the 'fraternal love' that heals envy and joins him in that same 'fraternal love' to mediocrities everywhere, starting in the sunlight of the new day at the asylum.

   Tune in tomorrow for part 3.  All Souls Day (November 2), is, in a certain way, a celebration of that yet-to-be-redeemed woundedness in us all that alienates us from God, yet promises to reveal the surest path of our redemption in his love and mercy.  The 'poor souls' of purgatory enjoy God's favor as heirs to the kingdom while still longing for the complete healing and purification found in his mercy...

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'."