Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, a mixture of both fantasy and fact, revolves around the dramatic interpretation of the lives, and the relationship between the two great composers, Antonio Salieri and Amadeus Mozart.  But to what extent is Amadeus the product of the imagination of the writer Peter Shaffer; a record of historical fact and intrigue or a combination of the two; and in a piece of theatre is that a significant difference?

Richard Adams, editor of the 1984 Longman Study Text edition of Amadeus, saw “Its truth is not that of the history book, but of the theatre.” and that“The playwright who draws his material from historical sources must always be free to include or omit, to exaggerate or diminish, to alter the balance of fact in whatever way is necessary for him to establish the dramatic truth he is seeking” (pg xiv).  Thus allowing for the dramatic licence that a performance needs to breed and live on. 

Nikolai Foster, the director of the 2007 performance of Amadeus on Sheffield Theatres’ Crucible stage, stated that “If there’s not a feeling that Salieri falls out of control at times, then the play never really takes off and we never really get into the thrust of it”.  So even though to a certain extent we are dealing with historical facts within the production, the journey by which we meet those facts must have uncertainty and danger for the audience, therefore becoming truly immersed in the work as a piece of theatre, and links back to Adams’ assertion that the playwright “must always be free” to adapt the historical facts to reach the “dramatic truth”.

In Shaffer’s Amadeus, there is certainly a combination of historical fact and fiction.  Following the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the 5th December 1791, rumours surrounding his death and his relationship with the Kapellmeister, Antonio Salieri, began to circulate in Vienna, mainly around the unpleasant circumstances surrounding Mozart’s death.  These rumours were fuelled again 32 years later following Salieri’s abortive suicide attempt in November 1823 when he claimed to have murdered Mozart; and then again in Alexandar Pushkin’s short verse drama ‘Mozart and Salieri’, which can be seen as a root source for Shaffer’s Amadeus. 

In addition to Pushkin’s play Shaffer used historical accounts and in particular many of Mozart’s letters as creative stimulus and sources for his play; “A lot of the confrontation and dirty language is Mozart’s, not mine at all.  For example, Mozart’s letters to his cousin, a female cousin, throughout the year 1777 were absolutely extraordinary! They are alarming.  No not alarming, it’s just that they are rather infantile in their humour, you know like a school boys; but he maintained it all his life”.  In particular the use of word play and dirty language that Mozart and Constanze use in Baroness Waldstadten’s parlour in Act Onehas it’s foundation in Mozart’s letter.  For instance, if you compare the extract below from Amadeus:

Mozart:          Hey – hey – what’s Trazom!
Constanze:  What?
Mozart:        T-R-A-Z-O-M.  What’s that mean?
Constanze:  How should I know?
Mozart:        It’s Mozart spelt backwards – shit-wit! If you ever married
me you’d be Constanze Tramzon.
Constanze:  No I wouldn’t
Mozart:        Yes, you would.  Because I’d want everything backwards once I was married.  I’d want to lick my wife’s arse instead of her face.

With this extract from one of Mozart’s letters to his cousin in 1778, in which he uses word play and refers to bodily parts “…whether to make peace with me you’ll be so kind?  If not, I’ll let one off behind!  Ah, you’re laughing! Victoria!  Our arses shall be our symbol of peace making…” we can clearly see that Shaffer has adapted the style of address Mozart uses in his letters, for the character that he has written for the stage. 

Shaffer asserts that in “everything, everything, even the elements of the play that people complained about or didn’t like, such as the fact that Mozart was portrayed as too dirty mouthed, is in fact justified by research and that in every scene, there is a crystal of truth”.  However, the difficulty for the audience, is that same difficulty that Salieri suffers from within the play, how could a man who produced such exquisite music, be foul mouthed and childish. 

You know how hard I’ve worked! – Solely that in the end – in the practice of the art which alone makes the world comprehensible to me, I might hear Your Voice!  And now I do hear it and it says only one name: MOZART!... Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantile Mozart! – Who has never worked one minute to help another man! – Shit talking Mozart with his botty-smacking wife! Him you have chosen to be your sole conduit

For Salieri, the disbelief is born out of jealousy; for many audience members the disbelief comes from viewing Mozart as an idol, a genius, and intrinsically and inseparably relating that notion to the notion of goodness.  Shaffer does not assert through the play that Mozart was evil or degenerate, but that he was a man and that it is possible for a man to produce the sublime music; “may have been very tiresomely doing that or he may have been very juvenile. But he doesn’t show any signs of being unworthy to write music or of being very wicked.”  But it is this idea of Mozart as a man and not a superior being that some audience members find incomprehensible.  Peter Hall gives provides the ultimate example of an audience member being unable to accept Shaffer’s portrayal of Mozart, when he recounts speaking to Margaret Thatcher after her visit to the National to watch Amadeus.
“She was not pleased.  In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words.  It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul mouthed”.  I said that Mozart’s letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour.  In a sense, he protected himself from maturity by indulging his childishness.
“I don’t think you heard what I said,” replied the Prime Minister.  “He couldn’t have been like that”.  I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart’s letters to Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary.  But it was useless: the Prime Minster said I was wrong, so wrong I was.

The only scene in Amadeus that Shaffer allows is a complete creative fiction and unfounded by historical fact or evidence is the finale between Salieri and Mozart.  In his essay, Amadeus: The final encounter, Shaffer clearly states that “for the purposes of Drama there needs to be such as scene: the play urgently demands one” and as Richard Allen has previously stated in the Longman Study Text, the playwright “must be free” to use the historical material to explore his “dramatic truth”.  In the case of Amadeus, Shaffer clearly felt that the play needed the confrontation between the two figures to make it complete, “I wanted a confrontation scene of some kind between the two men but it wasn’t there historically and so I put it in, in various forms… Amadeus is a drama; not a historical record, but it’s called dramatic licence isn’t it?”. Shaffer was free to subvert from historical accuracy because he is not an historian, his aim is not to recreate an accurate account of the lives of Mozart and Salieri on stage, but to create an epic and dynamic play that captures it’s audience, and this he certainly achieves.

Bibliography

Shaffer, Peter.  Amadeus.  Longman Study Text. Ed. Adams, Richards.  Essex 1984

Nikolai Foster – Director of Amadeus Interview
Sourced from http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/creativedevelopmentprogramme/productions/Amadeus/index.shtml

Sir Peter Levin Shaffer – Writer of Amadeus Interview
http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/creativedevelopmentprogramme/productions/
Amadeus/index.shtml

“Introduction by Sir Peter Hall”  
From Shaffer, Peter.  Amadeus. Modern Classics Penguin Books, London (2006)

“Amadeus: The Final Encounter by Sir Peter Shaffer”
From Shaffer, Peter.  Amadeus. Modern Classics Penguin Books, London (2006)