Amadeus (Theatre Review)
Jul. 20th, 2020 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThis week, the National Theatre put their production of Amadeus on Youtube. (Until Thursday.) Directed by Michael Longhurst, starring Lucian Msamati as Salieri, Adam Gillen as Mozart and Karla Crome as Constanze. One of the Masters (from Doctor Who, that is), Geoffrey Beevers (aka Crispy!Master), plays the Baron van Swieten, who has more to do in the play than in the movie. Most importantly, this production got around the problem of the play not being able to do what the movie did - i.e. use Mozart's and a bit of Salieri's actual music as soundtrack - by constantly having 20 musicians and six singers on stage along with the cast (sometimes in the background, sometimes prominently displayed) and incorporating the music where appropriate. It doesn't manage purely cinematic transitions like Mozart's mother-in-law to the Queen of Night (not least because the character isn't in the production), and of course the death scene is quite different anyway, but it really contributes a lot, not least because the play's Mozart, Adam Gillen, was, I felt, the one less than stellar actor.
I had read the play eons ago, not too long after watching the movie, I think, but I'd never seen it performed. So I knew there were some considerable differences, which I find fascinating since playwright Peter Shaffer also wrote the movie script. Some of the differences are due to the change in format - Salieri adressing the audience as the ghosts of the future and telling them the story works in the theatre, but for the movie, they needed something else, and presto, the young priest who hears Salieri's confession came into existence, for example - , but others make for a change in emphasis. The play is firmly Salieri-centric throughout. We hear about Leopold Mozart; he doesn't show up as a character. (Which means Salieri really has to explain to us his Komtur = Leopold theory. There's also a corresponding Leopold = Sarastro realisation later that's not in the movie.) There is no maid paid to spy on the Mozarts, though Salieri employs two spies bringing him rumors throughout the play. Constanze's mother doesn't show up, either; Salieri's wife, otoh, does, briefly. (Her entire existence is never referred to in the movie.) All of these are connected to the big difference between the play's second act and the movie's second part. As I said, the play stays in Salieri's pov; the movie slides into Mozart's, and gives us quite a few scenes Salieri isn't witness to. All of which would still be minor but for the quite different death scenes play and movie climax in, and the corresponding "present day" scenes for old Salieri.
In the movie, Salieri after having his Leopold = Komtur from Don Giovanni epiphany, decides to impersonate the ghost of Leopold and order a requiem, planning to present it as his own work after Mozart's death, becoming the masked man of Mozartian legend; when the dying Mozart dictates to him, Salieri for that brief time finally understands what it feels like to be Mozart-the-composer, until the returning Constanze takes his price away. In the play - well, in this production, I seem to recall in the script Salieri later briefly recounts the story about the nobleman who did order Mozart to write a requiem planning to display it as his own composition - , there is no grey masked man, he only exists in Mozart's feverish imagination. Salieri doesn't get the moment of collaboration; looking at the unfinished Requiem score makes him realise the requiem is for his own soul, which he nearly killed entirely in his relentless jealousy and destruction of Mozart, and he confesses to Mozart, who first doesn't believe him and later seems to be too insane to truly take it in, though they have a brief moment of mutual cradling that Salieri could interpret as absolution were it not for Constanze's return and Mozart telling her Salieri destroyed him. In the play, Salieri's old age accusation of himself of a murder that in literal terms didn't happen (while in both versions Salieri is a huge factor of driving Mozart into a breakdown, he does not physically kill him) - and his attempted suicide are really one last attempt to connect his name with Mozart's, and his punishment is that no one believes him, the suicide doesn't work, and he has to live with this. The blessing of mediocrities happens in both versions - Salieri blessing the audience is another thing Shaffer had to find a different thing for in the movie - but the black humor of it is, I felt, stronger in the film.
