Antonio Salieri, as portrayed in the film Amadeus, helped me understand that God uses the arts to reveal himself to human beings. I’m sure I knew that intellectually, but this truth came alive in my imagination as a result of watching Amadeus.What’s more, Salieri’s description of a mysterious longing in Amadeus enabled me to understand and interpret my own glimpses of eternity. So it is no surprise that Amadeus is one of my favorite films.
The drama begins with the elderly Salieri attempting suicide. Playwright Peter Shaffer speculates that Salieri has long lived with the belief that he was responsible for the early demise of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The weight of guilt has taken its toll, so Salieri needs to express his angst in some way. The entire story is Salieri’s confession of his plot to kill Mozart.
Salieri tells his confessor about his first encounter with the celebrated musician at the Viennese residence of the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg. There Salieri furtively witnessed a young man engaging a young woman in flirtatiously crude conversation. While the couple is preoccupied, an ensemble begins performing a serenade. Hearing the music, the young man breaks away and rushes into the salon to conduct the performance himself. Salieri follows Mozart and is shocked to discover that the bawdy character is, in fact, the famous Mozart.
Curious about Mozart’s talent, Salieri studies the musical score of the serenade after the performance has ended. Salieri describes the music as a segment is reprised for us on the film soundtrack. “This was a music I had never heard—filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God. But why? Why would God choose an obscene child to be his instrument?”
What a marvelous depiction of someone experiencing poignant longing! It is remarkably similar to descriptions given by C. S. Lewis. How can this be? Did the playwright read Lewis’s works? Or did both men, in strikingly similar language, describe a not uncommon human experience?
Later in the film, Mozart’s wife secretly takes some of his manuscripts to persuade Salieri to give her husband work. Salieri is astounded by Mozart’s ability. As Salieri reads the manuscripts and questions Constanze, he realizes that Mozart has written first drafts of music from his head as if he were taking dictation. Salieri is no less astonished by the beauty of the music, for he comments in rapture, “Here again was the very voice of God. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”
He is so enthralled with the music that the manuscripts fall from his hands. With mixed powerful emotions (ecstasy and fury) he walks out of the room, stepping on Mozart’s autographs in defiance of the One who gave Mozart his gifts. The next scene features Salieri throwing a crucifix in the fire and telling God that they are now enemies. Salieri had wanted to be God’s conduit of beauty on earth. Instead God had chosen Mozart.
The point I wish to make is that, by expressing rage toward God for giving Mozart gifts Salieri wanted, Salieri was acknowledging that the beauty in Mozart’s music came directly from God.
Peter Shaffer got it right—at least about the perfection (the God-like quality) of Mozart’s creative work. The composer Johannes Brahms wrote regarding Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, “In my opinion, each number in Figaro is a miracle; it is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect; nothing like it was ever done again, not even by Beethoven.”
From what source but God could such beauty come?
No comments:
Post a Comment