Amadeus

Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus was adapted into a film in 1984 by director Milos Forman. Opening with a dramatic portrayal of the now old and anguished composer Salieri attempting suicide. His attempt is a failure, and narrates the rest of the film to a priest as a confession. Salieri had been court composer in Vienna, where he first heard -- and was overwhelmed by -- Mozart's music. Salieri attempts to use his political sway to get Mozart a position as music tutor to the princess, but the composer's arrogance is an obstacle. Mozart's wife makes efforts to secure this position through sharing her husband's compositions with Salieri (in a scene notably lacking the sexual tension of the play.) Mozart's original drafts of music are flawless, and this enrages Salieri with jealousy and rage. Mozart, meanwhile, is collapsing into further financial ruin. After the death of Mozart's father, Salieri takes on the facade of being his ghost and commissions Mozart to compose a requiem mass. Mozart is eaten alive by the project, and dies before its completion. Salieri is old, alone, and insane at the conclusion of the movie.

Shaffer took many liberties with the characters of this play. Salieri is known today primarily as the composer that wasn't Mozart, though he did in fact teach such musical greats as Schubert, Beethoven, and Hummel. Salieri's soft and simple music was actually very influential in the course of music. Mozart was in fact very ill (and broke) when he was commissioned by an unknown source to compose a requiem mass, and he is reported to have imagined the work was for himself as implied in the film. His death is actually most likely due to kidney failure, though at the time rumors did circulate that he had been poisoned by Salieri. Salieri has never been proven to be completely removed from Mozart's death, but neither the evidence against him nor the level of mediocrity in his work merit the pop-culture title he has received as the jealous murderer of a great composer, instead of being recognized as a composer in his own right. Mozart's character, additionally, is portrayed as a very vulgar and disrespectful to authority in the film. While his music was in all certainty extremely revolutionary for the time, his manner of addressing the royal family would most likely have been less openly disrespectful. Despite -- or perhaps due to -- this use of artistic license, the film is a beautiful piece of historical fiction that is true to the sublime artistic tone of both featured composers' work thematically, visually, and as a whole. The superb incorporation of the classical music into the soundtrack, not just as background or mood-setting music, but also as an interactive and living part of the action, is the strongest point of the movie. (Still, the play is better.)