The different leading man performance fits the different conceptions. Lucian Msamati's Salieri is more divided into a public and a private self, with the sleekness of the public self never ruffled (except in the Constanze scene), and the way he operates is very much a polished professional performer and courtier. (Watch the scene where Emperor Joseph tells Salieri he intends to make Mozart his niece Elizabeth's music teacher, which is near identical in movie and play, and you'll see a big difference in performance - in both cases, Salieri first assumes he'll be the new teacher, the Emperor clears up the mistake, and Salieri quickly reacts by making insinuations about Mozart's conduct with his female pupils. But in the movie, the moment where Salieri thanks the Emperor for his supposed appointment and the misunderstanding is cleared up feel far more awkward for Salieri until he rallies and counterattacks. Msamati's Salieri is a master schemer not thrown by this accident. On the other hand, Msamati's Salieri's private self is easily as anguished as Abraham about the play's key premise - longing to possess Mozart's talent and feeling rejected and tormented by God for both recognizing and not having it, despite the world celebrating him as the superior composer. And this private anguish culminating into the realisation that he's destroyed himself along with Mozart is an incredibly powerful performance.
Sadly, imo as always, the Mozart he's given is incredibly one note, no pun intended. Adam Gillen starts his scenes shouting and keeps shouting till the end with hardly any modulation. And he's not just occasionally infantile; he's so toddler-like that you don't understand how Mozart has been able to function without someone constantly holding his hand. Now part of it is that the play and this particular production gives us less scenes for Mozart than the movie does, and no quiet ones at all, but part is the acting. Gillen's Mozart really is nothing but an obscene child. Hulce's Mozart can be that, but he also has, say, the scene where he convinces the Emperor to greenlight Figaro ("I am a vulgar man, but my music is not"). The equivalent play scene has Gillen's Mozart shouting the lines about the way opera can do a quartet, sextett, octett etc. at von Strack, Orsini-Rosenberg, Salieri and van Swieten, and it's not convincing anyone. And there's no "one can one say but - Salieri" reply by Mozart in answer to Salieri's question how Mozart liked Les Danaides because that kind of subtle sarcasm is something this production's Mozart would be incapable of. This Mozart really has no positive human quality other than his music, and while the play still gets the horror of destruction across, there isn't really that much difference, except financially, between Mozart at the start and Mozart at the end in terms of acting.
Otoh: Karla Crome really is superb as Constanze, smart, determined, and full of (in this production) incomprehensible affection for her manchild of a husband. Her two big scenes with Salieri where she brings him some examples of Mozart's work, he blackmails her for sex and then throws her out when she decides she'll do it if that gets her husband the job make here for a very different dynamic than in the movie (Director's cut version, because the cinematic cut does have the work sample delivery but not the attempted sex blackmail). Crome's Constanze wisens up to what Salieri is up to far earlier, and after her attempts at deflection (including a pointed question about his wife) don't work, she on the one hand gives in to the blackmail but on the other cuttingly laughs about his attempt at making this a seduction and is coldly determined, not allowing him the illusion that he's doing anything but what he does, so that when Salieri throws her out it's not one more humiliation of Constanze but, despite him telling the audience it's because he doesn't want his revenge on God via Mozart to be so petty, clearly his inability to face up to what she makes him face. Constanze wins by sheer force of actress personality, and considering what a strong Salieri this production has, it is really saying something.
Lastly: not for the first time, I thought that it's ironic Amadeus, either version, in order to pull off its central conflict and premise has to eliminate someone pretty important to the creation of operas - the librettist. Lorenzo da Ponte worked with both Mozart and Salieri, and Pierre Beaumarchais, the playwright on whose drama Figaro's Wedding is based, actually wrote the (original) libretto to the Salieri opera that brings Salieri such constrasted-to-Figaro success. Both were very interesting men in their own right, who, btw, left a lot of autobiographical writings. But, say, suggesting that Don Giovanni might owe more to da Ponte's mixed feelings about his fellow Venetian Casanova, or to his idea of himself as a galant, than about any daddy issues Mozart had would not work with the story Shaffer wants to tell, in either version. Exit poetae.
