• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3181 0

the story is told by Salieri to a priest through a series of flashbacks. Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Academy Award as Best Actor for his performance) was the court composer to Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), the Austrian emperor, but he was also a man who dedicated his life to serving God through music. Salieri becomes insanely jealous of the young Mozart (Tom Hulce), who impresses everyone with his musical genius. Salieri, however, is dismayed by Mozart’s lewd, irreverent, and foolish behavior. In hearing Mozart’s music, he believes he is hearing the voice of God (“God is singing through this little man to all the world”), but he cannot fathom why God would speak through such a common person and comes to believe that God is laughing at Salieri’s own musical mediocrity through Mozart’s genius. As Mozart suffers through a series of trials and rejections by people who have little appreciation of his genius, Salieri plots the downfall of Amadeus (literally “God’s beloved”) as a way of defeating God. He secretly commissions Mozart to write a Requiem Mass, which he plans to pass off as his own work of genius after he has killed Mozart. As his financial worries increase, however, Mozart becomes increasingly weakened by drink and illness and dies before the Requiem is completed. Salieri now believes that God killed Mozart so that Salieri could not be recognized as a musical genius.

Mozart (Tom Hulce) meets with Salieri (F. Murray Abraham).

© Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection

Amadeus is a brilliant film about brilliance—the musical genius of Mozart. While the movie is accurate in presenting Mozart as a child prodigy and a great composer who died at the young age of thirty-five,the story of the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart is mostly fictional. There was indeed some antipathy between these two composers who vied for royal commissions and teaching jobs. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that the two men respected each other, and there is certainly no evidence that Salieri was instrumental in bringing about Mozart’s downfall and death. Musical scholars also reject the view of Mozart as a giggling fool, subject to the outbursts of laughter that Tom Hulce used so effectively in his portrayal of Mozart. The film’s depiction of Mozart writing out perfect manuscripts of what he had already composed in his head is also questionable. Mozart himself said once, “People make a mistake who think that my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I.” Despite the lack of historical accuracy, however, Amadeus beautifully conveys the genius of Mozart and gives viewers a sense of why he is regarded as one of the world’s greatest composers.

* * *

The High Culture of the Eighteenth Century

Historians and cultural anthropologists have grown accustomed to distinguishing between a civilization’s high culture and its popular culture. High culture usually means the literary and artistic world of the educated and wealthy ruling classes; popular culture refers to the written and unwritten lore of the masses, most of which is passed down orally. By the eighteenth century, European high culture consisted of a learned world of theologians, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, poets, and dramatists, for whom Latin remained a truly international language. Their work was supported by a wealthy and literate lay group, the most important of whom were the landed aristocracy and the wealthier upper classes in the cities.

A London Coffeehouse. Coffeehouses first appeared in Venice and Constantinople but quickly spread throughout Europe by the beginning of the eighteenth century. In addition to drinking coffee, patrons of coffeehouses could read magazines and newspapers, exchange ideas, play chess, smoke, and engage in business transactions. In this scene from a London coffeehouse of 1705, well-attired gentlemen make bids on commodities.

© British Museum, London/The Bridgeman Art Library

Especially noticeable in the eighteenth century was an expansion of both the