Word: shaffers
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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...
...staged by Peter Hall, first at Britain's 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...
Milos Forman found a reason. The director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest saw a way to retain the play's intellectual breadth and formal audacity without betraying the movie medium's demand for matter of fact naturalism. And he persuaded Shaffer, who had been disappointed by film adaptations of his plays, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, to write the Amadeus screenplay, reshaping Amadeus from a madman's memory play to a more realistic musical biography. Recalls Shaffer: "It was like having the same child twice...
...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 of his victim's achievement...
Hall plans three new productions at the National: Coriolanus, Animal Farm as a musical and, possibly, another play from Peter Shaffer. (Hall staged Amadeus in both London and New York.) Meantime, he is happy to see the three auditoriums in the National complex filled to 80% of capacity. "I've always been a businessman as well as trying to be an artist. And I do love running things." With his $71,000-a-year contract at the National renewed for five years, Sir Peter seems destined to remain a lively British monument. Just like Nelson's Column...