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I particularly wanted to rewrite the end. You see, the problem with the Mozart-Salieri
story is that there is no end, in life. One survived the other by thirty-two years. It's
not much of a climax. There has to be a scene between them, a confrontation scene in a play.
That's what drama demands. And I had to supply it. The first scene that I supplied,
which involved a long confessional from a drunken and slightly demented Mozart that
didn't really please me very much, and Salieri just stood in a mask and heard it all, and
I always wanted to rewrite it, and in Washington I got my chance, and I opened up an enormous
can of beans, because I think I wrote a different confrontation scene for that play every night
for a week--Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and the actors, Ian McKellen and
Tim Curry were superbly supportive. I said, "You know, I'm probably driving you mad,"
and they said, "Never mind. We'll learn a new scene every night, because we want it
to be absolutely right." They were marvelous. And Peter would stage it, stage the scene
every day for me, he'd set it up, and slowly, over that immensely tormented and tormenting
week, we put...we inched up on that scene and, "Well, that's not it but it's almost
it. That's not it, but it's almost there..." And finally I reached what I wanted, and I
remember the day when I did. It was the day when I realized the scene concerned Mozart
offering the Requiem as an example of his work to the messenger, the masked messenger,
and for Salieri literally to eat the manuscript, to devour it, spit it out, as if it were both
desirable and poison, and actually to say to him, "We're both poisoned, Amadeus.
I by you and you by me." And it is, of course, melodrama. It obviously never happened, couldn't
have happened. I like it, that it couldn't have happened. It became pure theatre at that
point. I wanted an atmosphere more like one of the Tales of Hoffmann, using
the iconography of Mozart's last year, the grey messenger.