Amadeus

“Yes, we were servants. But we were learned servants! And we used our learning to celebrate men’s average lives!” 

Salieri talks about composing as having a larger purpose. In opera, he claims, they glorify the common man. Simultaneously, he refers to himself and his fellow artists as servants, humble and carrying out the work of the divine. This is ironic, since Salieri’s thirst for fame will lead him to destroy Mozart who desired to write operas about regular people. 

“We took unremarkable men: usual bankers, run-of-the-mill priests, ordinary soldiers and statesmen and wives—and sacramentalized their mediocrity.”

What Salieri describes here when discussing opera parallels is how both the play and narratives of history treat these historical figures. The play in particular infuses these people with an elaborate drama, turning Mozart into a martyr for his art rather than an unfortunate person who was underappreciated in his lifetime and died in poverty. 

“What?! What is this? Tell me, Signore! What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it Your need? Can it be Yours?...” 

Salieri responds with incredulity and pain when he hears Mozart’s music for the first time. Until this moment, Salieri has believed that he had been a good person and was therefore favored by God. When he hears Mozart’s composition, he is struck by the believe that he has, for the first time, heard the voice of God. This means that God has never favored him like he has favored Mozart.

“I was suddenly frightened. It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child!” 

Salieri is appalled by the idea that God would choose to speak through Mozart rather than someone like him. Salieri has just witness Mozart being vulgar and acting like a cat while shamelessly chasing Constanze around at a party. He draws a line between Mozart’s voice, which is his own, and his music, which must be purely divine. Salieri uses this juxtaposition to feed his intense jealousy over Mozart’s musical talent.

“In my view, musicians are not horses to be run against one another.”

Van Swieten’s assertion is ironic, since the whims of Emperor Joseph and the court require musicians to compete with each other for their patronage by creating compositions that will be popular. Mozart refuses to do this, so he ends up penniless and in an early grave. 

“No one who cares for art can afford not to know Herr Salieri.” 

When the emperor introduces Mozart to Salieri, this description highlights Salieri importance and standing within the court. However, it is ominously ironic, since in the end, Mozart’s life is made worse by Salieri’s friendship. In actuality, if Mozart cares for his art, he cannot afford to have Salieri in his life.

“There are just as many notes, Majesty, neither more nor less, as are required.” 

Mozart’s response to the emperor’s claim that the opera had too many notes shows his inability to show deference when his work is criticized, even in a case when the critic has immense power over his career and very little actual musical knowledge to lend his opinions credence. This display of pride shows how hubris will eventually contribute to his downfall.

“Katherina is an excessive girl. In fact she’s insatiable.” 

When Mozart makes this comment in response to Salieri’s criticism of the aria, Salieri knows what he was suspecting while watching the opera must be true: Mozart has slept with Katherina. Salieri has placed Katherina on a pedestal, describing her as virtuous and innocent, the object of his love, so learning that Mozart has defiled that vision makes Salieri even more determined to ruin him.

“All the same, as my revered teacher the Chevalier Gluck used to say to me—one must avoid music that smells of music.” 

Salieri’s comment suggests that music that “makes one aware too much of the virtuosity of the composer” (38) is tacky and undesirable. However, this points to his own insecurity and lack of virtuosity. Mozart immediately insults Gluck, and by insulting Salieri’s mentor, indirectly insults Salieri. Salieri is implying that Mozart should restrain his ability rather than writing music that might be considered too showy.

“When I return, I’ll tell you about the war I fought with God through his preferred Creature—Mozart, named Amadeus. In the waging of which, of course, the Creature had to be destroyed.” 

Right before intermission, Salieri is setting up the second act in which everything will change for him. He will stop being passive aggressive and start forsaking everything he once valued to wage war with a man who has no idea he’s meant to be fighting. In the end, of course, Salieri does not fully destroy Mozart but rather contributes to his downfall.

“This is now the very last hour of my life. You must understand me. Not forgive. I do not seek forgiveness. I was a good man, as the world calls good. What use was it to me? Goodness could not make me a good composer. Was Mozart good? Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.” 

It is notable that Salieri does not seek forgiveness. He is confessing to an audience to a crime that he did not actually commit. Salieri has come to the conclusion that goodness is meaningless when it comes to talent and art. Therefore, if Mozart was not good in the sense that Salieri believes that he himself was good, it doesn’t matter. This is a major revelation, since before meeting Mozart, Salieri believed that goodness would lead to being rewarded with the fame and talent he thinks he deserves.

“Because I want to do a piece about real people, Baron! And I want to set it in a real place! A boudoir!—because that to me is the most exciting place on earth! Underclothes on the floor! Sheets still warm from a woman’s body! Even a pisspot brimming under the bed!” 

Mozart’s idea of writing an opera about the mundane goes against everything that has been expressed thus far about the role of opera in society. Salieri describes opera as elevating the common man. Opera tends to be an entertainment for the elite, and thus it depicts the elite or reimagines the lower classes in idealized forms. To show things that polite society keeps hidden is considered scandalous, shocking, and even vulgar.

“Because they go on forever—that’s why! They represent the eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us, Mozart—you and me just as well as the Emperor. It is an aggrandizing art! It celebrates the eternal in Man and ignores the ephemeral. The goddess in Woman and not the laundress.” 