I had read the play eons ago, not too long after watching the movie, I think, but I'd never seen it performed. So I knew there were some considerable differences, which I find fascinating since playwright Peter Shaffer also wrote the movie script. Some of the differences are due to the change in format - Salieri adressing the audience as the ghosts of the future and telling them the story works in the theatre, but for the movie, they needed something else, and presto, the young priest who hears Salieri's confession came into existence, for example - , but others make for a change in emphasis. The play is firmly Salieri-centric throughout. We hear about Leopold Mozart; he doesn't show up as a character. (Which means Salieri really has to explain to us his Komtur = Leopold theory. There's also a corresponding Leopold = Sarastro realisation later that's not in the movie.) There is no maid paid to spy on the Mozarts, though Salieri employs two spies bringing him rumors throughout the play. Constanze's mother doesn't show up, either; Salieri's wife, otoh, does, briefly. (Her entire existence is never referred to in the movie.) All of these are connected to the big difference between the play's second act and the movie's second part. As I said, the play stays in Salieri's pov; the movie slides into Mozart's, and gives us quite a few scenes Salieri isn't witness to. All of which would still be minor but for the quite different death scenes play and movie climax in, and the corresponding "present day" scenes for old Salieri.
In the movie, Salieri after having his Leopold = Komtur from Don Giovanni epiphany, decides to impersonate the ghost of Leopold and order a requiem, planning to present it as his own work after Mozart's death, becoming the masked man of Mozartian legend; when the dying Mozart dictates to him, Salieri for that brief time finally understands what it feels like to be Mozart-the-composer, until the returning Constanze takes his price away. In the play - well, in this production, I seem to recall in the script Salieri later briefly recounts the story about the nobleman who did order Mozart to write a requiem planning to display it as his own composition - , there is no grey masked man, he only exists in Mozart's feverish imagination. Salieri doesn't get the moment of collaboration; looking at the unfinished Requiem score makes him realise the requiem is for his own soul, which he nearly killed entirely in his relentless jealousy and destruction of Mozart, and he confesses to Mozart, who first doesn't believe him and later seems to be too insane to truly take it in, though they have a brief moment of mutual cradling that Salieri could interpret as absolution were it not for Constanze's return and Mozart telling her Salieri destroyed him. In the play, Salieri's old age accusation of himself of a murder that in literal terms didn't happen (while in both versions Salieri is a huge factor of driving Mozart into a breakdown, he does not physically kill him) - and his attempted suicide are really one last attempt to connect his name with Mozart's, and his punishment is that no one believes him, the suicide doesn't work, and he has to live with this. The blessing of mediocrities happens in both versions - Salieri blessing the audience is another thing Shaffer had to find a different thing for in the movie - but the black humor of it is, I felt, stronger in the film.
The different leading man performance fits the different conceptions. Lucian Msamati's Salieri is more divided into a public and a private self, with the sleekness of the public self never ruffled (except in the Constanze scene), and the way he operates is very much a polished professional performer and courtier. (Watch the scene where Emperor Joseph tells Salieri he intends to make Mozart his niece Elizabeth's music teacher, which is near identical in movie and play, and you'll see a big difference in performance - in both cases, Salieri first assumes he'll be the new teacher, the Emperor clears up the mistake, and Salieri quickly reacts by making insinuations about Mozart's conduct with his female pupils. But in the movie, the moment where Salieri thanks the Emperor for his supposed appointment and the misunderstanding is cleared up feel far more awkward for Salieri until he rallies and counterattacks. Msamati's Salieri is a master schemer not thrown by this accident. On the other hand, Msamati's Salieri's private self is easily as anguished as Abraham about the play's key premise - longing to possess Mozart's talent and feeling rejected and tormented by God for both recognizing and not having it, despite the world celebrating him as the superior composer. And this private anguish culminating into the realisation that he's destroyed himself along with Mozart is an incredibly powerful performance.
