Word: salieri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...National Theater and then for long runs in 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...
...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 a bit to make room for the glory and wonder...
...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...
...dramatic and visual storytelling. Defeated by his two previous challenges-turning the Love Generation Hair into a Viet Nam elegy and compressing the epic misanthropy of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime-the director has come to some sensitive compromises with narrative reality. Mozart sings the music of God, Salieri schemes and screams in tragic register, and the film keeps humming merrily along with them both...