From Winter, 1997, issue of Creative Screenwriting

<center> <h2>Fine-Tuning Villainy</h2> <h4> Salieri's Journey from Stage to Screen </h4> <h5>by Charles Deemer</h5></center>



Peter Schaffer had to be convinced to adapt his stage play Amadeus to
the screen.  In an "Introduction to the Film Edition" of the published
stage script, he writes:

        "The cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to
        work in.  Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone
        living largely by the spoken word.  Increasingly, as American
        films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent
        that the most successful are being spoken in 'Screenspeak,' a
        kind of cinematic Esperanto equally comprehensible in Bogota
        and Bulawayo.  For example, dialogue in heavy-action pictures,
        horrific or intergalactic, now consists almost entirely of the
        alternation of two single words - a cry and a whisper -
        needing translation nowhere on the planet: 'Lessgidowdaheer!"
        and "Omygaad!"  Mastery of this new tongue is not easy for
        older writers." (pxiii)

Nonetheless, the playwright was persuaded to write a new screenplay
for his story about Mozart and his jealous rival Salieri, much of
which was done in secluded collaboration with film director Milos
Forman.  Shaffer himself realized many of the compromises he would
be forced to make: "...its operatic stylization would probably have
to go, and its language would have to be made less formal, though
not automatically more juvenile." (pxv)

In his NY Times article "How Amadeus Was Translated From Play to
Film" (September 16, 1984), critic Michiko Kakutani writes that
director Forman considered the stylized theatricality of Shaffer's
play to be an advantage for the adaptation:  "The fact that 'Amadeus'
was so stylized, so theatrical - well, so uncinematic, he argued,
was actually a blessing - it meant they wouldn't be tempted to merely
translate the play to the screen, but would be forced to demolish the
original, then totally reimagine it as a film."

As a matter of fact, Shaffer himself had already done significant
"demolishing" in changes made between the London and New York
productions of the play, the most important probably being the removal
of Salieri's servant Greybig, who in the London production is the
person whom Salieri enlists to drive Mozart insane.  Greybig
disappears from the New York production but is not yet replaced in
full horror by Salieri himself as the agent of destruction, which of
course is what we see in the film.

The point is, the playscript was already in more-than-usual flux in an
essential element of its structure, and returning to the story afresh
as a screenplay gave Shaffer further opportunity to think through the
Salieri-Mozart dynamics.  What results is a film villain far more evil
and dark than the Salieri we see on stage - but at the ironic cost of
being in a story that is less threatening to the audience.

In this article I will trace the major shifts in Shaffer's fine-tuning
of villainy as Salieri moves from stage to screen.

                              The Hook

The operatic theatricality of the stage play begins as soon as the
curtain is up.  In his stage directions, Shaffer introduces what will
become a central narrative device:

        (Two middle-aged gentlemen hurry in from either side, also
        wearing long cloaks and tall hats of the period.  These are
        the two VENTICELLI: purveyors of fact, rumor and gossip
        throughout the play.  They speak rapidly - in this first
        appearance extremely rapidly - so that the scene has the air
        of a fast and dreadful overture.  Sometimes they speak to
        each other, sometimes to us - but always with the urgency
        of men who have been first with the news.)

        VENTICELLO 1: I don't believe it.
        VENTICELLO 2: I don't believe it.
        V.1: I don't believe it.
        V.2: I don't believe it.
        WHISPERERS: Salieri!
        V.1: They say.
        V.2: I hear.
        V.1: I hear.
        V.2: They say.
        V.1 & V.2: I don't believe it!
        WHISPERERS: Salieri!
        V.1: The whole city is talking.
        V.2: You hear it all over.
        V.1: The cafes.
        V.2: The Opera.
        V.1: The Prater.
        V.2: The gutter. (p2-3)

and so on, the emotion heightened until:

        V.1: What do you think?
        V.2: What do you think?
        V.1: I don't believe it!
        V.2: I don't believe it!
        (Pause)
        V.1: All the same ...
        V.2: Is it just possible?
        V.1 & V.2: Did he do it after all?!
        WHISPERERS: SALIERI! (p6-7)

The question, of course, is whether or not Salieri murdered Mozart as
he claims.  In the film we begin with the same psychological moment
but with the terse realistic economy we've come to expect in American
movies:

        INT. LANDING AND STAIRCASE OUTSIDE OLD SALIERI'S SALON. NIGHT.
        1823.

