‘Mozart! Mozart! Forgive your assassin. I confess I killed you. Forgive me, Mozart!’ So, to the dramatic opening strains of Mozart’s G minor Symphony No. 25, begins Amadeus – perhaps the greatest film about classical music ever produced.
Described as a ‘fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri’ by Peter Shaffer, upon whose play the script was based, the film takes as its premise the ‘confession’ of Antonio Salieri to the murder of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – a rumour first circulated in 1825 when whisperings of a poisoning gripped Vienna, and embellished in the years that followed by playwright Alexander Pushkin and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Were Mozart and Salieri rivals?
Though at times there may have been professional tensions, there is little historical evidence of a bitter rivalry between the two composers, let alone a murderous plot. Yet, this gripping black fantasy of genius and ‘mediocrity’ – as a jealous and wrathful Salieri must accept as his God-given fate – proves the perfect vehicle to showcase the dazzling skill and versatility of Mozart’s music, and to reflect in a surprisingly sophisticated way on the nature of brilliance, and creativity’s power to consume and destroy.
Released by Orion Pictures in September 1984, the film took the Oscars by storm the following March. Nominated in 11 categories, it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture for producer Saul Zaentz, Best Director for Miloš Forman, Best Screenplay for Peter Shaffer and Best Actor for F Murray Abraham, who played Antonio Salieri.
Who recorded the Amadeus soundtrack?
Notably absent from this list, though, was conductor Neville Marriner who, as director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF), supervised and recorded the film’s soundtrack. As the Oscars recognise only original scores, Marriner’s role went unrewarded, as Amadeus made near-exclusive use of Mozart’s unaltered music – acknowledged by Forman and Shaffer as the film’s ‘third character’.
It was their dedication to Mozart’s music that set the tone for the project, and precipitated a highly original production schedule. Forman had seen the play during its debut London run in 1979 and approached Shaffer to adapt the work for the screen.
Over four intense months at Forman’s home in Connecticut, the two produced a script, but both agreed that Mozart’s music, originally supervised by Harrison Birtwistle, had played too small a role in the stage version. ‘We didn’t want music in the background cueing the emotion,’ explained Shaffer in a 2002 documentary for the film’s Director’s Cut. ‘It was, in fact, in the foreground.’
Thus Forman, Shaffer and producer Saul Zaentz approached Neville Marriner. ‘Our first meeting was in the first class Pan Am lounge in New York,’ remembers Lady Molly Marriner. ‘We only had an hour before catching planes to various destinations. They explained to Neville that they were approaching him at the recommendation of several big figures in the music world – only Neville’s name had appeared on everyone’s list.
The making of a seminal soundtrack
'Neville agreed, and they visited us in our country cottage for a weekend. They arrived in a white Mercedes, hired from the Savoy or the Ritz, and worked away very seriously over those two days – though with frequent breaks for Miloš and Neville to play tennis, and for Miloš to watch Wimbledon! By the end of that weekend, they had plotted the music for every single scene.’
The stage was now set to record the soundtrack in full, before even a single reel of film had been captured – in contrast to the usual production order in which the music is cut to fit the images. This decision helped honour Marriner’s one condition of accepting his music supervisor role – that ‘not one note of Mozart would be changed’.
Recording with the ASMF duly followed in Studio One of Abbey Road Studios. ‘The sessions took a long time and were very spread out,’ reveals Graham Sheen, the Academy’s then-principal bassoon. ‘Forman, Shaffer and Twyla Tharp, who choreographed the operatic scenes, were all there. Often, they’d say, “Actually, we’ve had second thoughts for this scene and need a different sort of sequence”, so we’d have to repeat sections.’
'In those days we were probably one of the five most recorded orchestras in the world’
For this, the ASMF’s extensive experience as a recording orchestra proved invaluable. ‘In those days we were probably one of the five most recorded orchestras in the world,’ says Sheen. ‘The way we worked was virtually unheard of on the continent.
In Europe, orchestras would perform a piece several times before recording, with separate rehearsals, but the ASMF would go into a session at 10.30am and by 5.30pm had recorded a Haydn symphony. So, we were well set up to complete the sessions amazingly efficiently. And because the music for this project wasn’t a servant to the visual side, we were able to perform without restrictions.’
Meanwhile, the mammoth task of casting was underway, involving close to 1,400 auditions, due in no small part to Forman’s insistence on the importance of even the smallest roles. Although ‘every major star wanted to be Salieri in the film’, according to Forman, he wanted ‘people to see Mozart and Salieri, not big stars’.
Even so, he was surprised upon meeting F Murray Abraham: ‘He was wonderful, and Salieri became so real and alive. I told him, I will fight for you to play Salieri, and it was a fight. But he didn’t believe me and accepted another role!’ Later Forman told producer Zaentz: ‘Murray thinks he could be a great actor if he didn’t have breaks against him. He is Salieri, on and off stage!’
Where was Amadeus filmed?
Principal filming took place over seven months in Communist-era Czechoslovakia, Forman’s homeland and a country to which he had never expected to return following the banning by the authorities of his 1967 satire The Firemen’s Ball. Despite the perpetual presence of secret police, Prague in the early ‘80s had one advantage: it was relatively untouched by modern development, due to years of infrastructure neglect. ‘It was wonderful to walk down those streets in those fabulous costumes,’ says Abraham. ‘Everyone else was an anachronism. It was like a painting come to life.’
