Amadeus: A Play in Two Acts

What a fun reimagining! Maybe it's because I also watched the recent Australian Story with TwoSet that I very much enjoyed the way this brought classical music to life, infusing it with evergreen themes of jealousy and beauty and identity. Sometimes I feel like people demand a lot from historical fiction, to be accurate to the absolute minutiae whilst being entertaining. However this play was just so fun that Shaffer can get away with his wild central premise. It did take me a while to get into the written play but perhaps the best tribute to the play I can give is that immediately after to reading it, I went on a rabbit-hole binge of Wikipedia articles on everything and everyone related to this work.

I've never personally watched an Aleta before and hence, this review is solely based on my limited grasp of the play.

Where do I start! The play is more than just about rivalry or envy, it is about love and compassion. Love that is destructive and compassion that burns ones own soul. Both Salieri and Mozart love their work, to an extent that destroyed them. Salieri destroyed himself not just out of envy for Mozart's talent but despise for his own limits.
"Yet he from the ordinary created legends- and I from legends created only the ordinary."

There are moments of joy, and moments of cruel defeat right in the immediate. There is love and there is envy bordering on hatred. The play is awfully dark, and yet funny. It's a whole lot of show more paradoxes. There is expected mortality, yet immortality coming out of it.
"Something immortal- yet stinking of death. Indestructible- and yet rotting!"

The play is unbearably human. You feel disgust, pity and love, all the same.

It's beautiful. Give it a read. show less

I loved this play, but I think I prefer the movie. Maybe if I saw a performance of the play I'd change my mind. Amadeus is told from the villain's point of view, or is he actually the protagonist? It's hard to tell, since Mozart isn't really either. I did sympathize a bit with Salieri; how did he work so hard all his life to be shown up by some potty-mouthed, goofy child prodigy? Salieri tries the best he can to ruin Mozart, whom he sees as God's special instrument, to get back at God for overlooking him and wasting such talent on a nincompoop.

Shaffer brings history to life. This is a side of Mozart you'd never imagined before, complete with making fart noises and pretending he's a cat. I'd love to read some biographies of Mozart to see show more how accurate Shaffer was. show less

This isn't the first time the rumoured "murder" of Mozart by Salieri has been staged (the poet Alexander Pushkin wrote a play on the subject called MOZART AND SALIERI, adapted into a one-act opera by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1898), but I'd be extremely surprised if anyone else touched it after this. Shaffer's made the subject-matter unquestionably his own, taking two figures and bringing out classic, eternal themes - psychotic jealousy, Divine indifference, cosmic injustice. Far more dirty, pungent and mannered than the Forman screen adaptation of AMADEUS, but more authentic too.

A great drama, if a bit wordy at times. Definitely a must read for anyone interested in music and theatre, or for anyone who has tried their hand at making art.

O Amadeus do Forman está completando 40 anos por esses tempos, então resolvi ler a peça do Shaffer antes de rever o filme.
Particularmente não gosto muito de ler peças, gosto de vê-las encenadas no palco ou no cinema, mas é bom ler pra ver o que é do autor original e o que é do diretor da peça/filme, por exemplo, aqui a risada excêntrica do Mozart já está marcada no texto, então uma das características mais marcantes do Tom Hulce no filme já fora pontuado pelo Shaffer.

The play is strikingly different from the film. Pay special attention to the stage directions for the "hissing" noise created by repeating Salieri's name, and the stark modernist set. It makes for a completely unique mood in the play not recreated in the film. Schaffer has the sheer audacity to run head first into situations that would scare away a weaker playwrite, and does so with charm and finesse.