Van Swieten reiterates what Salieri states earlier in the play about composing being part of a higher purpose. It does not, according to him, simply depict the elite for the entertainment of the elite, but actually raises up the consciousness of mankind to higher levels.  

“That’s why opera is important, Baron. Because it’s realer than any play! A dramatic poet would have to put all those thoughts down one after another to represent this second of time. The composer can put them all down at once—and still make us hear each one of them!” 

Mozart hits upon the capabilities of music to represent emotion in such a way that the audience can feel and understand what the composer is trying to represent in only a few notes. Language can describe thoughts and emotions or create narratives designed to evoke a certain response, but music can affect audiences in an instant in a way that transcends language.

“I bet you that’s how God hears the world. Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us!” 

Mozart has a tendency toward self-aggrandizement, comparing his musical abilities to the ear of God himself. But this description of music as a complex way of hearing the world is a profound understanding of the mysterious power of music. It also refers to Salieri’s earlier conviction that Mozart’s music is the voice of God flowing through him.

“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the best opera yet written. That’s what it is. And only I could have done it. No one else living!” 

Mozart is fully aware of his immense talent and musical genius and believes that it makes him immune from consequences. However, his hubris will ultimately be a part of his downfall. In this instance, Mozart protested the removal of the dance sequence in Figaro, only to be given permission by the emperor to keep it in. Mozart’s inflexibility in his work may be integral to the fact that his compositions have endured for centuries. But in the play, during his lifetime, his pride and stubbornness makes him unwilling to compromise, which leads to a quickly declining career.

“We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary created legends—and I from legends created only the ordinary.” 

After seeing the Ghost Father in Don Giovanni, Salieri comments on the evilness of the character and how he is punished and cast into hell. But, Salieri claims, both he and Leopold Mozart—Mozart’s two father figures—are not particularly evil or extraordinary. Mozart made them into something extraordinary. In contrast, when Salieri composes operas about the divine and mythical, he makes them ordinary.

“The Creature’s dreadful giggle was the laughter of God. I had to end it. But how? There was only one way. Starvation. Reduce the man to destitution. Starve the God out.” 

Mozart’s laugh is a repeated symbol throughout the play. Salieri views it as offensive, a childish giggle that is both vulgar and unmanly. Hearing it makes him even more determined to ruin the composer’s glee. By starving the God out of Mozart, Salieri is proposing to take away Mozart’s livelihood until he is too poor and desperate to serve as a vessel for the voice of God. 

“Like many men obsessed with being thought generous, the Emperor Joseph was quintessentially mean.” 

As Salieri comments, those who have large amounts of money and pride themselves in being very generous with it are typically actually very frugal. True generosity would require sharing wealth equitably rather than keeping most of it for oneself. Salieri uses this understanding to convince the emperor to pay Mozart very little for a position for which his predecessor was paid a great deal. Emperor Joseph, eager to save money, agrees, even though Mozart obviously needs the money to survive. Were he truly generous (rather than generous for show), the emperor would likely have taken pity on Mozart and ignored Salieri’s advice.  

“I have no subscribers left, Baron. I am no longer fashionable.” 

Mozart, poor and desperate, describes a common conundrum for those who make their career as artists. Popular success as an artist often has little to do talent and much more to do with producing art that the general public enjoys. Since most consumers are not trained in the art they consume, popular tastes are often pedantic and do not value the truly innovative. Mozart’s popularity was brief, and the rejection of society leads to his downfall and death.  

“She’s been delivered. Unexpectedly. Of a boy. Poor little imp. To be born to that couple. In that room. With that money. And the father a baby himself.” 

The Venticelli announce the birth of Mozart and Constanze’s son, offering condescending pity for and commentary on the state of the couple and the life that the child is entering into. Not only are they poor, but according to the Venticelli, Mozart is still a child himself and not fitting to become a father. This calls back to Mozart’s issues with his own father, who treated him like a child and served as an unfortunate role model of fatherhood. Not only is Mozart unable to support his family, but he is living in fear, frightened by nightmares and ghosts.

“I eat what God gives me. Dose after dose. For all of life. His poison. We are both poisoned, Amadeus. I with you: you with me.” 

In order to torment Mozart, Salieri dresses as the sinister, ghostly man who, according to Mozart, has been haunting the composer and demanding that he write a Requiem. Salieri looks at what Mozart has written, declares that it is good, and then tears off a corner of the composition and eats it, “in the manner of the Communion Service” (96). Salieri claims that he and Mozart have been poisoning each other, and that Salieri has been poisoning Mozart with his hate for ten years. Although this claim and the revelation that the man haunting him was in fact Salieri pushes Mozart closer to his impending death, it also shows that the poison is metaphorical. In the end, Salieri did not poison the composer with arsenic as he claims.  

“Oh lovey, be silent now. No one has hurt you. You’ll get better soon, I promise.”

Constanze comforts Mozart in his last moments, begging him to live. She claims that no one has hurt him, but this is only true in the physical sense. Salieri may not have literally poisoned him, but he betrayed him by earning his trust, becoming a surrogate father, and then tormenting him.