Amadeus

When I was young and idle, I used to play a little game with myself. Lying in my back garden under the glare of the sun, I'd clamp my hands as tightly over my eyes as I dared and try to squeeze out as much of the light as I possibly could, pressing harder and harder until the inky blue-black melted into infinity and my heart froze fast in the tremulous terror that if I peeled my hands away now they would leave the blackness behind them. The evaporation of my crystalline dread into the red light which seeped through my eyelids and trickled like tears into the recesses of my soul, extinguishing the black spots, was a joy unlike any other I've ever known, before or since.

I still play this game today and the principle remains the same, although the rules have changed. Nowadays, I face away from my video cabinet, close my eyes really tightly, cover my face with my hands and pretend that there's no such thing as Amadeus.

"In 1781 Vienna, court composer Antonio Salieri (Abraham) is maddened with envy after discovering that the divine musical gifts he desires for himself have been bestowed on the bawdy, impish Mozart (Tom Hulce), whom he plots to destroy by any means necessary."

What actually happens in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Well, you might say, a sailor embarks upon a voyage in the course of which he shoots an albatross and is puni... But no, no, no, you are quite mistaken. What actually happens in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is that some Wedding-Guests are waylaid by an old man of dubious sanity who insists on relating to one of them a highly improbable story about angelic spirits and disembodied voices and Life-in-Death. No albatrosses were harmed during the writing of this poem: it's merely the framing of the narrative which makes us think that the events on board the ship actually happen in a linear way. So when I ask you now "What actually happens in Amadeus?", you'll know better than to reply "Well, my dear fellow, in 1781 Vienna, court composer Antonio Salieri...."- what actually happens in Amadeus is that an old man of dubious sanity tells a story about a history of which he is the only surviving remnant. The sequences which make up the bulk of the movie -the invocations of 1781 and the decade which follows on- are, quite explicitly, merely visual and aural translations of the tale the wizened Salieri tells his confessor, the memories to which the words form a primitive audio commentary. There is no 1781 anywhere, except in Salieri's head, and this is as much a part of his tragedy as anything else.

But this is where it gets a little confusing. Salieri's story consists of montages, scenes, images and exchanges he couldn't possibly have known about. Even allowing for hearsay, gossip, retrospective reconstruction, poetic license and sheer creative imagination, it is ludicrous to suggest that Salieri should have such a clear perception of what Mozart was singing at Schikaneder's hut, or of the inspiration for the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute: and yet, when he tells us, we believe him. Although Mozart has been touched by the genius of God, it is Salieri himself who possesses God-like powers. His aptitude for being in the right place at the right time -such as on his first encounter with Mozart, or his appearance at the masquerade ball- borders on omnipresence, and his effortless thwarting of Mozart's every enterprise is omnipotence itself; he is able to destroy Mozart without scarcely so much as dirtying his hands, and is even capable of willing two perverse, antichristian "miracles" in the death of his father and the yawn of the Emperor at The Marriage of Figaro. But it is Salieri's quasi-omniscience which is most intriguing, in its apparent invertedness: the anomalies of the maestro's story are never in fact, merely in interpretation. At the ball Mozart, tricked by the simplistic binaries of his father's two-faced mask, forgets that neither of the faces are actually his father's; Salieri's Vienna is a solipsist's paradise in which no-one ever really knows anyone else, just a costume and a wig and a mask that bear the name of a person between them.

Paradoxically, it is the sheer inscrutability of the psyches of the people who populate it that makes Salieri's Vienna believable. Why do Bonno and Orsini-Rosenberg aid Salieri in frustrating Mozart? Because they're Italian. Because they're bullies. Because they can. All of these are petty, pointless, small-minded, vapid, unexplanatory and implausible reasons, and all are utterly realistic. Why does everyone have such passionate opinions on the language of Mozart's first opera for the court, yet such poor reasons to support them and such apparent resignation and disinterest when the question is perfunctorily decided? If you need to ask, you've obviously never needed to make a joint decision on anything. Why does the Emperor make decrees on the use of ballet in his operas which are, apparently, so arbitrary that even he forgets the rationale behind them? Ask your parents, your boss, your head of state or any other authority figure you happen to meet. The central ambiguity of motivation is that of Salieri's love-hate relationship with Mozart, but it is just one ostensible absurdity in a cross-stitched patchwork of them. The semiotics of the world Salieri inhabits remain perpetually elusive- he defies, challenges, blocks and bargains with a God whose insults, rebuttals, replies and punishments are perceptible to no-one but him, and insists on framing secular problems in a theological context. We don't need recourse to a God who prefers fart jokes and drunken revelry to chastity and self-sacrifice to explain why Mozart is a genius and Salieri is not. Mozart was playing piano blindfold for Emperors when the older Salieri was still playing blind's man buff; Mozart delights in playing and composition for their own sake, whilst Salieri rushes through the closing scenes of his own operas in order to get to the applause; most importantly, however, Mozart's is a mind that watches itself, whereas the hallmark of mediocrity -and Salieri- is a mind that watches other peoples' minds. Rather than trying to beat the benchmark, Salieri attempts to erase it, morbidly peering into Mozart's mind not to find ways of bettering his own craft, but to find ways of destroying genius and justification for doing so. But the minds of other people ultimately remain inaccessible- the barriers between one person's understanding and another are never really broken down, not even by that most potent of human communications: confession.

Amadeus is full of confessions. The movie itself is one, and it is telling that Salieri's self-accusation of Mozart's murder is heard only because it is not true. Confessions in Vienna are constantly frustrated, unheard, and misunderstood. Mozart, the most open of the movie's characters, reaches out to those around him repeatedly, and is repeatedly repulsed. Neither Salieri nor Schlumberg are moved by Mozart's admissions of poverty; only the court composer recognises the cry for absolution from his father which appears in Don Giovanni; and even his wife angrily accuses him of being drunk when he admits that he is slowly dying. Only once does Mozart's outstretched hand touch that of another, and the fleeting instant is as painful as it is electric. The deathbed moment at which Mozart begs Salieri's forgiveness for doubting his friendship and the horrified Italian realises that he has not destroyed the voice of an unjust God but a naive, trusting child whose beauty only he recognised terrifies like the fiery strings of the Confutatis Maledictus, redeems like its heavenly sopranos. Mozart's beauty does not end with his death, but begins there- whilst Salieri lives only to see himself die, Mozart will live forever, a divine giggle floating above our earthly madhouse. In both his music and his irrepressible spirit Mozart, as Van Swieten unwittingly prophesied, finally comes to represent the immortal in us all.