The Man Who Loved Mozart’s Music Enough to Hate God

David Lapadat | Music PhD

1 hour ago

10 min read

Spoilers for Amadeus.

With this essay on Amadeus, the blog reaches 200 articles. Music, cinema, and F. Murray Abraham’s extraordinary Salieri felt like the right company for the occasion. Thank you for reading, sharing, and returning.

In Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984), the applause ends and Antonio Salieri stays behind with Mozart’s score. He turns the pages back to the slow movement of the Serenade in B-flat, K. 361/370a, often called the Gran Partita, and the music begins again.

There is no orchestra in the room now. Salieri has just heard the Adagio performed; this is his first encounter with its written form. As his eyes move over the page, Forman lets us hear what he hears inside it. When Mozart returns for his score, the music cuts off. The silence confirms where the orchestra has been: in Salieri’s mind.

This small decision changes the character available to us. Forman makes an envious court composer’s musicianship audible as he inspects a rival’s work. Before envy can interpret the experience, the film admits us into a private act of reading so complete that ink becomes breath, wood, pulse, and sustained tone. Salieri’s tragedy begins with a gift of his own: he can reconstruct Mozart’s design from notation and feel its force without defense.

How the Page Becomes Music

Peter Shaffer’s language enters at the level of the body: “Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox.” The line is wonderfully humble. The movement does not seem to announce greatness. Salieri's description starts with something repetitive, low, a little wheezy, almost domestic. Then Salieri’s attention rises. An oboe enters above the pulse and holds its note; a clarinet joins and turns the suspended sound into a phrase.

The printed score contains more than Salieri’s account names. Horns and double bass help support the opening, the inner wind parts thicken the harmony, and the clarinet overlaps the oboe rather than simply waiting for it to finish. Shaffer reduces Mozart’s texture to successive discoveries, guiding our attention from the pulse toward the melody.

In the screenplay, “Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe” delays the instrument’s name while placing its sound above the pulse. The dashes give height its own interval in the sentence. The clarinet then lengthens the description into a phrase of delight. When Salieri turns to God, the exaltation has grown from what he has heard.

Watch the score-reading scene in Warner Bros.’ official clip (the speech begins at about 3:11).

An Honest Ear Inside a Wounded Man

The cheapest defense against Mozart would be a false verdict. Salieri could call the music gaudy, shallow, juvenile, or lucky and shelter his pride inside bad criticism. Alone with the score, he cannot make that defense hold. His ear admits what his pride needs to deny, leaving him painfully aware of the value of the man he will try to destroy.

F. Murray Abraham gives this recognition two ages. The younger Salieri has Mozart’s score before him; the old man speaks to a priest. One is undergoing the encounter, the other making it intelligible to a listener who was never there. Between the face absorbed in the page and the voice describing its music, the film holds one encounter open across decades. The younger man is still discovering what the music means to him. The old man knows the whole story, and still cannot tell it without making Mozart sound wonderful.

The younger Salieri’s silence is important. We have met a court composer, a man whose profession entitles him to pronounce on music; here he is occupied with receiving it. Abraham’s absorption makes us stay with a man who has momentarily stopped attending to his own importance. His attention stays with the score even though its author has already offended his sense of dignity. To follow the notes is to keep consenting to something his judgment of Mozart’s character has made intolerable. The pages hold him there until Mozart comes to take them away.

The older Salieri turns that absorption into an explanation someone else can follow. Abraham gives the old man the resources of a teacher: he names the instruments, places the oboe above the accompaniment, and follows the clarinet into a fuller phrase. The authority of a lifetime in music survives inside the confession. Salieri can teach his listener how to hear the work that injured him, giving each arrival its place in the pleasure. When the account reaches God, the religious claim carries the force of this patient musical attention: he has led us through the experience from which he drew it.

These two performances sustain a counterpoint between discovery and remembered grievance. The older voice places the younger man’s pleasure inside a story of divine cruelty, while the music keeps its power to delight us. Abraham lets the love retain its persuasive force even in the mouth of someone using it to accuse God. We can trust Salieri’s recognition here without accepting the account of divine malice he builds upon it.

