This is my entry for
this week’s critics blogathon on Milos Forman’s Amadeus.You can read about the project by the blogathon's leader, Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri. As the
Oscars approach, it was decided by us that Amadeus is one of the great films that deserved the critical praise the film
received, as well as its eight Academy Awards. At the end of this blog, you’ll
find links to the other pieces in the series.
There
is certainly something sublime about the music of Mozart, even if we can’t
understand why it arouses such feelings. Even those of us who have taken a
music class at college perhaps don’t truly understand the genius that has made
Mozart better known than any other composer in the world. But what if we could
understand it from the mind of a great composer? And what if that understanding
could be translated cinematically?
That’s
part of the conceit that makes Amadeus,
the 1984 Oscar winner from playwright Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman,
a fascinating film, and perhaps one of the best examples in how directors can
use music in film. It would have certainly been easy enough for Forman to
simply populate the soundtrack of Amadeus—a
quasi-biopic of Mozart as told through the eyes of a jealous rival named
Salieri—with the music of Mozart without much thought in why they chose any
particularly piece except the emotions felt. However, Shaffer and Forman use
the music as specifically a subjective experience and commentary by Salieri.
The music cues, both diegetic music (where the spectator can see where the
source of the music is originating) and non-diegetic (music that overlay the
soundtrack), offer insight both into how the spectator can understand the
genius of Mozart and how the film uses Salieri’s knowledge of Mozart to comment
and create a narrative of a man haunted by another.
