Amadeus: The Mozart and Salieri myth is bigger than history and truth

For more than two centuries, various doctors and medical professionals have speculated on what killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

A prodigious and prolific composer and considered one of history’s greatest artists, Mozart was struck down at the age of 35 in Vienna in 1791. His death certificate at the time listed the cause as “hitziges frieselfieber”, which roughly translates to miliary fever, identified by the presentation of millet-sized rashes.

Despite that, there have more than 150 different diagnoses after the fact, ranging from rheumatic fever or strep throat to a vitamin D deficiency. That his grave has never been conclusively identified makes it impossible to test against any remains.

His talents – many have called it genius – across various forms of classical music whether they be violin concerti, symphonies or operas have been deeply influential and even more beloved. The question has always been, what other greatness could have created had he lived?

When time and death are the villains which felled Mozart, there’s a sense of hopelessness, so history has cast around for a better black hat – Antonio Salieri.

A powerful contemporary of Mozart who enjoyed the title of court composer to Emperor Joseph II in the Habsburg monarchy, Salieri was an Italian musician whose legacy has been enmeshed and overshadowed by Mozart’s.

Salieri was a composer, a teacher (including to Beethoven and Schubert), and wrote dozens of operas, but that’s not how he is remembered. Salieri’s name will always be uttered as the man who killed Mozart.

Not literally, despite the many rumours over the years that Salieri had poisoned the younger man out of enraged jealousy, but a potential rivalry between the pair has been the subject of stage and screen for two centuries.

The latest iteration is a five-episode British miniseries, Amadeus, starring Will Sharpe as the Puck-like dynamo, Mozart, and Paul Bettany as the bitter Salieri, and written by Joe Barton, best known as the creator of Giri/Haji and Black Doves.

It’s based on Peter Schaffer’s 1979 play, which catapulted this story into the modern popular consciousness, which was globalised with the Oscar-winning 1984 film adaptation.

But the first artist to mythologise it was Alexander Pushkin, the Russian playwright, novelist and poet, who a short play called Mozart and Salieri in 1830, five years after Salieri’s death. In Pushkin’s text, the two composers are the only speaking roles and Salieri actually poisons Mozart during the play.

Rumours of the alleged deed had dogged Salieri during his lifetime in his later years, which he denied to another composer, Moscheles. Some of the historical context for this is factionalism between the German composers and the Italian camp in the Habsburg court, with the figures of Mozart and Salieri coming to represent the larger rivalry.

Letters written in the 1780s between Mozart and his father suggested that they held some suspicion that Salieri was an obstacle to Mozart gaining more power within the Viennese court.

That’s the little nugget a dramatist such as Pushkin needed to craft a whole story out of it. His play was then adapted as an opera in 1834 by Albert Lortzing.

Salieri’s music was largely forgotten in the 20th century until Schaffer came along. In past interviews, Schaffer describes the contradictions he saw in Mozart as he read more and more about him.

It’s the same conflict that would go on to obsess a fictionalised Salieri – that of this man who created the most sublime music, seemingly effortlessly, and a personality that didn’t have the same grace and gravitas.

He told The Guardian in 2013, “I am often criticised for portraying him as an imbecile, but I was actually conveying his child-like side. His letters read like something written by an eight-year-old. At breakfast, he’d be writing this puerile, foul-mouthed stuff to his cousin, by evening, he’d be completing a masterpiece while chatting to his wife.”

Schaffer turned his story on its head. It might be called Amadeus but it really is about Salieri. The story – and the film and TV adaptations which followed – starts and ends with him, and you’re never sure if what you see of Mozart is truth or Salieri’s version of the truth.

It might be framed as Salieri’s resentment against Mozart, but really, it’s his beef with God. Mozart is the vessel into which Salieri poured his animus, because Mozart has the natural talent Salieri believes God should have imbued him.

So, for this younger and far more talented man to always be present, to be a lout, to be a genius, to be a threat, is an affront to Salieri perpetuated by God. Mozart is merely the stand-in for what he sees as a personal betrayal.

Schaffer doesn’t contend Salieri actually poisoned Mozart, but it’s a death by a thousand bacterial-infected cuts. In slowly destroying Mozart, he killed the composer’s spirit.

In the first staging of Schaffer’s play in 1979, it’s Paul Scofield’s portrayal as Salieri that gained more notice, although Simon Callow was Mozart is still remembered. In Milos Forman’s 1984 film adaptation, F. Murray Abraham, as Salieri, won the Oscar best actor gong over Tom Hulce (they were nominated in the same category).

During a 2022 production of Amadeus at the Sydney Opera House, Michael Sheen’s Salieri outgunned everyone else in the cast.

Until now, that has been the juicier role – all that rage and jealously, even in a comedic send-up in 30 Rock, but with a pornographic video game instead of musical compositions – but this new miniseries actually re-positions Mozart to be an onscreen equal.

In Barton’s version, as portrayed by Sharpe, Mozart can still be caustic and careless, but he has more depth.

The burden of his gifts, and how they’re frustrated by roadblocks, some of his own making, the fractured relationship with his father, the emotional distance he feels to others despite his great capacity for love, it all makes for a more interesting mix than a preening, giggling boy genius.

The humanising of Mozart makes it all the more heartbreaking when his inevitable demise arrives, while Salieri’s fatal flaw is given equal weight as a true tragedy.

It may not be the historical truth, but it’s a far more interesting story than the mundanity of illness and death.

Amadeus the series is streaming on Binge, Amadeus the film is available for digital purchase