Amadeus

Director's Notes on Amadeus by Peter Shaffer

Mr Anthony

During her eleven-year tenure as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher attended only one production at Britain’s National Theatre: a performance of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. 

Poster for the original RNT production of Amadeus in 1979, designed by Richard Bird and Michael Mayhew

She described it as a 'filthy play' and upbraided director Peter Hall for depicting Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. When Hall pointed out that Mozart’s correspondence was laced with lavatorial flourishes (a missive to his cousin, Marianne, is touchingly signed off: 'by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin'), Thatcher held her ground: 'It is not possible,' she insisted, 'not from someone who could create works of such beauty. It cannot be so.'

Simon Callow as Mozart in the original RNT production

Not everyone shared the Prime Minister’s concerns; since its premiere in 1979 (starring Paul Scofield as Salieri, Simon Callow as Mozart and Felicity Kendal as Constanze) Amadeus has been drenched in plaudits. The original production won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play, the Broadway transfer (with Ian McKellen as Salieri and Tim Curry as Mozart) won five Tony Awards (including Best Play and Best Actor for McKellen), and the subsequent film adaptation received a staggering forty awards, including eight Academy Awards and four BAFTAs. 'With the play and the film,' concluded Hall, 'Peter Shaffer has done more to encourage the love and understanding of Mozart than anyone [in the twentieth] century.'

Poster for Milos Forman's 1984 film adaptation of the play

That is not to say historical veracity was Shaffer’s primary impulse; he described the play as 'a fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri'. Hall was right to defend the playwright’s depiction of the composer as coarse and capricious; the Viennese salonnière and former pupil Karoline Pilcher recalled in her memoirs: 'One day when I was sitting at the pianoforte playing the ‘Non più andrai’ from Figaro, Mozart suddenly moved a chair up and began to improvise such wonderfully beautiful variations that everyone listened to the tones of the German Orpheus with bated breath. But then he suddenly tired of it, jumped up and, in the mad mood which so often came over him, he began to leap over tables and chairs, miaow like a cat, and turn somersaults like an unruly boy.' However, the premise of Salieri and Mozart as a bewigged, eighteenth-century Cain and Abel is pure conjecture. In reality their relationship was one of mutual respect: Salieri tutored Mozart's son and conducted many of Mozart's works, both before and after his death. In 1823, hospitalised with severe dementia, Salieri was rumoured to have accused himself of poisoning Mozart, a claim later denied by the composer and unsubstantiated by the hospital staff. But the damage was done.

It was the Russian playwright Alexander Pushkin who first decided an alleged rivalry would make for good drama: in 1830 he published a short play, Mozart and Salieri, in which the latter murders the former onstage; the piece was later set as an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Mozart almost certainly died of either rheumatic fever or a streptococcal infection and, far from feeling hounded by a spectral assassin in his final weeks, wrote cheerfully to friends announcing he was in line for the lucrative post of Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. The unfinished Requiem in D Minor on which Shaffer’s Mozart labours was commissioned not by Salieri in a final act of psychological warfare, but by Count Franz von Walsegg, an eccentric amateur composer intending to pass the work off as his own at a Mass for his recently deceased wife.

Any artistic rendering of history will place a frame on the canvas that omits more than it includes. Amadeus presents a series of framing narratives designed not to muddy reality but to celebrate subjectivity. Shaffer offers a version of Mozart which suits his dramaturgical needs, the primary one being to discuss the painfully indiscriminate nature of genius. The play itself is presented through the framework of Salieri’s direct address: the selective memories of a very old man determined to shape a legacy least damaging to his pride. He himself has constructed an image of Mozart informed by the distortions of the Venticelli (or ‘little winds’) that permeate the court of eighteenth-century Vienna, a place where self-editing is a form of survival. In this environment the rigidity of social performance, the grandiosity of costuming and the codification of body language make explicit the theatricality of everyday life. It is against this most inauthentic of backdrops that Mozart, the only inept self-editor in the play, dances in such stark rebuttal. This is not a play concerned with truth, but rather with how we reframe truth to suit our needs – as Margaret Thatcher’s post-show assessment inadvertently revealed.

Paul Scofield as Salieri in the original RNT production of Amadeus

In its scope and scale, Amadeus is somewhat anomalous in the canon of twentieth century drama, more often concerned with the personal tragedy of Arthur Miller’s ‘common man’. Shaffer’s play boasts an operatic emotional intensity and a Shakespearean thematic reach. As such, it is a demanding play for any company of actors, let alone a group of teenagers. I would like to thank the cast for the intellect, craft and stamina they have displayed throughout rehearsals. In particular, I would like to thank Patrick Monroe-Davies for his exemplary leadership. Paul Scofield claimed that Salieri was the hardest acting role of his career – surpassing Lear – simply because he is onstage for the whole play and has such vivid and constant alterations of mood. I am grateful to Patrick and the entire cast for their unwavering professionalism, without which this production would not have been possible.

You can view a trailer for Mr Anthony's production of Amadeus here: tickets are available here, or just scan the QR code on the poster.  They're selling fast!