A Music Review: Amadeus

Directed by Milios Foreman, the eight-Oscar winner “Amadeus” is one of the best movies ever made about the process of creation of music and its creator, the composer. As indicated by its title, the film portrays the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, focusing on his last ten years in Vienna, narrated by Mozart’s rival Antonio Sallieri, the court composer to Emperor Joseph II.

“Amadeus” is a movie where the creation surpasses the creator and attracts the audience attention setting the question “Who is truly the protagonist?”

In the end of the movie, one may argue that the music in this film is not just a soundtrack used as a background, which usually serves the movie and creates the atmosphere of a scene adding thus to its artistic value and helping enhance the audience delightment. One may indeed support the notion that in “Amadeus” music’s name is written in the casting as it becomes the protagonist or to use a metaphor “a maypole” on which are tight and swindling around people’s lives in an endless dance full of sounds.

In “Amadeus” music acts, reacts, influences and changes the characters lives, participates in society’s actions and activities, becomes rivals weapon in the political arena and serves as man’s mediator to God. Music’s presence in the movie is powerful and ubiquitous in private and public life with orchestras, chamber music and church choir employing all known musical instruments of that time such as violin, piano, viola, cello and basso. At the same time its role is multidimensional releasing emotions, delineating social activities, portraying colorful cultural events, and revealing historical and political disputes.

As character, music in “Amadeus” is vivid, interesting, unpredictable, independent, nonconformist and rebellious like any form of art should be in order to serve its purpose in life as the watch dog of society healing human soul, praising humanity’s achievements and cauterizing its prejudice. In this sense from the beginning of the play music shows its rebellious nature. It escapes Mozart’s control and becomes an independent medium. Many are the scenes in the play where in moments of creation music manifests its self not as a product of thought but as an impulsive flow that spurs out of the composer’s mind and leads his hand in musical compositions written “without a single mistake” as Sallieri admits.

Music unfolds its emotional existence by expressing the characters’ passions, joy, sorrow, hatred, jealousy and obsession employing different forms to manifest them. Every passion of each person in the film is being expressed through music.

When it comes to happiness and joy the dynamics are in forte or mezzo forte, while in moments of sorrow there is piano and pianissimo. Obsession and hatred are given in fortissimo and forte too, while introspect and remorse is expressed with fortissimo, forte or even piano. Music is part of people’s everyday life revealing with forte and crescendo the fast pace of life in the bustling streets of Vienna, while at the same time renders the soft whispering of nature with piano and diminuendo that flows like the snowflakes that cover Vienna in white and melancholy.

It is music with its presence that reveals the fundamental truth of the coexistence of life and death in man’s life. In the opening scene, using one single musical piece in forte slowly changing into fortissimo, music embraces both the agony of the spiritually and physically wounded Sallieri and the joy of people’s dancing in the great Hall. It is the opera Don Giovanni with its forte and crescendo dynamics that expresses the remorse and dark shadows of the past that haunts Mozart.

Finally, music with a requiem laments death literally in Mozart’s loss and metaphorically in Sallieri’s degradation and loss of moral values. The Requiem is changing into fort and crescendo, but it includes parts of piano where female voices appear and which is the softer parts of the music.

On a cultural level music manifests its presence as a powerful factor in life at that era. With music as a vehicle we wonder to the magnificent but austere halls of the Emperor’s court and Archbishops establishment where music suffers by the suffocating hug by a sterile church that allows only forte dynamics, a few notes and no innovations. At the same time in private parties people enjoy music in fortissimo which is also entertaining without restrictions.

On a social level the audience is informed about the importance of music in all aspects of people’s life. From birth to baptism and from marriage to death, in moments of joy, or sorrow music is ubiquitous. People hire teachers to teach their children music, become musicians or musical instrument manufacturers to earn a living.

Last but not least, in the historical and political dimensions music becomes the hero that using Mozart rebels against the Establishment of that time declaring that Art in any form is beyond language barriers, geographical borders or political disputes. Defying the Emperor’s decisions Mozart will perform innovating for his time operas. By doing so in the “Marriage of Figaro” for the first time opera does not deal with mythology and its heroes or with Saints’ lives and God but rather with contemporary characters and situations. Emphasis is placed on the interplay of personalities on the scene and special interest was given in the various ways orchestra could be utilized to express the characters’ emotions.

Rarely a biographical movie reaches the top ten of the Box Office and becomes the darling of the critics. “Amadeus” which means God’s beloved succeeded both because of its charismatic protagonist- Music.