By: Tom Joudrey / BBC (original title: An unmistakable stab at the USSR': Could Amadeus be the most misunderstood Oscar winner ever?)
Translation: Telegrafi.com

When it premiered 40 years ago, Amadeus initially received heaps of praise. The historical drama, which revolved around the rivalry between two composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Miloš Forman won for best director, Peter Shaffer for best adapted screenplay, and both leading actors were nominated: F. Murray Abraham, who played Salieri, beat actor Tom Hulce, who played Mozart.

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But in the years that followed, there was growing backlash against what some people perceived as repeating historical mistakes. An article in The Guardian said that "vain jokes cannot hide the fact that the film has many ridiculous mistakes", while BBC commented that "the film shamelessly ignores historical facts". Salieri, critics pointed out, was not a pious man (as evidenced by his wife, eight children and mistress), and that after all this strange rivalry, the real Mozart entrusted Salieri with the musical education of his son. As for Mozart's debauched humor, this brazen indifference was actually common in middle-class Viennese society. The biggest scandal was that Mozart, world-famous, was not thrown into an unknown pauper's grave. If this was an homage to history, the complaints continued, it resembled the scene where Emperor Joseph II fumbled at the pianoforte, missing every note.

But these reactions may not make sense. Forman's intention to Amadeus could be seen as something quite different from a typical biopic, and it used a fictionalized version of an epic clash between composers to make an allegory for the global rivalry of the mid-to-late 1784th century: the Cold War. Put simply, the film may have been dismissive of 1984 because its real preoccupation was XNUMX.

The film opens with a scene in Vienna in 1823. The grizzled court composer, Salieri, screams behind a closed door that he has killed Mozart, and then injures himself. A few days later, while he was recovering in an asylum, a priest came to hear his confession. Salieri recounted how, as a young man, he took a vow of chastity to God as an expression of gratitude for what he believed to be the cause of his father's death, thus paving the way for his musical development.

Flash back a few years and Salieri appears as a prominent composer at the court of Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), where he eagerly awaited the appearance of the genius Mozart. His impatience was followed by disappointment when he looked at that man of flesh and blood, who turned out to be a vulgarian to tire his ear. Convinced that God was mocking his mediocrity, Salieri threw the cross into the fire and vowed revenge. After Mozart's father died, Salieri took advantage of the misfortune with a dastardly trick: he tricked Mozart into believing that his father had risen from the grave to commission him to compose the requiem, then to kill him and claim the masterpiece as his own. Mozart died sick of fever and drunk, leaving Salieri embittered and destined to end up in oblivion.

The premise was not original to Forman. Inspired by Alexander Pushkin's 1830 play, Mozart and Salieri, Peter Shaffer wrote a highly stylized play called Amadeus, which premiered in London in 1979. Forman, who was present at the performance, was struck by the dramatic rivalry and convinced Shaffer to collaborate with him, not simply to adapt the play for the screen, but to “subvert the original and then recreate it differently for film.” Over four grueling months, holed up in a Connecticut house with Shaffer, Forman rewrote the narrative with a new range of political resonances.

The process of casting actors for the coveted roles of Mozart and Salieri - which rivaled the film Gained with the wind [Gone With the Wind] in terms of the extent of the behind-the-scenes intrigue - lasted over a year and involved meetings with thousands of actors. Kenneth Branagh was close to winning the role of Mozart, but was then passed over when Forman was cast in the American version. Mark Hamill spent hours in grueling auditions and finally heard this line from Forman: "Nobody believes Luke Skywalker [his Star Wars character] is Mozart". Al Pacino lobbied hard for the part of Salieri and was in competition with Mick Jagger, Burt Reynolds, Donald Sutherland and Sam Waterson. In the end, Forman eschewed the big names and settled on Hulce and Abraham, but casting drama flared up again when Meg Tilly, who was supposed to play Mozart's wife, Constanze, broke her ankle playing soccer: she was replaced by Elizabeth Berridge a week before filming was due to begin. With the plot rebuilt and the cast set, more than one rivalry was about to come to light.

Czech-born Forman had been a major force behind the Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s, peaking with his 1967 film, Kallu, my lady [Horí, Má Panenko], which satirized the absurdity and failure of communism in Eastern Europe. The film was initially warmly received within the reformist milieu of the Prague Spring, but when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the following year and brought Czechoslovakia into the Eastern Bloc, Forman, branded a "traitor" to the state, was forced to flee to the West and found refuge in the United States.

Almost all of Forman's film work, then, was opposed to Soviet-style censorship, isolation, and centralized power. His first success in the USA, for example, in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest], depicted a mental health ward that was cruel and coercive towards patients - under the guise of compassionate care. Audiences didn't need to dig any deeper to see the asylum as a gulag and Nurse Ratched as the embodiment of the power-drunk Soviet bureaucrat. Likewise, Forman's 1996 film, The People v. Larry Flint [The People vs. Larry Flynt], described the magazine's founder Hustler facing censure, at the price of imprisonment, confinement in a mental institution, and paralysis by an assassin's bullet.

The Soviet allegory can be clearly seen in Amadeus. Perhaps Forman was less concerned with adhering to biographical facts when he presented Mozart as an ecstatic genius who, as a hostage to patronage, is stifled and finally crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state. Joseph II, the absolute ruler of the Habsburg monarchy, is advised at court by a pack of reptilians who undermine Mozart’s achievements and tarnish his reputation. Whatever the deviation from the 1823th and early XNUMXth centuries, this criticism can be read as a jab at the USSR—a centralized bureaucracy hostile to ideas and innovation. But Forman showed that Mozart would have the last laugh. By XNUMX, Salieri’s meaningless, state-sponsored melodies had been forgotten, while some of Mozart’s themes immediately caught the priest’s curiosity. In the free market of tastes, the state's push towards Salieri was drowned out by the triumph of genius.