Sadly, imo as always, the Mozart he's given is incredibly one note, no pun intended. Adam Gillen starts his scenes shouting and keeps shouting till the end with hardly any modulation. And he's not just occasionally infantile; he's so toddler-like that you don't understand how Mozart has been able to function without someone constantly holding his hand. Now part of it is that the play and this particular production gives us less scenes for Mozart than the movie does, and no quiet ones at all, but part is the acting. Gillen's Mozart really is nothing but an obscene child. Hulce's Mozart can be that, but he also has, say, the scene where he convinces the Emperor to greenlight Figaro ("I am a vulgar man, but my music is not"). The equivalent play scene has Gillen's Mozart shouting the lines about the way opera can do a quartet, sextett, octett etc. at von Strack, Orsini-Rosenberg, Salieri and van Swieten, and it's not convincing anyone. And there's no "one can one say but - Salieri" reply by Mozart in answer to Salieri's question how Mozart liked Les Danaides because that kind of subtle sarcasm is something this production's Mozart would be incapable of. This Mozart really has no positive human quality other than his music, and while the play still gets the horror of destruction across, there isn't really that much difference, except financially, between Mozart at the start and Mozart at the end in terms of acting.
Otoh: Karla Crome really is superb as Constanze, smart, determined, and full of (in this production) incomprehensible affection for her manchild of a husband. Her two big scenes with Salieri where she brings him some examples of Mozart's work, he blackmails her for sex and then throws her out when she decides she'll do it if that gets her husband the job make here for a very different dynamic than in the movie (Director's cut version, because the cinematic cut does have the work sample delivery but not the attempted sex blackmail). Crome's Constanze wisens up to what Salieri is up to far earlier, and after her attempts at deflection (including a pointed question about his wife) don't work, she on the one hand gives in to the blackmail but on the other cuttingly laughs about his attempt at making this a seduction and is coldly determined, not allowing him the illusion that he's doing anything but what he does, so that when Salieri throws her out it's not one more humiliation of Constanze but, despite him telling the audience it's because he doesn't want his revenge on God via Mozart to be so petty, clearly his inability to face up to what she makes him face. Constanze wins by sheer force of actress personality, and considering what a strong Salieri this production has, it is really saying something.
Lastly: not for the first time, I thought that it's ironic Amadeus, either version, in order to pull off its central conflict and premise has to eliminate someone pretty important to the creation of operas - the librettist. Lorenzo da Ponte worked with both Mozart and Salieri, and Pierre Beaumarchais, the playwright on whose drama Figaro's Wedding is based, actually wrote the (original) libretto to the Salieri opera that brings Salieri such constrasted-to-Figaro success. Both were very interesting men in their own right, who, btw, left a lot of autobiographical writings. But, say, suggesting that Don Giovanni might owe more to da Ponte's mixed feelings about his fellow Venetian Casanova, or to his idea of himself as a galant, than about any daddy issues Mozart had would not work with the story Shaffer wants to tell, in either version. Exit poetae.
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Date: 2020-07-20 06:26 pm (UTC)Oh, that sounds REALLY neat.
Yeah, I....just don't like PS's Mozart, because I don't like the whole "the artist is a holy fool touched by God who is nothing but a human sized pen" (ahem) thing, and I grew up with my mom's music books and lectures around so I had a different impression of him than the pop-culture one from the start. One of the things that actually makes me angry about the pop depictions of Mozart and van Gogh and a lot of other artists is, they did a lot of work. They had the genius, yes indeed, but there were years and years of hard work that had to go along with the genius.
it's ironic Amadeus, either version, in order to pull off its central conflict and premise has to eliminate someone pretty important to the creation of operas - the librettist. Lorenzo da Ponte worked with both Mozart and Salieri, and Pierre Beaumarchais, the playwright on whose drama Figaro's Wedding is based, actually wrote the (original) libretto to the Salieri opera
Oh, that's really neat. And IIRC Mozart was nearly always writing for specific artists, too -- contemporary musicians have a big influence on composers, just like specific actors and directors do for playwrights (a big example I can think of, and about the only one on not enough coffee, is the long partnership of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, or Laurette Taylor creating the role of Amanda in the Glass Menagerie).