The Joke Inside the Revelation

The scene’s final turn is comic because Forman has prepared it with sacred seriousness. Salieri reaches the highest possible explanation for what he hears. Mozart returns for the score, interrupting the music, and carries the revelation away with him. The man Salieri has just seen behaving like a vulgar child is the bearer of the sound he has identified with God.

“But why?” Salieri asks.

The question is not yet his declaration of war. We can read it as the beginning of a theological grievance compressed into two syllables. In Shaffer’s screenplay, he tries to call the Serenade an accident, an isolated miracle that need not overturn his idea of the universe. Later, when he reads Mozart’s manuscripts and finds the same authority everywhere, that escape closes. Repeated beauty converts bewilderment into prosecution. Salieri begins to use every truthful musical judgment as evidence that grace has been distributed unjustly.

Salieri accepts the low, comic pulse as the ground from which the oboe’s sublime line can rise. He hears no insult in their coexistence; the contrast is just part of the beauty. What he cannot accept, on the other hand, is the same joining inside Mozart. The giggling, bodily, socially ridiculous man and the composer of that Adagio must somehow be separated. Mozart’s interruption brings that wish up against the person who made the music. In the score, the exalted and the apparently undignified belong to one design. Salieri calls it divine. Faced with the same design in a person, he calls it an injustice.

The Welcome March

The welcome march makes the difference between the two composers audible in the same material. Salieri works over his little ceremonial piece, enjoys what he has made, and thanks the crucifix above his mantelpiece. At court, the Emperor plays it to greet Mozart. The music serves a comfortable arrangement of honors: the sovereign honors the visitor by performing, while the court composer receives the honor of having his work performed by a sovereign. Mozart has only to accept the manuscript and be grateful.

Instead, he sits at the keyboard and plays it from memory, then starts changing it. The march opens out into the tune of Non più andrai from The Marriage of Figaro. In the film’s invented little history of that melody, we hear the transformation happen. Mozart identifies a weakness, tries another possibility, and makes the improvement audible. The scene places the two composers’ capacities within a single musical comparison, so that Salieri has to endure the difference in a piece he recognizes as his own.

Abraham’s fixed smile has a different task here from the absorption of the score-reading. Salieri must remain socially present while something of his professional self-assurance is being dismantled in public. The ceremony still requires his good manners. Mozart’s freedom at the keyboard makes his restraint more conspicuous: one man can follow the music wherever it takes him; the other has to keep his face fit for court. The delighted performance and the effort of watching it occupy the same room.

Then Forman takes Salieri home to the crucifix. Abraham’s frown and the returning “Grazie, Signore” make the thanksgiving bitter. We remember the earlier satisfaction with his composition and hear what the intervening scene has done to those words. Shaffer does not need to supply a speech explaining that God has betrayed him. The address to God recurs, still formally grateful, while the face and the situation make it an accusation. Mozart has varied the march, and humiliation has changed the meaning of the prayer.

The Court’s Ear

The court has its own way of deciding what music is worth. Rosenberg, the opera director, has already dismissed Idomeneo with the complaint that it contains “too many notes.” Later, after The Abduction from the Seraglio, the Emperor reaches for a criticism he cannot formulate; Rosenberg supplies the phrase, Joseph adopts it, and Salieri lends his assent when appealed to as court composer. A judgment passes from official to sovereign to expert, acquiring authority at every stage without acquiring a musical example.

Mozart asks which notes should go. The question embarrasses the company because it asks them to return to the work. Forman and Shaffer have already shown us a listener capable of distinguishing the pulse, the sustained note, and the phrase that grows from it. Against that precision, the court’s numerical complaint sounds wonderfully vacant. Salieri has heard how the parts belong; the public verdict treats them as an excess nobody has to identify. The comedy depends on bringing a vague objection within reach of a practical test.

