The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [278]
A startling feature of this story, particularly in its film version, was the contrast between the care lavished to ensure that every detail of its setting might seem historically plausible and the way it portrayed its central character, Mozart himself. The film was shot in Prague, as the most unspoiled baroque city in Europe. It was even emphasised that a magnificent chandelier shown in several scenes was the very one owned by Mozart's Salzburg patron, the Archbishop Colloredo, lovingly restored and lit with thousands of candles for the first time since the eighteenth century. Yet in the midst of all this riot of historical verisimilitude appeared the central figure, Mozart, shockingly presented as a giggling and ridiculous little dirtyminded grotesque. Here any pretence at historical accuracy was chucked out of the window. This bizarre creation bore not the slightest resemblance to the complex and fundamentally very serious real-life Mozart who emerges from his letters or descriptions by contemporaries. It was as if it was not only Salieri who was setting out on his Quest to destroy Mozart but the author himself: turning the composer into this embarrassing travesty to gratify some obscure purpose of his own psyche.
To support such a distortion of the facts, Shaffer cited a few mildly scatological passages from letters Mozart had written to his girl cousin when in his early twenties. But, ignoring almost everything else we know about the composer, these fragments had then been blown up to represent the whole man. Inevitably this raises the question: why? The explanation offered was that the play was trying to show how an artist and his work can be seen as wholly separate. There was no connection between the nobility of the music and the ignoble personality of its composer. He was merely, Salieri explained, the unworthy channel for art which derived from some quite separate source.
But this hardly explained the need to debase Mozart in a way which so defied historical reality. Was it any accident that this dark story was conceived in an age which, while recognising the divine perfection of Mozart's music, had nevertheless travelled so far from the fundamental values it represented that it was now totally at odds with them? So long as the music could be treated as quite separate from the culture and the values which had given rise to it, it could still be marvelled at. But this made it all the more important to contrast the music with everything which had originally inspired it. Thus, instead of recognising the human Mozart as all of a piece with music which is one of the supreme expressions in history of the values of the Self, the story sought to degrade him into an infantile caricature. By doing dirt on Mozart, it was unconsciously violating the Self. Such, as was symbolised in Salieri's God-defying act of hurling the crucifix into the fire, was the purpose of portraying his demonic quest to destroy the composer of some of the most sublimely ego-transcending music ever written: resulting in a story which, in its own way, carried echoes of the darkness of Moby Dick.
Three very different examples of dark quests in modern popular storytelling were the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal (1971) and the post-war Ealing film comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in a pastiche version of the 1930s, full of period clothes, cars