Amadeus invented a murderous rivalry that Mozart and Salieri never actually had
Peter Shaffer's Amadeus gave the world a jealous Salieri plotting to destroy a giggling, foul-mouthed Mozart. Historians say it is nonsense. The two men seem to have respected each other, and after Mozart died, Salieri taught music to his son Franz. The play also, ironically, revived interest in Salieri's own operas.
Shaffer did not invent the rumour. He took his cue from Alexander Pushkin's short 1830 drama Mozart and Salieri, which Rimsky-Korsakov later turned into an opera. In Shaffer's version, an old and forgotten Salieri addresses the audience directly, claiming he poisoned Mozart, then flashes back to his years as the emperor's celebrated court composer. Appalled that God has given such genius to a crude young man rather than to a devout servant like himself, he renounces God and quietly sabotages Mozart's career while posing as his friend.
Scholars have been blunt. Some friction between the two men is documented, but nobody who studies them takes the murder idea seriously, and Salieri probably conducted some of Mozart's music. Critic David Cairns called the play myth-mongering and disputed its picture of Mozart as a sublime artist trapped in a fool's body, noting that Mozart's manuscripts show heavy revision rather than perfect copies of music already finished in his head. H. C. Robbins Landon worried that the public would never shake the image of a divinely gifted drunken lout.
As theatre, though, it was a triumph. Peter Hall directed the 1979 premiere at London's National Theatre, with Paul Scofield as Salieri and Simon Callow as Mozart. On Broadway, from December 1980, Ian McKellen played Salieri opposite Tim Curry; the production ran for 1,181 performances and took five Tony Awards, including Best Play. Curry later called it his favourite stage production. Mark Hamill was among the actors who later took over as Mozart.
Shaffer kept revising the script and adapted it for the acclaimed 1984 film. It has since travelled widely: Roman Polanski directed and played Mozart in Warsaw and Paris, and in 2017 it was staged in English at Prague's Estates Theatre, where Don Giovanni had its premiere in 1787. Michael Sheen, who played Mozart in a 1998 London revival, returned decades later as Salieri in Sydney.
Source: Amadeus (play)