        Total darkness.  We hear an old man's voice, distinct and in
        distress.  It is OLD SALIERI.  He uses a mixture of English
        and occasionally Italian:

                                OLD SALIERI
                Mozart ... Mozart ... Mozart - Forgive me! ... Forgive
                your assassin!  Mozart! ... (p1)

The contrast here is extraordinary - but also exemplary, in the sense
that each version plays the strong suit of its medium: the theater
"hook" taking advantage of the immediacy of a live audience and of an
operative rhythmic style consistent with its subject matter (in the
film, the music itself would serve this purpose in its own
extraordinary way); the film trading high theatricality for realism
and economy at its textual level, which will be embellished by
powerful images and music.

In the play, Salieri tells his story directly to the audience, moving
us toward the climactic action of his cutting his throat; in the film,
this act comes early on and serves as the hook, a suicide attempt
immediately heightened by Mozart's music:

        ...From under the door we see a trickle of blood flowing.
        In horror, the two men [servants] stare at it.  The dish
        of cakes falls from the Cook's hand and shatters.  He sets
        the candlestick down on the floor.  Both Servants run at
        the door frantically - once - twice - three times - and
        the frail lock gives.  The door flies open.

        Immediately, the stormy, frenzied opening of Mozart's
        Symphony Number 25 (the "little G Minor") begins.  We
        see what the Servants see ... (p4)

that Salieri has cut his throat.

Far more intellectual and rhetorical is Salieri's introduction to the
stage audience, speaking directly to them after the scene with the
Venticelli:

        SALIERI: (calling to audience) Vi saluto!  Ombri del Futuro!
                Antonio Salieri - a vostro servizio!
                (A clock outside in the street strikes three.)
                I can almost see you in your ranks - waiting for your
                turn to live.  Ghosts of the Future!  Be visible.
                I beg you.  Be visible.  Come to this dusty old room -
                this time, the smallest hours of the dark November,
                eighteen hundred and twenty-three - and be my
                confessors! (p7-8)

This begins a long monologue to the audience, and halfway through it
the house lights come on, so Salieri can see his "ghosts of the
future." He goes on to explain the course of their evening together,
Salieri and his guests, the actual audience at hand:

        SALIERI: And now, gracious ladies! obliging gentlemen!
                I present to you - for one performance only - my
                last composition, entitled The Death of Mozart;
                or, Did I Do It? ... Dedicated to posterity on
                this, the last night of my life! (p12-3)

If the stage Salieri is telling his story directly to the audience, in
the film a realistic device is used, the introduction of a priest who
visits the composer after his failed suicide attempt.  The priest
serves as "an ear" for Salieri's story - and it is the nature of the
story itself that evolves from stage to screen in ways that increase
Salieri's villany by making him a more direct participant in Mozart's
physical deterioration.

                         Salieri and Mozart

"Obviously, Amadeus on stage," writes Shaffer in his introduction,
"was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and
the film is even less of one" (pxii).  By taking more liberty with
history, as it were, and following the logic of his own premise,
Shaffer used the screenplay to fine-tune the character of Salieri into
a more direct force of villany and evil.

Hints of this appear early.  In the stage play, Salieri has this to
say about Mozart:  "I'd known of him for years, of course.  Tales of
his prowess were told all over Europe" (p18). And that's it.

In the film, this is changed:  "He was my idol! ... I can't remember a
time when I didn't know his name!  When I was only fourteen he was
already famous.  Even in Legnago - the tiniest town in Italy - I knew
of him!" (p9).

Mozart is no idol in the stage play - and it is the elevated nature of
the film Salieri's admiration that increases his disappointment when
he finally meets the genius composer, only to judge him to be an
obscene child:  "So it was he! ... That giggling, dirty-minded
creature I'd just seen ... crawling on the floor ... Mozart! ... The
phenomenon whose legend had haunted my youth! . . . Impossible!"
(p18).

