Tag: Mozart

Here’s yet another movie I haven’t seen in forty years.  Although in a sense this is the first time I’m seeing parts of it because it’s the “director’s cut” which added twenty additional minutes to a movie that was already 161 minutes long.

I’ll dispense with the idea of plot spoilers.  The whole movie is the confession by aged composer Antonio Salieri of his “murder” thirty-some-odd years before of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a man he openly admits produced music of a divine quality.  Basically, Salieri sets out to destroy Mozart as a way of taking revenge on God for giving the gift of producing sublime works of musical art to a man he judges to be obscene and undeserving instead of to himself whom he judges to be pious and deserving.

Over the course of several years, he does everything imaginable to ensure Mozart cannot make enough money to flourish including using his influence with Emperor Joseph II of Austria to discourage any patronage from the nobility.  Eventually he discovers that Mozart has a deep-seated neurosis around his father’s dissatisfaction with the way Mozart lived his life and after his father’s death Salieri impersonates Mozart’s father’s ghost by showing up as a masked figure to commission Mozart to compose a requiem mass.  Salieri knows that Mozart will assume the mass is for his father and this will further injure his physical and mental health.

Finally, because of mental stress, malnutrition, alcoholism and probably tuberculosis Mozart collapses during a performance of one of his operas.  Salieri takes advantage of Mozart’s wife Constanze’s absence to persuade Mozart to work through the night to try to complete the mass which Salieri hopes to pass off as his own during Mozart’s own funeral as his final insult to God.  But Constanze arrives just in time to take away the manuscript from Salieri and mourn for her husband as he expires.

All of this story is told as a confession by Salieri to a priest who arrives at Salieri’s room in a mental hospital where he was installed after attempting suicide on account of guilt for killing Mozart.  But at the end of the film he is unrepentant, insane and declares himself the patron saint of mediocrities, a man whose works of art are completely forgotten by the world, while Mozart’s music continuously grows more and more popular and celebrated over time.

Basically, this movie is a tour de force by F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri with Tom Hulce as Mozart coming in a close second.  But let’s face it.  No one is watching a three-hour period piece about Mozart unless he wants to hear the music.  Between the actual recordings of his chamber music and generous chunks from several of his operas this is not just a theatrical presentation.  It’s a concert too.

And for that reason, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to anyone who dislikes classical music.  I believe it would be painful to watch that much of something that doesn’t appeal to you.  I’m not sure if even the theatrical release version of the movie at 161 minutes would be short enough for the non-music lover.  But for people who don’t mind a little opera sprinkled on their corn flakes this might be a movie to consider.  I thought it was pretty good.