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Date: 2020-07-21 05:31 am (UTC)George Bernard Shaw wrote Eliza Doolittle specifically for Stella Patrick Campbell. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote Jedermann, modelled on the medieval Everyman plays, in close collaboration with and for Max Rheinhardt to produce. Good lord, Brecht, Mr. Verfremdungseffekt himself, is a terrific example for this: the US version of Galileo Galilei is specifically the result of him collaborating with Charles Laughton on an English version, see also here, and his life long partnership with Helene Weigel meant not one but two parts in Mother Courage were tailored to her (Katrin the mute daughter which was supposed to give Weigel a part she could play in countries she didn't speak the language of during their exile years, and the lead role afterwards in German theatre, which she indeed triumphed in). And of course Brecht went through his life with a whole entourage of collaborators, female and male, he half exploited, half inspired, in general.
Anyway, yes collaboration is the natural mode for any staged piece of art, musical or otherwise, and the whole idea of the artist as a lone genius who comes up with everything himself in isolation is a 19th century thing (not of 19th century reality, but of 19th romanticism in terms of the idea of genius), which still hangs on, and I'm as irritated about it as you are. This said, I think that since Shaffer wrote the film script after the play, he may have had some second thoughts, not to the central idea of genius but to how important it is to show that no matter how much talent you have, you need to WORK in order to make it bear fruit, because movie!Mozart is depicted being hard at work (especially in the second half where the pov shifts). We still don't get real life depiction of how collaborative this work was, but at least a hint because as opposed to the play, Schikaneder shows up as a character and we see his brand of vaudeville theatre as something Mozart responds to.
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Date: 2020-07-20 11:33 pm (UTC)Msamati was so good, and as you point out Crome was so good, and the production overall was intense and had such impressive stagecraft -- I really loved it -- but there was a hole at the center.
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Date: 2020-07-21 05:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-21 08:46 pm (UTC)But as you say, it does matter that Mozart be fully human, and there was hardly any of that here, alas. Hulce was SO GOOD ARGH.
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Date: 2020-07-23 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-23 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-23 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-22 04:55 am (UTC)Lucian Msamati is SO GOOD, I was like how could you follow F. Murray Abraham and he does it completely differently and yet gets all those essential beats through, his FACE, he is SO GOOD
I do think Adam Gillen is way over-the-top, I preferred Tom Hulce because his Mozart was so genuine and you could see why people might actually like him and champion him, Gillen's Mozart somehow comes across to me as both unlikeable and pretentious
(I just got to the dance scene with the Mozart symphony as pop. This is so delightful, they are doing so many clever things!)
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Date: 2020-07-22 05:01 am (UTC)and all his emotionally tense ones too
holy cow I had forgotten if I ever knew that Salieri sets out explicitly to seduce Constanze
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Date: 2020-07-22 05:11 am (UTC)Constanze: HR WHERE ARE YOU oh right it's the 18th C
Constanze: Actually I could get into this quid pro quo thing
Salieri: This was supposed to be ROMANTIC, not sordid!
Constanze: ...
I also love that they use completely different pieces of music for Salieri's monologue about Mozart's music
holy crap the KYRIE ELEISON I CAN'T EVEN WITH ALL THE FEELS
I really love the choir just standing there just visible, completely still, as he monologues, like they're standing in judgment
gosh I really love this!
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Date: 2020-07-22 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-25 05:07 am (UTC)Yesssss! I really loved this take on Constanze (and really loved this production's pragmatic and hard-edged Constanze). That's interesting that the dialogue is near identical! In the director's cut does she actually say "let's get this over with" (or whatever the line is)? And yes, they both work, although the vulnerability of movie!Constanze I think would set off my humiliation squick a bit, and I personally prefer the play version. (Well, I'm extrapolating since I haven't actually seen the director's cut, but.)
