Amadeus

About the show

Since the play's original run, Shaffer extensively revised his play, including changes to plot details; the following is common to all revisions. The composer Salieri is an impoverished old man, having long outlived his fame. Speaking directly to the audience, he claims to have used poison to assassinate Mozart and promises to explain himself. The action then flashes back to the eighteenth century, at a time when Salieri is the wealthy and acclaimed court composer of the Austrian emperor. He adores Mozart's compositions and is thrilled at the chance to meet him, during a salon honouring his patron. But when he finally catches sight of Mozart, he is deeply disappointed to instead see the composer crawling around on his hands and knees, engaging in profane talk with his future bride Constanze Weber. Salieri cannot reconcile Mozart's boorish behaviour with the genius that God has inexplicably bestowed upon him, nor can he understand why God would not bestow similar gifts on him, a devout and chaste Catholic. Salieri renounces God and vows to do everything in his power to destroy Mozart. He befriends the composer and becomes his close confidant, while actively hampering and disrupting his professional career. Mozart's own fortunes are not helped due to his vulgar nature. On more than one occasion, only the personal intervention of Emperor Joseph II allows Mozart to continue (interventions which Salieri opposes and then is all too happy to take credit for when Mozart assumes it was he who intervened). Salieri humiliates Constanze by forcing her to strip naked in front of him when she comes to him for help. He smears Mozart's character with the Imperial Court, ruining many opportunities for the composer. A major theme in Amadeus is Mozart's repeated attempts to win the acceptance of Vienna's aristocracy with increasingly brilliant compositions, which are always frustrated either by Salieri's machinations or because the aristocrats cannot appreciate Mozart's innovations and willingness to challenge the accepted standards of classical music. Towards the end of the play, with his life completely ruined, Mozart is visited one last time by Salieri, who reveals he has been Mozart's enemy all along. This triggers a complete mental and physical breakdown in the composer. He later dies in Constanze's arms, singing a nursery tune. Salieri recounts how for the next thirty years, he was honored as the "greatest" composer in all of Europe, after which audiences began to turn away from his music and toward that of Mozart, as the world finally comes to recognize his true genius. With his tale finished, Salieri posts a written account of his false confession before attempting suicide with a shaving razor. He survives and his confession is met with disbelief and eventually rejected. Defeated, Salieri, doomed to live the rest of his life in obscurity and failure, absolves the audience of their mediocrity.