[In the following review, Adair examines the relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus.]

In the beginning, probably, was the word; or name: Amadeus. Futile as it surely must be to speculate on the various mazy processes of free association rippling through an artist's consciousness when a project enters its formative stage, it might just be worth playing the game with Milos Forman's Amadeus—not only was creativity the subject of Peter Shaffer's play, it was a shortfall of creativity that constituted its own tragic flaw. Why, then, did Shaffer call it ‘Amadeus,’ instead of ‘Mozart’ or, like Rimsky's opera, Mozart and Salieri? Because the word's Latinate coda made it sound more like a ‘title’? Because the us suffix rhymed it, intertextually, with Equus? Or, which seems likelier, because in it lurks deus, Latin for god; and even, were one to indulge in punnilingus, A mad deus and I am a deus? For Salieri, of course, Mozart represented, as it were, an Amadeus ex machina, the unwary object of what could be described as a sad case of unrequited hate. More to the point, however, a divine artist he clearly is for Shaffer who (in a scene exclusive to the film version, which has the dying Mozart dictate, in a febrile, rasping hum, the closing pages of his Requiem Mass to his nemesis-turned-amanuensis) effectively inverts the proverb-honoured proportions of inspiration and perspiration in the recipe for creation. And it is to Shaffer's affecting, almost adolescent, idolatry of Mozart (an idolatry which is paradoxically re-inforced by the fictional being he has fashioned, an obscene Struwwelpeter, a nutty amalgam of the Marx Brothers, crossbreeding Harpo's lunar appearance with Groucho's preening lechery and Chico's pianistic virtuosity) that we can trace the (noble) failure of his play.

What does it propose? Antonio Salieri, an eighteenth century petit-maître of by no means negligible qualities, who has, in his devotion to Euterpe, forsworn all worldly pleasures (excepting the glutinous Viennese eclairs to which he is unrepentantly addicted), finds himself upstaged by a lascivious tot brimming with unearned genius; whereupon he pledges that in full—and, for the period, unseconded—cognizance of his rival's prodigious gifts, he will, like some cultural Judas Iscariot, destroy this son, or favourite nephew, of God. Now that, even so sparely paraphrased, is a great theme, one of the contemporary theatre's greatest, not unworthy of Shakespeare himself: dramatists' names have rung down the ages for less than having lit upon such a theme. But Shaffer, precisely, is not Shakespeare, not, indeed, a poet; so that, short of tactlessly comparing his plight with Salieri's, one can imagine another play, its protagonist a playwright ‘of by no means negligible qualities’ entrusted with a grandiose theme to which he, practically alone of his contemporaries, realises that he cannot do, and has not done, justice. The ‘tragedy’ of Shaffer's Amadeus is, in a sense, that it is not a tragedy, though it tantalises us with the uncultivated seed of a (terrible, Molièresque) comedy.

Forman has cultivated that seed. His is a genuine adaptation, not only because the play is permitted to stretch its legs beyond the pop-up book confines of a proscenium arch, but because he has leavened its High Art pretensions with a dash of showbiz raciness. What is for feited by such a shift in emphasis (notably, the spine-chilling moment when Salieri, liquefying before us like a beadlet of congealed blood on the heart of a plaster Virgin, blasphemously defies the God he has so loyally served) is compensated for by the gain in coherence. The period, first of all. Let the press handout gloatingly detail the unheard-of numbers of candelabra and costume changes: the film is not stultified by ‘research.’ Forman sketches a cartoon of the eighteenth century, Greenawayesque in its frisky over-codification and reducible to the period's infallible emblem: the bubble bath periwig (here pink, punk and high as an elephant's eye). The accents are mostly American, a convention which certain squeamish commentators have judged intrusive—though how a cast, say, of British actor-knights, aside from the reactionary cultural snobbery which their presence would imply (Amadeus is an American film), would be more ‘naturalistic,’ or more admissible to either Mozart's or Salieri's compatriots, I cannot fathom. Besides which, Forman's decision should be interpreted as consciously reflecting Mozart's, when he liberated opera from the mellifluous tyranny of the Italian language by setting Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail to a German text; which is, in turn, why The Magic Flute, concocted by its librettist Schikaneder as a populist fairy-tale pantomime, is sung in English in the film (and conducted by its composer in a manner more appropriate to Geraldo than Gesualdo).

As for the pivotal duo, it has been cross-hatched with broad, caricatural lines. I likened Tom Hulce's Mozart (whose casting, by succeeding where the other failed, vindicates in extremis that of Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon) to a composite Marx Brother, opposite whom Salieri has been stuck with the Margaret Dumont role. I might equally mention, from the cornucopia of popular culture, Peter Pan and Captain Hook, a Hook evilly dedicated to the proposition that his brattish bête noire never ‘grow up’; or else Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. The linking confessional exchanges between Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and a quizzically earnest young priest brought to mind scenes shared by George Burns and Richard Benjamin in the film version of Simon's comedy; and I could also detect something in the curl of Abraham's lower lip and the rhythmic jabbing of his index finger to recall Robert Preston as, aptly, Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Finally, rounding off this brief inventory of equivalences is the narrative's odd resemblance, in its tug-of-war of lethal oneupmanship, to Sleuth, by Shaffer's twin brother (and fantasised Salieri?) Anthony.

Or, rather, not finally. I wish to submit one more reference, the crux of the matter, hinted at in my description of the film's eighteenth century as a ‘cartoon.’ The relationship of Mozart and Salieri, as given the once-over by Forman, is very exactly that of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Or the Road Runner and Wily E. Coyote. (Can there exist a neater encapsulation of the distance which separates effortless genius from mere plodding talent than a Warner Brothers cartoon?) In fact, what Amadeus presents us with is an unexpected and strangely moving spectacle: a Roadrunner cartoon in which Wily Coyote, mustering his usual armoury of dynamite sticks, big black bombs with lighted fuses and complex retroactive rockets, ends at last by stopping his fleet-footed foe dead in his tracks. And, as Salieri is wheeled through the asylum in whose noisy, insalubrious oblivion he has, as they say, sought ‘asylum,’ offering sarcastic absolution to the assembled mediocrities of whom he styles himself the patron saint, and drawing this special edition of Looney Tunes to its close, I half hoped to see, scribbled across the screen in its familiar penmanship, the much-loved envio: That's All, Folks!