Word: abrahamisms
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Against lush backdrops of the Viennese court, Tom Hulce creates an energetic Mozart, frivolous on all concerns save music. As Saleri, F. Murray Abraham creates an ideal counterpart: a composer as measured, reasonable, and altogether average as his rival is extraordinary. Their prickly relationship reaches a moving climax in the film's final minutes, with a scene that mesmerizingly unravels the fabric of admiration and betrayal between...
...upon prodigy of musical Europe, comes at the age of 26 to the Viennese court of Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II (played with a sly, thin smile and a delicious air of cagey indecisiveness by Jeffrey Jones). There the man of the moment is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): court composer, consummate technician and politician, Emperor's favorite, a musical lion of Vienna. Most important, he knows his place, as an educated servant among masters of the blood and the bureaucracy. Mozart, fatally, does...
Hulce's Mozart bears the familiar Forman trademark. The director always seems to be telling his actors: Go bigger, dare more, fill the biggest moviehouse with your passion and technique. Abraham's challenge as Salieri was more daunting. He must be all smoldering menace, a dandy in smirking repose-until, one day, he scans some scribbled Mozart sheet music, and tears of astonishment and fury course down his cheeks. Says Abraham, who has played in everything from Shakespeare to Scarface to a leotarded leaf in the Fruit of the Loom TV spots: "Salieri is a figure tragic...
This book is irreverent, unfair and subversive. What more could anyone ask for? It begins with the 16th century geological musings of Martin Luther: "Longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist." It hurtles downhill from there toward outright insolence. Did Abraham Lincoln really say in 1859, "Negro equality! Fudge! How long . . . shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this"? Did the U.S. Labor Department truly announce that 1930 would be "a splendid employment year...
...350th anniversary of Virginia Dare's birth date, approached, they commissioned Paul Green, whose 1926 drama In Abraham's Bosom had won a Pulitzer Prize, to turn their origins into art. By 1963 the play was growing a little long in the tooth, and they asked Broadway Director Layton to overhaul...