Word: salieri
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During working hours, McKellen can be found deploying this same unique combination of high art, low cunning and surreptitious showmanship. His incarnation of Play wright Shaffer's antagonist, Antonio Salieri, owes much to the offhand technical virtuosity McKellen displayed in that restaurant and even more to an analytic actor's intelligence that is restless and ruth less at once. "If I couldn't defend a performance intellectually, I'd be very un happy indeed," McKellen remarks, and his Salieri is a seamless reconciliation of paradox. It is a portrait in depth of a shallow...
...claims to have poisoned Mozart years before. Beethoven reported this unsubstantiated charge in an entry of his conversation book of 1824. More pertinently, Salieri confesses to the envy that breeds malice when a mediocre talent meets a transcendent genius. In editing and reshaping his own text for Broadway, Shaffer makes jealousy a key factor in Salieri's persistent savaging of the hard-pressed Mozart in his attempts to secure court posts and paying pupils...
...this and other points - including a new scene concerning the premiere of The Magic Flute, which Salieri tried to thwart - the New York production is at variance, not always wisely, with the original production at London's National Theater...
...story proceeds in flashback us ing Salieri as narrator. The device impedes the dynamics of the play and some times makes the Viennese court seem like a cynically corrupted version of Grover's Corners. Early on, when Salieri is 16, he kneels in prayer and makes a Faustian compact with God. He vows to excel in virtue, magnify his talents and live his life as a tribute to his creator if only God will grant him fame...
...Salieri, Ian McKellen is less secure than Paul Scofield, who played this role in London. He lacks Scofield's ability to make a syllable wince or engorge a phrase with acrid humor. More important, McKellen does not make Salieri's early vows of purity plausible. Thus his desired revenge against both God and Mozart verges on lago's malign spirit. No cast under Peter Hall's direction ever fails to glisten with finesse, force and impeccable timing. Jane Seymour plays Mozart's wife Constanze warmly and fetchingly. Nicholas Kepros must also be singled...