In the stage play, the Venticelli introduce us to Mozart before we
meet him in the flesh:

        V.1: Such gaiety of spirit!
        V.2: Such ease of manner!
        V.1: Such natural charm! (p21)

When we do meet him, in similar stage/film scenes of chasing his
wife-to-be Constanze and engaging her in ribaldy, Salieri has a
similar reaction but one expressed on stage with more heightened
language in a long monologue to the audience, which concludes:

        SALIERI: Dimly the music sounded from the salon above.  Dimly
        the stars shone on the empty street.  I was suddenly
        frightened. It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God -
        and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I also had
        heard - and it was the voice of an obscene child! (p29)

The central dramatic question in the play is: how can God bless Mozart
with genius over the more devout Salieri?  In the film, the dramatic
question is less abstract and more personal, Salieri's revenge on God
by attacking his medium, Mozart, getting focus without the play's
philosophical wrapping.

Another change from stage to film heightens the stakes for Salieri,
increasing the motivation for his revenge.  In both play and film
Mozart replays and improves the little march of welcome that Salieri
has composed for his arrival to court.  However, in the stage play,
this scene is enacted between the two of them alone (pp39-42).  In the
film, this scene is played in front of the Emperor and leading court
musicians, to the much greater embarrassment of Salieri.

Salieri's revenge is the turning point in both play and film, spinning
the story into its more tense second half.  The first act of the stage
play ends with Salieri saying to the audience, "It is now one hour
before dawn - when I must dismiss us both.  When I return, I'll tell
you about the war I fought with God through his preferred Creature -
Mozart, named Amadeus.  In the waging of which, of course, the
Creature would be destroyed" (p75).

This plot point happens much earlier in the structure of the film:

        INT. BEDROOM IN SALIERI'S APARTMENT. NIGHT. 1780's.

        C.U. Salieri standing, his eyes shut, shaking in distress.
        He opens them - and sees across the room CHRIST staring at
        him from the wall.

                                OLD SALIERI (VO)
                From now on we are enemies - You and I!

        CUT TO:

        INT. OLD SALIERI'S HOSPITAL ROOM. NIGHT. 1823.

        The old man is re-living the experience.   Vogler [the priest]
        looks at him, horrified.

                                OLD SALIERI
                Because You will not enter me, with all my need for
                you! - because You scorn my attempts at virtue!
                ... because You are unjust, unfair, unkind - I will
                block You!  I swear it!  I will hinder and harm
                Your creature on earth as far as I am able!  I
                will ruin Your Incarnation! (p62)

In the play, Salieri's revenge is largely expressed by "starving out
the God," using his influence to deny Mozart commissions and cutting
short the runs of his operas.  While Salieri also does this in the
film, he does much more as well, including hiring a servant girl for
Mozart so that she can spy on him.

                             The Climax

In the play, Mozart shares with Salieri a recurring dream he has been
having, an image from which the climax will evolve:  "a figure comes
to me, wrapped in gray, doing this (beckoning slowly).  It has no face
- like a mask!  What can it mean, do you think?" (p117).  This leads
Salieri to "the wickedest thing I did to him," which he confesses to
the audience:

        SALIERI: My friends - there is no blasphemy a man will not
        commit, compelled to such a war as mine!  I got me a cloak
        of gray.  Yes.  And a mask of gray - Yes!
        (He turns around: he is masked.)
        And appeared myself to the demented Creature as - the
        Messenger of God! ... I confess that in November, 1791,
        I - Antonio Salieri, then as now First Kapellmeister of
        the Empire - walked empty Vienna in the freezing moonlight
        for seven nights on end!  That precisely as the clocks of
        the city struck one I would halt beneath Mozart's window -
        and become his more terrible clock. ... Every night I
        showed him one day less - and then stalked away.  Every
        night the face he showed me at the glass was more crazed
        at each visitation. (p136)

The masked Salieri tells the audience how on the last day he crossed
the street and entered Mozart's apartment - moving into a scene of
climax with Mozart, in which Salieri confronts him directly:  "Die,
Amadeus!  Die, I beg you, die! ... Leave me alone, ti imploro!  Leave
me alone at last!  Leave me alone!" (p140)  In a Freudian moment,
Mozart starts calling for his father; Constanze, having left Mozart,
returns and enters the scene; and Mozart dies.  The scene plays better
than it tells but still is far less powerful than the new climax that
Shaffer found for the film.

