MOZART’S MYTHMAKER
‘Amadeus’ and ‘Equus’ playwright Shaffer scored big on Broadway
P ETER Shaffer, who wrote two of the most successful Broadway plays of all time — “Equus” and “Amadeus” — died Monday in County Cork, Ireland at age 90.
Though born and raised in England, Shaffer lived in New York City in a rambling Riverside Drive penthouse he bought with the money from “Equus,” which opened on Broadway in 1974 and ran three years.
“Equus” tells the story of a teenage boy who blinded six horses. Shaffer got the idea for the play on a drive with a friend through the English countryside. As they passed a stable, the friend told Shaf- fer about a local boy who’d attacked horses and was committed.
“The story was repellent to me,” Shaffer told me for my book, “Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway.”
“And then it took hold of me in a way that I really wanted to account for this, somehow, in my head . . . I was thinking about it all the time, and the only way I could lay it to rest was to write about it.”
A classical music fan, Shaffer wrote “Amadeus,” about the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, after stumbling on a little-known fact about Mozart’s death. Legend had it that no one attended the funeral because a ferocious thunderstorm forced the closing of the cemetery that day. But Shaffer looked at Viennese weather reports from 1791 and discovered that the weather had been mild. He began to wonder if authorities had kept people away to curtail suspicion that Mozart had been poisoned. Shaffer called “Amadeus” “a black fantasia on Mozartean themes.”
“Amadeus” won five Tonys — the movie, which Shaffer wrote, won eight Oscars.
But what pleased Shaffer the most about “Amadeus” was the success of the movie’s soundtrack album, which he co-produced. He proudly displayed his gold record in his Riverside Drive apartment.