The film’s court is not uniformly indifferent: Baron van Swieten admires Mozart and speaks for his promise. Rosenberg and Bonno defend established operatic practice, insisting on the propriety of Italian as a language for singing. Even Salieri, asked earlier about bringing Mozart to Vienna, answers in terms of the pleasure of infuriating the Archbishop. Beside the private listener who follows an oboe through the score stands the official who knows what will please a ruler. Mozart enters a world in which knowing music and managing its patrons have become separable accomplishments.

Salieri therefore shares the court’s failure while feeling something its convenient verdict cannot contain. His assent makes him answerable for the dismissal; his private response gives us reason to doubt that he believes it. Abraham’s Salieri is painful because, in his portrayal, he possesses the understanding that would make a defense of Mozart possible, then places his authority elsewhere. Concern for his position helps explain that choice. But, alone with the score, he hears a revelation, and can't figure out why the memory of it remains alive long after Mozart has ceased to threaten his place at court.

Salieri’s devotion to music has never been entirely disinterested. As a boy, he makes a covenant with God in which piety, work, fame, and immortality are bound together. He wants to glorify God through composition, but he also expects God to glorify him. His faith binds the service of music to the survival of his own name.

The score-reading gives us a moment in which that personal claim is suspended. Salieri follows Mozart’s musical decisions closely enough to let them govern his own attention. His explanation takes a listener through the same pleasure. However possessive his ambition, he can still give this much of himself to another composer’s work. The cruelty that follows cannot be blamed on a failure to notice what was there.

“A Perfect Harmony” recognizes the love in Salieri’s listening and finds in the film an ennobling power of art. His response gives that claim a painful limit. He can honor what Mozart has made and still choose to harm Mozart; the knowledge acquired through music does not settle what he will do with it.

The film’s Salieri belongs to poetry more than biography. The historical Mozart and Salieri worked in the same competitive Viennese world, and Mozart sometimes complained about Salieri and his Italian allies. The record does not support the mortal spiritual war dramatized here. The two men contributed to the same 1785 cantata, and Salieri later taught one of Mozart’s sons; their professional relationship was more mixed and at times more cordial than the legend allows. Shaffer and Forman needed a theological antagonist, not a documentary portrait.

The Hand at the Bedside

Near the end, the Requiem brings the two composers together at a page. The direction of the opening encounter is reversed. Salieri first read Mozart’s notation and heard it inwardly; now Mozart dictates, and Salieri must turn what he hears into notation. The private reader has become the composer’s scribe. Forman gives his musical understanding something immediate to do for the person whose gifts he has resented.

The dictation of the Confutatis builds the sound in layers. Voices enter, instrumental parts join them, and the strings add their restless movement. Salieri asks for time, checks what he has heard, and writes. Abraham’s effort makes the pace of Mozart’s thought visible; Tom Hulce’s exhausted body makes that pace more astonishing. Mozart has little physical strength left, yet the imagined music keeps arriving faster than another skilled musician can comfortably record it. Their unequal speeds give the scene its urgency.

Salieri’s questions also let us hear the construction. A part is isolated, repeated, and fitted to another; what first reaches us in fragments gathers into an ensemble. We depend on his need to understand as much as on Mozart’s capacity to invent. The sound gives us access to an imagination no camera could photograph, while the labor at the bedside keeps that access human. Abraham has moved from the courtier’s maintained expression into the practical difficulty of keeping up. His admiration now interrupts the business of taking dictation.

The intimacy remains entangled with his plan to claim the Requiem as his own after Mozart’s death. He wants the music completed, and the wish includes both devotion to what he hears and the hope of possessing it. That knowledge troubles our pleasure in seeing them work together. Every page he helps produce can serve the work and the scheme at once. When Mozart asks forgiveness for having doubted his regard, the appeal hurts because the regard is real and the trust is dangerous.

When we saw the first score-reading, Salieri wanted to separate the divine music from its undignified maker. Then, at the bedside, the music comes through that maker’s failing body, and Salieri lends his own hand to get it onto the page. The work requires an attention to Mozart that his hatred has spent years trying to corrupt. Decades later, Abraham’s old Salieri can still describe the oboe to the priest with enough understanding to guide us into its beauty.

His accusation against God carries Mozart’s music to another listener.