I finished Mythic Quest on Apple TV last week. It’s good in patches, and two episodes are better than that, Backstory! and Peter, both of which step outside the show’s usual rhythm and are written and shot like they belong to something else. F. Murray Abraham plays C.W. Longbottom as an ageing, eccentric and frequently ridiculous writer, and plays him so completely that it took me a while to place him. My first F. Murray Abraham was Antonio Salieri.
In 2013 I’d moved back to Bhilai from Jamshedpur for a project. Most of my friends had already left for work in other cities, so I was in a town I knew well with very few people left in it, and I had a lot of evenings to fill. Amadeus turned up during one of those internet rabbit holes, probably off a Pinterest list of films everyone should see once. I knew nothing about it and it took a fair bit of searching to find a copy. Laptop, earphones, and that was the evening. The opening tells you immediately that this won’t be an ordinary film. A snowy night, a man shouting somewhere in the dark. “Mozart! Mozart!” Another man runs up the stairs towards the voice. “Mozart, I killed you!” The door goes in and there’s an old man inside, bloodied, having cut himself. That was my introduction to Salieri.
Mozart in the film is fascinating. I’ve never met anyone I’d call an eccentric genius so I can’t claim to relate to him, but I can imagine what it must have been like in Vienna to watch him work. A childish, irritating man composing like it was child’s play, and the music has already outlived every person who was in the room to hear it first. It’ll outlive us too. That’s what makes Salieri the more interesting of the two. Mozart is the genius and Salieri is the one we watch him through, and Salieri understands music well enough to know exactly what he’s hearing. It takes a kind of talent to work out that quickly that you’ve been beaten. Salieri has exactly that much. There are levels to genius and he can hear which one he’s standing on.
There’s a scene where a priest comes to visit him. Salieri plays a few of his own compositions and the priest listens politely and recognises none of them. Then Salieri plays something else and the priest knows it immediately and hums along. Mozart, picked out in a couple of bars by a man who couldn’t tell one Salieri piece from another. You give your whole life to becoming good at one thing, you succeed at it, you’re respected, you’re good enough to hold a position at the Imperial court. Then someone arrives with the thing you’ve spent forty years chasing and it costs him nothing to have it. I think the scene that won Abraham the Oscar is the one where Salieri reads Mozart’s manuscripts. Nothing happens in it. A man sits with sheets of paper and reads, and everything the film has been building runs across his face while he does it. Abraham does the whole thing with his eyes. There aren’t many better examples of acting with a face.
Both of those scenes stayed with me, and so did the Requiem. Mozart dictates it from his sickbed and Salieri writes it down, and it’s one of the great climaxes in a film that has no action in it at all. Mozart finally has someone in the room who understands what he’s doing, someone who might have become a friend. Salieri is inside the music for once instead of listening to it from across a room. The two of them working through it together for one night is the most alive the film ever gets, and it’s why the ending hurts as much as it does.
Amadeus is historical fiction and worth treating as such. The real Salieri and Mozart seem to have got on reasonably well, and the rivalry, the sabotage and everything surrounding Mozart’s death belong to the film rather than to the record. But put yourself where the film puts Salieri before deciding he’s the villain. A man with that much ability, finding out that someone younger and less disciplined has what he can’t reach through work, would feel something. The film gets the history wrong deliberately and gets the jealousy exactly right. There’s a particular cruelty in being good enough to hear the difference. Someone with no ear would have been happier.
Amadeus was also my introduction to classical music. Before it, Mozart and Beethoven were names I knew rather than music I’d listened to. That changed slowly, and by 2015 and 2016 I was driving around at night with one or the other playing in the Fiat Punto Evo. The Punto went in 2024 and the songs are still on my playlists. What the film did was turn Mozart from a name in a textbook into that laughing, insufferable man moving through Vienna while Salieri sat somewhere nearby wondering what God was playing at. I still put both of them on when I need to concentrate on something properly.
Most films released in a year disappear. A few get remembered for one performance or one story. What separates the good ones from the great ones is how many things they get right at the same time, and Amadeus has the story, the performances, music that can’t be argued with, the costumes, the sets and an 18th-century Vienna that holds up. It also doesn’t belong to a period of filmmaking. Most of the 80s films I love are unmistakably 80s films, which is a good part of why we love them. This one could have been made this year. It assumes you know nothing about Vienna in the 1780s and don’t particularly care, and by the end you’re invested in people whose names you didn’t know an hour earlier. The film won eight Academy Awards from eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Miloš Forman, Best Adapted Screenplay for Peter Shaffer and Best Actor for Abraham. Tom Hulce was nominated for Mozart in the same category and lost to the man playing Salieri. In that one instance Salieri came out on top.
I’d more or less forgotten F. Murray Abraham until C.W. Longbottom turned up on screen. It took thirteen years and a comedy about video game developers to put me back in front of a laptop in Bhilai, listening to a man scream a name into the snow.
