Everyone waxes lyrical about the film Amadeus, and rightly so. As well as having the biggest wig budget in movie history (yes, my brain is a treasure-trove of useless trivia), it also got many people interested in classical music.
But which composer is the film actually about? You probably answered Mozart. Controversially, I disagree. The composer who narrates the movie, whose terrible decline from imperial court to madhouse we witness, and whose mental turmoil is most profoundly captured by Peter Shaffer’s brilliant script, isn’t the genius Mozart. It’s his overshadowed, humiliated and embittered rival, Antonio Salieri.
Salieri is literally driven crazy with jealousy
Yes, Amadeus may be an examination of genius. But it’s also an examination of not being a genius – yet being painfully reminded every day of the gulf that exists between genius and talent.
In Amadeus, Salieri is literally driven crazy with jealousy. But he is also the one with enough musical perception to analyse how Mozart’s creativity exists on a plane that his second-rank mind will never achieve. And the odd thing is that creative geniuses need such second-rankers – discerning patrons, quick-witted assistants, supportive publishers and even, dare I say it, astute critics.
Why geniuses need 'ordinary' minds to share their work with the world
By definition, geniuses produce work that, initially at least, bewilders ordinary minds. The work needs championing. That can only be done by those who understand it, though unable to create it themselves. By the second-rankers.
It’s not easy being one of those, and not only because it involves recognition of your own limitations when compared with the towering intellect standing next to you. It also involves possibly being the target of the ugly personality traits that often seem to go hand in hand with genius (and which screenwriter Peter Shaffer, rightly or wrongly, incorporates into his portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus). Arrogance. Rudeness. Egotism. Selfishness. Impatience. Manic depression…
The poignant tale of Imogen Holst and Benjamin Britten
Mark Ravenhill’s play Ben and Imo offers a fascinating take on all that. It explores the relationship between Benjamin Britten – under intense stress as he tries to complete his Covent Garden-commissioned opera Gloriana in time for Coronation week in June 1953 – and Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav Holst, whom Britten engages as his assistant. Imogen was an accomplished conductor, composer and teacher. Yet when she entered Britten’s Aldeburgh domain, it’s as if she sublimated all her own ambition in order to serve his.
That was an extraordinary act of generosity, even love – because Imogen, who never married, certainly had feelings for the gay Britten. But it also represented a frank self-appraisal on her part: a recognition that although she didn’t have the creative powers to create an epic opera herself, she could play a vital part in someone else’s.
And not just in musical terms. She also acted as a kind of psychological shock-absorber, by accepting that Britten was capable of saying cruel things even to his closest colleagues – or suddenly breaking off all contact if they said something that offended him (as he had just done with the writer Ronald Duncan, who created the libretto for The Rape of Lucretia). In Ravenhill’s play, Britten says cruel things to Imogen, too, but she stands her ground and sticks with him.
The musical world depends on people who know their place
Nowadays we shudder at the phrase ‘know your place’. It sounds condescending at best, belittling at worst. But the musical world depends on people who know their place – the wise, well-balanced second-rankers without whom the geniuses wouldn’t be able to function.
Some composers have whole support-systems around them. Think of Elgar, for instance, who depended psychologically and practically on Alice his wife, Jaeger his devoted publisher, and several others whom he repaid with immortality in the Enigma Variations (which we named as one of the best works by Elgar).
In an alternative universe, Salieri might have become Mozart’s support-system – the person who understood his genius and could therefore best help it to flourish – rather than his bitter rival. With someone to steady him mentally and aid him practically after his father died in 1787, Mozart might have paced himself better and lived another 30 years. Imagine his response to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony!
But a fruitful relationship between a genius and a second-ranker requires an honest acknowledgement on both sides that each needs the other. I don’t think either Mozart or Salieri had it in them to do that. Shame. Still, the story of their mutual loathing makes a great movie.