The Count Nostitz Theatre, where several operatic scenes were filmed, was central Europe’s last remaining wooden opera house. Here, some 200 years previously, Mozart himself had conducted the world premiere of Don Giovanni.
‘Everyone was affected by the spirit of the place,’ recalled Shaffer, ‘but it was in danger of burning down at any moment, so we had 30 or 40 firemen on standby every day, in addition to 500 extras!’ ‘We had fire everywhere and could so easily have burned down that historic opera house,’ choreographer Twyla Tharp confirmed in a 2015 interview with the Hollywood Reporter. ‘We had live fire in the chandelier. We were lighting people on stage, and the dancers were whipping those torches around. It only worked because the crew were so devoted to Miloš.’
Who played Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus?
Historically accurate settings, costumes and recorded music aside, the film’s credibility would always be in question were it not for the ability of its leads, Tom Hulce and F Murray Abraham, to convincingly portray the musical skills of Mozart and Salieri respectively on screen. For his part, Hulce, who had only previously played guitar, set about practising the keyboard for three or four hours per day, and as Lady Marriner remembers, stayed on his own in the Marriners' London flat over the Christmas weekend before principal filming began, ‘just practising and practising, as he was so keen to get it right’.
‘There’s no way I was going to be able to act that without being actually able to do it,’ Hulce explained in the Director’s Cut documentary. ‘The keyboards I played in front of the camera were all silent. All the music was recorded before we started. So, the sequence was either done with music being played out loud or in my ear if there was dialogue going on.
'I began, as filming went on, to believe the illusion a little bit, so it was always distressing to go back to my practice room and hear what it really sounded like on a working keyboard!’ Clearly the illusion worked, however. ‘Tom never hit the wrong key, even when he played it backwards,’ Neville Marriner commented with astonishment upon seeing the finished film.
'The most beautiful descriptions of music ever written'
For Abraham, the already recorded music and Shaffer dialogue was an invaluable inspiration. ‘The words of Peter Schaffer have to be the most beautiful descriptions of music ever written, whether on film or in literature,’ he says. ‘And that the music accompanies the words… what more can you ask?’
Perhaps Amadeus's technically difficult sequence was the dictation of the Mozart Requiem, by the dying Mozart to the desperate Salieri, who hopes to take down the precious notes and pass them off as his own. Sheen confirms that this sequence was patiently recorded by the ASMF prior to filming, so that Hulce and Abraham – who had spent much of the production apart to preserve ‘a slight antagonism’ between their characters – could synchronise their dialogue to the music, played through earphones on set.
Two separate cameras were set up to capture their performances simultaneously, meaning the sometimes-overlapping dialogue could be captured naturally, as if in the theatre. ‘I would leave out certain information that I knew Murray needed to go to the next place,’ Hulce remembered. ‘So, we would have to stop, and it would seem like he wasn’t quite smart enough. The scene is a superb partnership between two players.’
Was Amadeus successful?
And what of the film’s impact? ‘We were invited to a private preview in Hanover Square,’ says Sheen, ‘and at that point I was knocked out by this amazing production. The music had such a central space, and it was all done so beautifully and tastefully.’
Neville Marriner had a similar experience: ‘I remember the stunned silence when the end titles came up and the Piano Concerto No. 20 was still playing,’ he recalled. ‘The extraordinary thing was that people waited until the end of the main titles and then erupted in applause as if it had been a concert. You got the first sense that this was going to be an unusual movie and perhaps the music had won.’
And it certainly had. The legacy of Amadeus is best encapsulated in the film’s Original Soundtrack, recorded separately to the film sessions and showcasing full works and movements. Following its release, the soundtrack reached Number 1 in the Billboard Classical Albums Chart, Number 56 in the Billboard Popular Albums Chart, and has sold a staggering 6.5 million copies to date, making it one of the most popular classical music recordings of all time.
For Marriner, the risk had paid off handsomely: ‘We came in for quite a lot of punishment in the beginning because they questioned how an orchestra as respectable as the Academy could become associated with a film that makes Mozart into a buffoon,’ he said in a 1989 interview.
'Neville’s approach was a bit of a revolution'
‘But I would say that we have had more reaction from both Amadeus and the record of the movie than from any other music we’ve ever been involved in. And if there is any justification for being part of such a patently commercial enterprise, it is that millions of people have heard bits of Mozart they might never have heard if we hadn’t involved ourselves.’
Within the classical community, the ramifications were no less significant. Under Marriner, the ASMF had developed a fresh, technically brilliant, chamber music-focused approach to the works of Vivaldi, Haydn and Mozart, far removed from the heavier, solid and, at times, ponderous approach of the past 20 years. ‘I think Neville’s approach was, to a certain extent, a bit of a revolution,’ says Sheen. ‘He was changing the style and formulating something new; a very colourful and articulated approach that can certainly be seen as a precursor to the period movement that is so dominant today.’
And in the end, Amadeus breathed immediacy and life into the figures of Mozart and Salieri. Yes, some might complain that Hulce’s Mozart became a bawdy, immature caricature, and that Abraham’s Salieri was uncharitably portrayed as cynical and far less talented than the real composer, but the film’s tragi-comical message is surely one for all time.
‘I speak for all mediocrities in the world,’ concludes Salieri. ‘I am their patron saint. Mediocrities everywhere, now and to come: I absolve you all!’