Word: mozart
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...Antonio Salieri, the 18th century Italian composer whom Peter Shaffer resurrected in fictional form for his 1979 play Amadeus, one peculiar genius was even more frightening: a precious gift and a malicious joke from God. The creature's name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-"Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart!" as the play's Salieri, his contemporary and rival, calls him. "I had heard a voice of God," the Italian mutters after listening to a Mozart adagio, "and it was the voice of an obscene child!" Salieri carried a double curse: to appreciate beyond pain or pleasure Mozart...
...London and on Broadway, Shaffer's play was an eloquent tragicomedy swathed in theatrical sorcery. Events in the crisscrossing lives of the two composers were summoned up as spirits-real, distorted or imagined-out of the crumbling mind of Salieri, a man convinced that he had murdered Mozart. Weaving Mozartian facts into the Salieri fantasy, Shaffer conceived his play uniquely for the stage. Surely there was no reason, no excuse for turning it into a film...
Amadeus the film dramatizes nearly all the major events in the last decade of Mozart's 35 years. His music, which in the play served only as an allusive ostinato, seizes center screen with significant excerpts from four Mozart operas, several concerti and the Requiem. As seen through the dealer's eye of the movie camera, Salieri looks like a sullen midget next to a Mozart monument; he is Judas to Mozart's Jesus, James Earl Ray to his Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Uecker to his Babe Ruth. Explains Shaffer: "Salieri had to give way just...
...like Mozart," enthuses Apollonia. "I visited his house on a lake 20 miles outside of Minneapolis. It is purple. It's pretty. He has a studio in there. He lives in that studio." Apollonia shares a number of things with Prince, including "pretty much the same measurements. I'm 36-24-36 and he's got a well-developed upper torso"; some articles of clothing, such as his suits and her lace tank tops ("He's a ladies' man, not homosexual. He does love his women"); and a phone number. "The hot line, I guess...
...modest set with few props and simple staging enables the cast to move around easily, focusing our attention on their voices and gestures, rather than unnecessary production, as the cast deftly conveys the simple themes of good versus evil and heaven versus hell of the libretto, complemented by Mozart's score. The simple costumes, which can't be pinned down to any one era, and the sparsely furnished set suggests tone rather than time, giving the singers the opportunity to display their superb voices and at the same time revealing the agelessness of Mozart's music...