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Date: 2020-07-22 07:57 am (UTC)Precisely. It's sad, because everything else about this production is superb, and I'm fine with alternate interpretations of characters, but Gillen's Mozart being so relentlessly dislikeable, as if someone, either Gillen himself or the director, decided to take Salieri's "this obscene child" from the introduction scene as saying all that is to say about Shaffer's Mozart, which is a shame since it robs the story of layers.
Otoh, it also shows, as I said to
Act 2 - Figaro
Date: 2020-07-22 04:33 pm (UTC)-Vienna!Joe! :D
-Not specific to the theatrical production, but this is the first time I've watched any version of Amadeus since I fell in love with opera and it is suuuuuch an experience. Not least because the movie was my very first introduction to opera as a Thing, particularly a Thing that people might love, and so a lot of how I can articulate how I feel about Mozart's operas is, I am realizing, informed by Salieri's words here. And so there's a lot of "YES YES WOW THIS IS JUST SO EXACTLY THE WAY IT IS" overlaid by remembering that all the other times I've watched it I was kind of ?? about opera.
-Specific to the theatre production, the highly stylized bits, like where Mozart talks about everyone being a quartet while people freeze in place, and Salieri gesticulates alongside the singers in the finale of Nozze -- those all work sooooo well and I'm so glad I got to see this production!
-Though... in this section the Mozart interpretation really starts hampering the production, I feel. In Act I it didn't matter so much because it was all about Salieri's reactions to Mozart, but in this specific bit where he's talking about the music in Figaro as well as wanting to write a quartet with Salieri and Mozart and the other two guys I feel like we need to believe that he's utterly sincere about it.
-I do have a theory about why Gillen might have been directed to play it that way -- I know this is a UK production, but they must have been thinking about race in a US context as well, and there is a choice there about making Salieri black and Mozart white that could have backfired colossally with a Mozart who was too sympathetic. Like I know I would have side-eyed it a bit if it had become the story of "black guy who is upstaged by more awesome white guy!" But if the white guy is played as simply the conduit for God and not with any redeeming qualities of his own -- well, I am not having that side-eye at all. (Admittedly, in large part, because all the side-eye is going towards being frustrated at Mozart.) (Of course, they could have cast Mozart as black as well, I feel like that would have solved all the problems :) And I think it would have worked, too -- Mozart and Salieri are both outsiders, though in different ways.)
-Msamati confronting Gillen after the opera and saying how marvelous it is -- it is heartbreaking when Abraham does it, and it's heartbreaking when Msamati does it. <33333
(OK, that's all until tonight :) )
Re: Act 2 - Figaro
Date: 2020-07-22 05:12 pm (UTC)BTW, did you know that ViennaJoe and Mozart both hung out with Angelo Soliman, rl poc and Free Mason, who earlier had worked for that same Prince of Liechtenstein whom Fritz bought the "Antinuous" statue from?
Re: Act 2 - Figaro
Date: 2020-07-25 05:02 am (UTC)Act 2 - Magic Flute and Requiem to end
Date: 2020-07-23 05:14 am (UTC)-Magic Flute! Hee, I liked the pop moments, it's a great reminder that Magic Flute was basically like rock concerts to us (well, I mean, not me personally, but you know)
-Interestingly, I was more okay with Gillen's Mozart interpretation in this section. I think because it dovetails with Salieri's objectification of Mozart, calling him the reed that God was playing through -- and no more, just an object of pity at best (which he really was at the end). So it was interesting and I guess in the end worked for me, although I still liked Tom Hulce's interpretation better and I still think Gillen's doesn't work at all in that middle section.
