Amadeus Ex Machina: Why Rivalries Make for the Greatest Doomed Love Stories

Rivalry and reverence are intertwined forces with inherently similar fates, and no movie better understands this than Miloš Forman's Amadeus. The betrayal of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the hands of his biggest detractor, Antonio Salieri, unfolds as it would in an epic love story, filled with tropes of unhealthy fixations and the desire for immortality through the absolution of love.

This might be most significantly represented in the most famous tale of love, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The infamous play is about blinding infatuation that causes the young lovers to hold on to unrealistic versions of each other, brimming with miscommunication that leads to their doomed fates. This is meant to represent a tragedy and not an idealistic standard of the lengths one must go to in order to gain eternal and true love.

The biblical reimagining of the life of a great composer maps the quest to gain immortality through finding God's favour, in return for blind devotion. Where one composer is literally born with the name Amadeus, meaning "loved by God", the other pious individual feels neglected by the deity he so valiantly served and sacrificed for, only to gain indifference and humiliation as compared to His prodigal son. Based on the real-life rumour that Salieri poisoned Mozart out of spite, Peter Schaffer's script represents this "poisoning" as a form of systematic manipulation and abuse.

The crafty Salieri uses his powers of anonymity to quietly observe the childhood trauma borne from a fractured parent-child relationship that Mozart shared with his father, to guilt the younger composer into working himself to death. This is similar to an abusive person trying to make their partner feel so powerless that they would do anything to prove their worth.

All of Salieri's vicious actions spring from the fact that the messiah-like image he held of Mozart all his life was brazenly crushed when he witnessed him in the flesh as a man-child engaged in, what he believes to be, frequent acts of sin and impropriety. The desire Salieri feels for Mozart's talent and indulgences compels him to act in increasingly reprehensible ways, much like an infatuated lover might, in order to get closer to the object of his affection.

Creating music is a sacrament to Salieri, who believed it to be a language used by God to communicate His message to those loyal to him. Mozart, then, turns out to be a baffling prophet to Salieri. With his brazen disregard for customs or respect for tradition, he somehow still composes music that could only have had a divine hand in its composition and such a juxtaposition drives Salieri to spite this God that lacks the understanding of true devotion.

This undermines the real hard work Mozart put into his compositions and is neatly explored in the prodigy's adoption of the mindset "forgo permission and ask for forgiveness", consistently finding loopholes in the Emperor's rules. This shows the vast powers of interpretation Mozart has. He exhibits an astute sense of not particularly going against the Emperor's orders but drawing unsubstantiated hypotheticals and putting them into effect, claiming them as exceptions "surely" not meant to violate the hard-coded rules of the Sovereign. Mozart rejects the idea of attaching divinity to music. He does not believe in symphonies being created by the handiwork of any God. His focus remains on the human struggles of survival and morality, and he is not bound by any adherence to the traditional catering to a higher being.

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Mozart further says "love" is not an Italian value, laughing at its portrayal: men screeching about things they know nothing of. The tone seems rigid and wholly unoriginal to him, a sharp difference from the established and reverent pedestal it was put on at the time. "Italians are musical idiots," he definitively states, showing how the likes of Salieri were not even in his periphery as serious contemporaries. To consider Salieri a threat, he would have to consider him at all.

This outlandish and challenging art is met with the masses turning on Mozart; his shows perform poorly and gain a hedonistic reputation. At Salieri's own operas, the theatres are packed and roaring. The shot we see towards the beginning of the film, of a young Salieri recounting one of the best moments of his life is assumed to be so because of the over-pouring love of the audience, but as the story is later given more context, we learn that he was only looking for Mozart in the crowd. The enthusiastic showcase of approval from him was what had moved Salieri to remember this as a highlight in his career. He yearned for Mozart to say that he had loved his work from his own mouth, something he would replay in his head for the rest of his life.

Mozart's father is reintroduced since the first time we saw him touring Mozart as a show pony around Europe when the composer was not even a teenager. His stronghold on the emotions and actions of Mozart is apparent, as the grown maestro regresses into a helpless child in his father's presence, desperate for his approval and love. His father had always attended to his finances, leaving Mozart with no sense of saving and investing. He is forced to beg people for a job, ready to teach just about anyone for some money. His notorious label as a "bad debtor" also earns him the ire of moneylenders who would otherwise put faith in a man of his calibre. This, compounded with his heavy drinking, is pointed out to him by Salieri as the reason for his alienation in Vienna — as if Salieri's own hand in denying him good jobs by falsely planting stories of Mozart as a predator had not made the situation as dire as it was. Salieri also attempts to solicit a sexual favour from Mozart's wife, Constanze, in return for giving her family some money but quickly ridicules her for trying to save her husband from the brink of emotional and monetary ruin.

The devastating news that his father has died comes to Mozart at the time when he is ostracised from any form of work or companionship in society, along with his marriage crumbling apart. Without a beat or scene to show Mozart processing this information, we are plunged into his most harrowing piece of work, Don Giovanni, where the authority figure on stage stands menacingly as a sickly and almost-possessed Mozart conducts. This immediate compulsion to turn his trauma into art in order to help him better control the pain and helplessness he feels, equates a therapeutic experience with actual therapy. Living out the power dynamics and broken relationship in an emotionally-wrought opera is a cathartic approach to deal with the conflicting feelings of losing his abusive father, but it isn't the same as employing sustainable and healthy mechanisms to heal from his suffering.

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The scene showing Mozart's deathbed is a masterclass in acting, staging, writing, and use of score. Salieri's realization that the first time he read Mozart's composition was not a one-off piece of divinity, but that this man's music possessed the "voice of God" that Salieri so desperately longed to hear all his life, in his own work. The pages on which Salieri attempts to transcribe Mozart's final composition fall to the ground faster than he can finish writing them, indicating his inability to keep up with the younger composer even while the latter is at death's door. "He shudders as if in a rough and tumbling sea; he experiences a point where beauty and great pain coalesce," is the mesmerizing imagery and emotion Schaffer uses in the screenplay to describe what Salieri goes through. Though the standout performance is undoubtedly F. Murray Abraham's Salieri, one can't help but take in the tortured brilliance of Tom Hulce's withering Mozart as he the curtains slowly close on his immense talent.

Mozart does not live to see his 36th birthday, his body dumped into a pit with tens of others, leaving no money to support his family. His music eventually finds massive popularity following his death and is played in ballrooms and community theatres alike.

Salieri's last interaction with Mozart shakes him, and the pain he has caused Constanze and their family starts to dawn on him. He lives out the remainder of his days slowly slipping into insanity before attempting to kill himself as a form of reprieve for the sins he committed. The empty and haunting laughter that ripples out of him as he blesses his fellow institutionalised patients absolving them and himself of mediocrity shows the final denouncement of his blind rage and actions only to end up being forgotten while his revered rival lives on forever.