In praise of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus

The time-hon­oured movie biopic has devel­oped some­thing of a bad name in recent years. Direc­tors and stu­dios appear hell-bent on mak­ing sure that their cho­sen sub­ject is framed as a fig­ure who audi­ences should real­ly spend lots of time car­ing about. As such, there’s a nag­ging ten­den­cy to over­state genius – that there’s only val­ue in these sto­ries because the peo­ple involved are indis­putably super-human and have under­tak­en acts that have unequiv­o­cal­ly improved soci­ety at large.

Miloš Forman’s 1985 Acad­e­my Award-win­ner, Amadeus, is cut from a slight­ly dif­fer­ent cloth, in that it’s a biopic which opts to take its sub­ject to task. Also, it isn’t just a straight pro­file of a sin­gle hero­ic fig­ure, but the chron­i­cle of a death­ly tus­sle between rival artists. It’s a study of slow, inex­orable psy­cho­log­i­cal break­down and a hymn to the toils of cre­ativ­i­ty. It’s based on a screen­play by the late, laud­ed British play­wright Peter Shaf­fer, and is a loose adap­ta­tion of his own stage pro­duc­tion which ran to raves at London’s Nation­al The­atre in the late 1970s, although For­man uses sly tac­tics to make the film feel glo­ri­ous­ly cinematic.

For­man, an émi­gré from the for­mer Czecho­slo­va­kia, is a direc­tor with a back­ground in sharp social satire. He honed his skills with films like the delight­ful take­down of small-town bureau­cra­cy, The Fireman’s Ball, and his lilt­ing, bit­ter­ly iron­ic take on teen romance, Loves of a Blonde. He marked him­self a close observ­er of human foibles, and he mined the com­ic poten­tial of trag­ic sit­u­a­tions. Hol­ly­wood duly brought him to its breast. All of these ele­ments fuelled the mak­ing of his great­est suc­cess, Amadeus, a film which, from some angles, looks like the prod­uct of a con­ser­v­a­tive and risk-averse indus­try, but is qui­et­ly rad­i­cal in the man­ner of its making.

The sto­ry of Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart remains a lip-smack­ing prospect, even if it means just lav­ish­ing in the chance to hear lengthy excerpts of some of the great­est music ever writ­ten and per­formed. One of the film’s most aston­ish­ing sequences sees ​“Wolfie” wav­ing his baton like a mani­ac at the pre­mière of Don Gio­van­ni – his macabre response to the death of his father. Fore­man affords a rare amount of space for the opera to play out, focus­ing on the hand-tooled sets, and the apa­thet­ic reac­tion from the audi­ence. He shows the genius at play rather than hec­tor­ing the audi­ence, telling them they are in the com­pa­ny of one. Mozart nev­er real­ly knew fame in his life­time, par­tic­u­lar­ly con­sid­er­ing that his diverse oeu­vre is now con­sid­ered a bench­mark by which all clas­si­cal music should be mea­sured. And the film direct­ly taps into that melan­cholic state of being.

A spir­it­ed turn by the actor Tom Hulce lends a grotesque edge to this pro­lif­ic prodi­gy. Mozart is pre­sent­ed as some­thing of a buf­foon, an aspect to his char­ac­ter which is enhanced with a haunt­ing, high-pitched laugh. Yet in Amadeus, bio­graph­i­cal detail and a man­date to do right by his­to­ry is not the cen­tral focus. This is about the lop-sided pro­fes­sion­al rival­ry which devel­ops between this unher­ald­ed musi­cal god­head and the lit­tle-known Ital­ian com­pos­er, Anto­nio Salieri (F Mur­ray Abra­ham), who held a lofty posi­tion in the court of the Emper­or Joseph II. While the cognoscen­ti failed to com­pre­hend the tran­scen­dent beau­ty of Mozart’s work, Salieri realised that he was liv­ing along­side one of the all-time greats, and opts to insid­i­ous­ly take him down as a result of his own deep-set insecurities.

The film is a paragon of old-school crafts­man­ship of the type pop­u­larised by the likes of David Lean in the 1950s and 60s. It’s now over 30 years old and hasn’t aged a day. On 2 Novem­ber, it plays as part of the Roy­al Albert Hall’s Fes­ti­val of Film strand, with live sound­track pro­vid­ed by the Acad­e­my of St Mar­tin in the Fields and the Phil­har­mo­nia Cho­rus, con­duct­ed by Lud­wig Wic­ki. Even if you’re a pro­fessed hater of clas­si­cal music, Amadeus is most assured­ly a film worth catch­ing, for the intense ener­gy of its per­for­mances, for the lov­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of 18^th cen­tu­ry Mit­teleu­ro­pean high soci­ety, and for the being able to see the strange con­text in which these icon­ic musi­cal selec­tions were forged.

Catch this unmiss­able screen­ing of the film on Fri­day 2 Novem­ber 2 at the Roy­al Albert Hall. Book your tick­ets at roy​alal​berthall​.com