The mask that Salieri wears is foreshadowed in the film when Mozart's
father wears it at a costume ball.  The Mozart-father relationship,
more fully developed on film than on stage, sets the stage for
heightened madness and revenge by the film Salieri, for after the
father's death, the same mask is worn by Salieri, who appears
at Mozart's door looking like the ghost of Mozart's father:

        INT. MOZAART'S LIVING ROOM. DUSK. 1790's.

        Mozart sits writing at a table.  He appears now to be really
        quite sick.  His face expresses pain from his stomach cramps.
        There is a gentle knock at the door.  He rises, goes to the
        door and opens it.  Immediately there is a SHOCK CUT:

        The dark, frowning mask stares at him and at us.  The violent
        D Minor chord which opens Don Giovanni is heard.  Salieri
        in costume stands in the doorway.

                                SALIERI
                Herr Mozart?

        The second chord sounds and fades.  Mozart stares in panic.

                                SALIERI
                I have come to commission work from you.

                                MOZART
                What work?

                                SALIERI
                A Mass for the dead.  (pp128-9)

The new plan is ingenious, as Salieri later explains to the priest:

                                OLD SALIERI
                His funeral - imagine it! ... The Cathedral
                - all Vienna is sitting there!  His coffin
                - Mozart's little coffin in the middle!
                - and suddenly in that silence, music!
                - a divine music bursts out over them all
                - a great Mass of Death! Requiem Mass for
                Wolfgang Mozart, composed by his devoted
                friend Antonio Salieri! ... What sublimity!
                ... What depth! ... What passion in the music!
                ... Salieri has been touched by God at last! (p131)

To get Mozart to write his own mass - and then to steal it as his own:
this is Salieri's final thrust in his war against God.

Later, when Mozart gets too ill to compose, Salieri himself writes
down the score as Mozart struggles to dictate the notes, a climax that
is moving and ironic, engaging and horrifying.  The climax of the
stage play palls beside it.

                             Conclusion

On stage, when Salieri is finished with his story to the audience, he
cuts his throat, leaving the Venticelli to wrap up the narrative the
same way they began: "I don't believe it."  Salieri cannot even claim
victory as Mozart's assassin but is regarded instead as a demented old
man.

Then Salieri rises from his wheelchair and looks over the audience:
"Mediocrities everywhere," he tells us, "now and to come - I absolve
you all.  Amen!" (p152)  As played, this is a powerful moment - and we
ourselves, the audience, become the "mediocrities" to which he refers.

In the film, in contrast, Salieri delivers these parting words to
other patients in the hospital as he is wheeled away from his visit
with the priest.  The difference in tone is striking: even though the
climax of the movie is much more powerful than the ending of the play,
nonetheless there is something more personally threatening in
Salieri's direct confrontation of the audience at play's end, telling
us of our human mediocrity.

If Shaffer were to revise the stage play yet again, I think he would
do well to add much of the film's climax to it.  The powerful scene
between Mozart and Salieri, the former dictating his own mass as the
latter scribbles to keep up, would play on stage as well as on screen.

But I doubt if Shaffer will be returning to this material.  He tells
us as much:  "...our joint movie is definitely the first and last of
the metamorphoses of Amadeus. ... There will be no television series
of half-hour dramas in which Salieri plots a different method of
murdering Mozart each week, only to be frustrated by the wily little
genius in the twenty-ninth minute" (pxxi).

What we are left with are two Amadeuses, each powerful in its own way,
the play more confrontational to the audience, the film more powerful
in its overall storytelling, each a solid accomplishment.


Bibliography:

AMADEUS. Peter Shaffer. New American Library (New York, 1984)

AMADEUS. Peter Shaffer. Script City (Final Draft, December 1982)


[BACK TO TEXT]
SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

3/98