According to Forman, the Habsburg Empire bore the hallmarks of Soviet power. Masquerade and disguised identities evoked the confusion and paranoia that had spread under the Soviet system. Salieri’s spy maid (Cynthia Nixon) carried out covert surveillance, resembling the 20th-century KGB, which had thousands of spies who infiltrated the private lives of artists and dissidents. Meanwhile, Salieri’s heretical burning of the cross and his fight against God recalled the ideological struggle between the Christian worldview and the secular arrogance of the Soviets. (After Abraham’s mother – a devout Italian woman – saw the scene of the burning of the cross, she criticized her son so much that he confessed what he now tells the BBC was a lie: “I said, ‘Mom, it was another actor – someone else threw [the cross]’”!)

And then there is the mass grave where Mozart's body was dumped. This description did not fit with the known facts of his death, but it makes sense if read as an indictment of Soviet practices - erasure of individual identity and mass murder. The exhumations of these graves continue to this day. Forman, whose parents died in Nazi concentration camps, understood the power of this image.

Jeff Smith, author of the book Film Criticism, The Cold War and The Blacklist [Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist], tells the BBC that Mozart's fight against the status quo influenced Forman's own frustrations with Soviet censorship. "The emperor's vain assessment of Mozart's opera - 'too many notes' - is the kind of accusation that was used against avant-garde artists and thinkers, to imply that their work was not pleasing or educational to Soviet ears. The furious astonishment in that scene reflected Forman's own long-standing contempt for Soviet stagnation and repression."

Filming took place in 1983, over a six-month period, in Prague, which offered basilicas, palaces and cobbled squares unchanged since the end of the XNUMXth century. However, even with the fall of Soviet power, Czechoslovakia remained part of the Eastern Bloc and Forman was still a person non grata, so this deal was struck: the director would not meet with political dissidents, and the regime would allow Forman's friends to meet with the prodigal son.

Forman's own recollections of the shoot focused on problems stemming from Soviet intervention. The landlady warned him that his phone was tapped. Informants entered every room. Two cars escorted him everywhere, which seemed excessive when it was known that his driver was also a secret agent. In his autobiography, Forman was simply ashamed to express the degree to which themes of Soviet repression were revealed in Amadeus"This is how it was to be in socialist Prague," he wrote, "the spirit of Franz Kafka hovered over our work."

Perhaps even more telling is the story he told about negotiations with the director-general of film in Czechoslovakia, Jiří Purš, who, as Forman put it, wanted absolute certainty that the Communist Party would have nothing to fear: "I suppose politically there is nothing in the script that they could get caught up in"! Forman's response is a model of plausible deniability and bitter irony: "Look, it's about Mozart"!

F. Murray Abraham felt the strain of mandatory screening when going to and from the United States (for the role in the film Scarface), while Amadeus was being made in Prague. Abraham tells the BBC: "At the end of each day of filming I had to cross the border to get to Vienna airport, to return to Hollywood. At the checkpoint, the Czechoslovak police would make us sit idly, as a way of showing their weight, to let them know who was in charge. The feeling of harassment and intimidation was everywhere."

That tension between the American crew and the Soviet agents came to a head on July 4. The production was shooting an opera scene, and the crew was organized so that when Forman shouted “action,” the American flag would be unfurled and the national anthem would be played instead of Mozart’s music. An additional 500 Czech actors were moved by the song, revealing their sympathy for the West. But not all. Forman said: “Everyone stood up—except for 30 men and women, whose faces were filled with fear, looking at each other [asking] what they were supposed to do. They were from the secret police, scattered among the actors.”

until Amadeus continues to be reassessed on its 40th anniversary, the importance of the Cold War seems ever greater. Paul Frazier, author of the book The Cold War in Film [The Cold War on Film], tells the BBC that the film tapped into a deep vein of Soviet envy: "Salieri is a Soviet 'Lada' trying to be a 'Ford Mustang'. He can't be greater than Mozart, so he resorted to undermining and manipulation. This was also the USSR's approach to the West: instead of being better than the West, the Soviets resorted to undermining and discrediting the West."

Historian Nicholas J. Cull echoes this analysis. “Remember Jonathan Swift’s line: ‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by the sign that all the fools will unite in a confederacy against him.’ Whether in the 1780s or the 1980s, what you saw was true genius facing off against crooked and mediocre bureaucrats. You see the same dynamic in Cold War movies, like Oppenheimer [Oppenheimer] of last summer, which in a way is a Amadeus with an A-bomb. It makes sense that refugee filmmakers like Forman and his creative team were inclined to talk about the allegory of communist evil."

Not everyone understood the idea that Amadeus fought Soviet totalitarianism. Kevin Hagopian, a professor of media studies, says there is a danger that allegory of everything as an unprecedented Soviet threat ends up making art a mere handmaiden to politics. "It ends up becoming a dead end to appreciating the emotional beauty of Mozart's music," Hagopian tells the BBC. However, he adds, the political resonances cannot be ignored. "The allegory that Czech satirical filmmakers like Forman brought meant that audiences began to search for, and perhaps even invent, political allegorical meaning," he says. "All the films can be read against the essence of a regime that lacked not only humanity but any sense of irony for itself. So if Amadeus it wasn't really about Soviet-style tyranny, but the audience just thought it was, okay, I have a feeling Miloš Forman wouldn't mind."

For his part, Abraham is candid about what he believes are the film's contemporary political actions, as he told the BBC in June: "Just think how many Americans worship Putin now. These autocrats are suddenly appreciated. It's disappointing, really demoralizing, but if Amadeus can help us see our current situation with a clearer view, it shows how powerfully his message resonates." /Telegraph/

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