Amadeus

Judged on structure, the spine is required from end to end. The vow, the first hearing, the burned crucifix, the plot against the Requiem, the dictation and the absolution are each a step in Salieri’s war on God, and the frame gives every scene a confessor to answer to. The core resists subtraction: the March of Welcome, which Mozart takes up and mends at the keyboard in front of its composer, is the whole rivalry in one scene. What gives is the middle. The parody of Don Giovanni at Schikaneder’s theatre, the maid planted in the household and much of the court comedy restate what is already plain, and Katerina Cavalieri’s affair is gestured at rather than built. At about 160 minutes the second hour is long by permission, and that holds the axis among the lowest.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: the man able to recognise genius fully may be exactly the man who cannot make it, the recognition is torment, and the gift falls without regard to virtue, so that piety and labour earn nothing and a giggling young man receives everything. Salieri is the only one in Vienna who hears what Mozart is; the Emperor yawns and the court counts the notes. Envy is shown as a form of love and of theology, and the condition is general: the patron saint of mediocrities is a figure audiences recognise in themselves, which is why the absolution lands. Held a step below the gate because the disclosure is single and stated more than once in Salieri’s own words, Mozart himself is disclosed far less, and the free falsification of the history narrows what it shows of how genius lived and worked.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The film rises often, and the rises are its best scenes. Salieri reads the manuscript pages Constanze brings, and the scores fall from his hands as the music sounds over them. He describes the adagio of the Serenade for winds, K. 361, the plain accompaniment and then the oboe entering over it. The Commendatore steps from the stage of Don Giovanni as Leopold’s ghost; the masked messenger stands in the doorway; the Confutatis is dictated at the bedside, assembled part by part in the room; the cart goes out in the rain to the Lacrimosa. Much of the height is Mozart’s, and the film’s own share is the staging of hearing, a real achievement but not the music’s. The comic register is level by design for long stretches.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The myth is built and load-bearing. Salieri bargains with God as a boy; God answers by sending Amadeus, whose name means beloved of God, to a man who has kept his side of the bargain; and Salieri declares war on Heaven through its creature. It is the pattern of Cain and Abel, the favoured and the unfavoured offering, crossed with Job and with a Faust who received nothing for his soul. The father runs beneath it: Leopold returns as the Commendatore, and Salieri, in Leopold’s mask and cloak, commissions the Requiem, so that the son writes his own mass for the dead at a false father’s order. Held below the gate because the myth came from Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri (1830) and Shaffer’s play and is carried over largely whole, and because the theological frame is spoken more than embodied.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is the costume biography of the composer, from the studio lives of musicians to Ken Russell’s lurid ones of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the prestige adaptation of a stage success. The turns are real. The great man’s life is told by his enemy and judged by him; Mozart is played as a vulgar, giggling, ruinously human young man, with American voices throughout the cast rather than a mannered Old World speech; the music is given long, uncut spans as action rather than background; the composer is not the film’s consciousness. The stake was moderate, and that holds the axis among the lowest: a play already proven on the stage, a producer and director coming from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a lavish period surface. Casting unknowns and shooting in communist Prague were risks; the form was not.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows, which is what genius looks like to the one man who sees it and cannot share it. Everything is filtered through Salieri’s telling: Mozart is never alone with the camera except where Salieri imagines or reports him, and the music is presented as Salieri hears it, so that the audience is made to listen with envy. The frame of a confession to a priest who cannot follow it is the form’s sharpest stroke, showing a church unable to hear what the musician heard. Held at the figure because much of this is the play’s form transposed, and the film’s own addition, the opened world of courts, theatres and streets, is often container rather than instrument; the operas are reproduced with care more than made to think.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Forty-two years are the evidence. The film has kept a criticism and a debate: on its falsifications, a teacher of Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt shown as a mediocrity, Count Walsegg’s commission of the Requiem turned into a murder plot, the deathbed collaboration invented, and on whether the slander matters; on what the film believes about God; on the vulgar Mozart, partly sourced in his letters; and on Salieri’s unreliability, since nothing in the film stands outside his telling. It rewards return mainly in F. Murray Abraham’s performance, where the reading of a line shifts with knowledge of the end. What holds it: the questions are fewer than the deepest films raise, and the central one, envy of the gift, is posed whole on first viewing and does not grow. Formally it yields less on return than it offers at first.

Score: 7.9 / 10

A classical-music biography turned into a drama of perception and resentment, with the music given the floor: within the cinema of the 1980s, a prestige film that was not only prestige. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film renewed the screen life of the composer biography and of the artist’s rival as a subject, and the name of Salieri became a common name for the gifted envier, owed more to the film than to Pushkin. What holds the figure is form. The film reorganised little of how films are made; its influence ran through subject and prestige, the costume picture of the awards season, and the play had already done much of the cultural work before it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

A film of 1984, forty-two years elapsed. The theatrical cut survives whole and is in circulation. For some years the director’s cut displaced it in home release, a small charge on the surface, since the film as released was for a time the less available version, and that withholds the tenth that the widest presence would earn. The presence is otherwise wide and continuous: television, home video, concert screenings with live orchestra, classroom use and the general idea of Mozart. The American accents and some styling of the eighties, the wigs and the punk inflection of the young Mozart, are of their moment, but the period setting has protected the film more than dated it. The bar of 8.5 is cleared by a tenth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Miroslav Ondříček photographs interiors by candle and window light; Patrizia von Brandenstein’s design and Theodor Pištěk’s costumes make a whole city of the eighteenth century; the opera stagings in the Estates Theatre in Prague, where Don Giovanni had its premiere, are exact and alive. The cutting to music is the film’s mastery: the description of K. 361, the manuscripts scene and the dictation are edited to the score, so that the image follows the music’s logic. Abraham’s Salieri, old and young, is a performance of great range and control. What holds the figure: the comic scenes are often broad, some line readings are pitched for effect more than truth, some Viennese scenes run at the length of a stage scene without being cut for the screen, and the second hour sags in pace.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the court, the wigs and the young man who crawls under a piano and talks of excrement, and the deathbed dictation and the lime over the bodies. They obey one law, because both are Salieri’s memory, the comedy his contempt and the tragedy his guilt, and the film’s register is licensed by his voice throughout. The American speech is a single convention kept consistently. What gives: the court politics, the Italian faction and Count Orsini-Rosenberg’s manoeuvres, have their own comic physics that the frame does not always govern, and the late turn, Salieri’s plan to pass off the Requiem as his own at Mozart’s funeral, belongs to melodrama more than to the confessional law the rest obeys.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The orders held are several: consciousness, Salieri’s above all, and through him the experience of hearing; the family, with the father’s rule and his death; money and patronage, court appointment and debt; the theatre, from the imperial opera to Schikaneder’s suburban stage; the state, in the Emperor and his censors and the ballet in Figaro; the sacred, in Salieri’s God, the confessor and the mass for the dead. They are integrated through the rivalry rather than listed. What holds the axis among the lowest: the world beyond court and theatre, the city’s people, labour, the politics of the Empire, is decor, and Constanze’s life and the poverty of the household are touched rather than held.

Score: 7.8 / 10