Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Amadeus is not an objective documentary biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For a start, he
never called himself Amadeus. He signed himself, when he did, Amadé, which is, you know, is
the French version of it, and a lot of people who criticize the play on that level appear
never to have heard of fiction. I would stand by a lot of the details of the play, not actually
the giggle, which now irritates me, and I sort of regret it. I think it’s used too
much, and I’ve taken it out of the printed version of the play, actually, because it’s
liable to be misused and made too much of, but the scatology is true, and a lot of it
I got from, or the idea of it, from his letters, particularly to his cousin, Anna Maria Thekla,
and I figure if a guy writes scatology, his conversation must be fairly scatological too.
Perhaps not the other way around, but certainly that way, I think, it’s a fairly safe assumption.
And a lot of people don’t—for the nineteenth century, for example—could not accept the
idea of a man writing ineffable music, say the slow movement of the “Clarinet Concerto,”
who also is telling fart jokes, but I mean I find that as the great paradox that excites
a dramatist, that sort of thing. Part of him is very infantile. He was held back, a lot,
I think, in his development by his father. He wrote a lot of letters to his father which
either conceal or evade the truth. They have the force, not exactly of lying, but of doctored
truth, because he was frightened of his father and always wanted to please him too much,
although he did defy him in the end and married the girl that Leopold didn’t want him to
marry, and all of that is true. His addiction to billiards and dancing is true, his dressing
up is true, but you see, he didn’t…it’s amazing that he had any time to do anything
but write, because the outpouring of music is so vast, and the wonder is not only that
it’s so prolific, but that it is so perfect once he got started. I think Mozart’s--apart
from one or two works written in Salzburg--his greatness begins with his arrival in Vienna
and the ten years—1781 to 1791 when he just writes one masterpiece after another.