A vengeful plot
Seven key scenes from the film
Father Vogler’s faux pas
Following the film’s opening scene in which an aged and guilt-ridden Salieri attempts suicide, we next encounter him in an asylum. Father Vogler has been sent to speak to this ‘soul in pain’, but Salieri is set on testing the chaplain’s musical knowledge. After playing several of his own tunes, which Vogler disappointingly fails to recognise, he begins playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik. ‘Oh, I know that!’ exclaims the relieved Vogler. ‘That’s charming! I didn’t know you wrote that.’ ‘I didn’t,’ comes the withering reply.
The first encounter
We move back in time to Salieri in his prime, recently appointed court composer of Emperor Joseph II. When Mozart travels to Vienna to play his music at the residence of his employer, Prince-archbishop of Salzburg, Salieri goes to meet him. In a deserted buffet room, the hidden Salieri encounters a bawdy couple. The young man has a high-pitched giggle and makes obscene jokes. Yet when strains of the ‘Gran Partita’ reach the room, he becomes instantly serious. ‘My music! They’ve started! They’ve started without me!’
Schooling Salieri
Emperor Joseph (a fantastically dry Jeffrey Jones) arranges to meet Mozart with the intention of commissioning an opera. Salieri has composed a march of welcome, which the Emperor decides to play as Mozart enters. As the meeting concludes, the Emperor presents Salieri’s sheet music to Mozart, who declines, claiming, ‘It’s already here in my head.’ Joseph is incredulous – ‘On one hearing only?’ – demanding that Mozart performs the work from memory. Mozart obliges, but his dazzling display doesn’t end there. ‘That doesn’t really work, does it?’ he muses, proceeding to improve the march until it is transformed into ‘Non più andrai’, later to be used in his own Marriage of Figaro.
The Emperor’s verdict
All of Vienna are assembled for the premiere of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Following rapturous applause, the Emperor congratulates Mozart on ‘an excellent effort’. When Mozart presses him for more, Joseph hesitates before asking Count Orsinirosenberg, his director of opera, for his input. ‘Too many notes,’ Rosenberg replies smoothly. ‘Exactly,’ agrees Joseph. Mozart is appalled, but the Emperor counters: ‘My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.’ ‘Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?’ is the spiky retort.
Original copies
Unbeknown to Mozart, his wife Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge) visits Salieri to apply for a royal teaching position on behalf of her husband. To this meeting she brings examples of his compositions. Salieri assures her he will look at the work in time, but Constanze requests that he look at the material while she waits. She cannot leave the works with Salieri as these are originals and Mozart doesn’t make copies. Looking at the portfolio, Salieri is mystified: ‘These are originals?’ Phrase after phrase of magnificent Mozart compositions are heard as we cut back to Salieri in the asylum, who explains to Vogler: ‘It was actually beyond belief. These were first and only drafts of music, yet they showed no corrections of any kind. He’d simply put down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it, as if he was just taking dictation.’
The death of Leopold
Following the news of his father Leopold’s death, Mozart is moved to write Don Giovanni, yet Salieri alone knows the truth. ‘So rose the dreadful ghost in his next and blackest opera,’ he recounts. ‘There on the stage stood the figure of a dead commander calling out, “Repent! Repent!” And I knew – only I understood – that the horrifying apparition was Leopold, raised from the dead. Wolfgang had actually summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the world.’
The Requiem
Mozart is dying. Tormented by his father’s death and the strange black-clad figure who has commissioned a Requiem mass, he collapses while conducting The Magic Flute and is taken to his apartment by Salieri. There, the cunning schemer, who has himself secretly commissioned the Requiem with the intention of passing it off as his own, offers to help Mozart finish the work. The following dictation scene is a perfect melding of dialogue and music, as Mozart feverishly reveals his ‘Confutatis’ to an awestruck Salieri. The work is never completed, however – returning the next morning from the spa, Constanze finds Salieri asleep and Mozart barely conscious. Minutes later, Mozart dies and Constanze locks up the manuscript.