Word: requiems
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...sing or melodies, Salieri is tormented by the knowledge that Mozart alone possesses true genius. And so the jealous man seizes upon a plan of total destruction. In a voice that carries no hint of remorse, the aged composer reveals to the speechless Priest his decision to commission a requiem from Mozart, and then murder his rival. At the funeral, the cathedral would swell with a stirring mass for the dead musician, written by his devoted friend Antonio Salieri...
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...
...Shaffer's screenplay retains many of the play's epigrammatic fulminations, deftly synopsizes whole sections, transforms Mozart's father from a hectoring apparition to an onscreen tyrant, and provides a thrilling new climax in which the dying Mozart dictates his Requiem to a Salieri racked with guilt, jealousy and awe. If the operatic excerpts occasionally impede dramatic flow, they capture the Mozartian spirit as well as comment, with typical Forman bravura, on the theme of an oaf who makes miracles with music: in the Don Giovanni parody, a dove flies out of a horse...
Salieri stands to the side during all this, stage-managing Mozart's downfall, then appearing to the fevered young man in his dead father's disguise and commissioning the Requiem. Similarly, the two main actors, chosen from a thousand who auditioned for the roles, must follow different circuits to their roles. Hulce, who may be remembered by movie fans as the prime nerd in National Lampoon's Animal House, must stride on-screen as a fop manqué, pinwheeling his arrogance, before the audience can find the obsession at the core of his genius. Hulce prepared...
Among his 40-odd compositions are three symphonies, two string quartets, a mass, a requiem, two operas and a St. Lukers Passion...