-I never *really* understood why the play was called Amadeus until now -- I think you had actually mentioned this in your movie review, maybe? because I'd seen it before -- but there was this just visceral shock to my system in that last terrible confrontation between Salieri and Mozart and he calls him Amadeus and it's clear that he means it absolutely literally, the one God loves, and all that Italian Salieri's been randomly speaking suddenly has this huge payoff
-The way he was tapping out music on Constanze's shoulder as he was dying, and even his death spasm was in time to the music AGH
-I mean, the end Salieri-Mozart scene in the movie is SO GOOD, the play did not top it, but it was surprisingly powerful, or at least I was surprised by how powerful it was
(I hope to reply tomorrow when my time's not being all taken up with watching this play! :) )
Re: Act 2 - Magic Flute and Requiem to end
Date: 2020-07-23 07:25 am (UTC)Amadeus: yes, I did mention it.
Death scene: agreed, for what it was it was moving and powerful, just in in quite different emotional beats than in the film, because here in the play and this production, Salieri is at this point horrified by what he‘s done, aware that he’s become monstrous and seeking absolution from the one person who can give it. And it‘s the sole point in the play where Mozart - what‘s left of him - and Salieri both see each other clearly and connect, for a moment. Which is a different thing from what drives movie!Salieri at the same point; he doesn‘t seek absolution because he never has a moment where he realises he‘s become monstrous, and the connection the scene between them establishes is a creative one. (Also of course early in the scene it‘s Mozart who asks for Salieri‘s forgiveness.)
Re: Act 2 - Magic Flute and Requiem to end
Date: 2020-07-25 05:01 am (UTC)*nods* I need to watch the movie again and then go read your review again! I don't remember Salieri speaking quite as much Italian in the movie, so I think it hit me here where it didn't as much in the movie -- but it could also be that I didn't know Italian when I last watched the movie, so it would have been lost on me in any case.
Which is a different thing from what drives movie!Salieri at the same point; he doesn‘t seek absolution because he never has a moment where he realises he‘s become monstrous, and the connection the scene between them establishes is a creative one. (Also of course early in the scene it‘s Mozart who asks for Salieri‘s forgiveness.)
Hm! I think I assumed Salieri had realized he had become monstrous in the movie, but couldn't bring himself to make himself monstrous in Mozart's eyes. (Surely you couldn't be asked for forgiveness by Tom Hulce and not realize that? :) ) It's really powerful in the play though partially because Salieri needs Mozart to be as horrified by him as he is by himself so that he can ask for absolution -- which might even be considered a form of selfishness?
Anyway, yes, very different emotional beats, and I agree that the connection in the movie is a creative one.
Re: Act 2 - Magic Flute and Requiem to end
Date: 2020-07-25 05:45 am (UTC)He doesn't. The movie was made in the early 1980s for an US audience (also world wide one thereafter, of course). You can bet they keep the non-English at an absolute minimum. (Also the reason why the excerpts from Entführungn aus dem Serail and Zauberflöte are in English, not in German.) I think all movie!Salieri says in Italian is "Grazie, Signore", and one sentence during the scene where Mozarts gets introduced to the Emperor.
Re: Act 2 - Figaro
Date: 2020-07-23 06:56 am (UTC)Re: Act 2 - Figaro
Date: 2020-07-25 04:54 am (UTC)I do think that making Mozart unlikable but interesting would be harder than making Salieri so (as it's basically written right into Salieri's character text) but yeah, one-note was definitely not the way to go about it.
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Date: 2020-07-25 05:15 am (UTC)Oooh, that's interesting. I didn't notice that about the Princess Elisabeth scene but now that you mention it I see it. I think it also has a lot to do with the difference between a movie and play structure. I'd always thought that movies had more freedom because you can do amazing things like the way they combine the music and the cinematography, as we've discussed -- but it's also true that plays allow one to do things one can't do in a more realistic movie, like have Salieri's private self be part of the action (e.g., in the middle of an opera shown on stage) and thereby show that this is his private-not-public self. And of course you could never get away with all the emotion in the monologues that Msamati puts into it. So there can be a much sharper distinction between public and private. Whereas Abraham has to put his emotions in the public scenes because it just wouldn't work if we didn't see them there.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-25 05:51 am (UTC)