The Rivalry of Amadeus Mozart & Antonio Salieri as a Composer

Mozart and his family were in "perpetual neediness" due(p) to "absurdly low fees" for his teaching, the neglectful public who did not date or appreciate his operas, the businessmen who cheated him. As for who was honored in Mozart's place: "Who was better fitted than Mozart to win the admiration" of the Viennese who " favorite(a) Salieri and ... other composers vastly his inferior" (Brion 76).

The film is not really biographical with respect to either man. While Salieri, the narrator, does straightforwardly run the earlier life of his rival, that period is far less all-important(a) than the final ten years of Mozart's life which the film focuses on. That early life depicts Mozart as a musical prodigy, touring with his father Leopold (a bang-up influence in his life) and sister through Europe, his ample and chivalrous education, and his first serious compositional operatic effort in music. In keeping with Mozart's commitment to individuality (one aspect of the Enlightenment), he began to show much independence from his father's influence later in life. For example, Mozart married a woman in defiance of his father's wishes in Vienna. More importantly than filling in women to Mozart, however, was his tasteful and notional freedom. In a letter to his father from Vienna, at about the beginning of the ten year period covered in the film, Mozart expresses bitter di

...We are ... blatantly claiming the grand license of the storyteller to embellish his tale with fabricated ornament and, above all, to supply it with a climax whose sole justification need be that it enthralls his audience and emblazons his theme (Robbins).

The creative, artistic character, especially in its extraordinary or genius form, is decomposable and contradictory. In order to create a more striking and perhaps more simple story, author Peter Shaffer and conductor Milos Forman chose to emphasize the wilder aspects of Mozart and the more controlled aspects of Salieri. The complexities of both men, apparent in more historically-based accounts, is forfeited to the drama of this exaggerated and simplified channel.

The choice produced an exciting and popular film (which is amazing itself for the life of both classical composers dead two hundred years), just an wide of the mark historical portrait of those men. Perhaps the most intriguing narration this reader discovered during this study, with respect to the conflicts between the more romantic Mozart and the more Enlightenment-oriented Salieri is that "In each poet there is both a Mozart and a Salieri" (Mandelstam 18). In other words, the film's portrayal of the two composers as being so completely foreign to one some other is to fail to see that there is indeed in every artist both an active heart and mind. One dominates, but the other must be engaged. The heart must reanimate the mind, but the mind must channel the heart. Mozart was no more all heart than Salieri was all mind, but that is the extreme contrast the film tries to portray.

Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Mozart & Salieri. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1994.

Mersmann, Hans, ed. Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. New York: Dover, 1972.

The film begins to divagate into hyperbole when it zeroes in on its true concern--the last decennary of Mozart's life in Vienna and his relationship with Salieri. Although the film portrays the two as virtually battling composers locked to
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