Amadeus Dramatic Vs Historical Truth Essay Research — страница 2

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singer. JOSEPH: Charmant! SALIERI: Not pleasant, Majesty, but true. JOSEPH: I see Let it be Herr Sommer, then. And later, the emperor was willing to offer Mozart a post and a salary, to which Salieri objected. JOSEPH: We must find him a post. ( ) There s Chamber Composer, now that Gluck is dead. SALIERI: Mozart to follow Gluck? JOSEPH: I won t have him say I drove him away. You know what a tongue he has. SALIERI: Then grant him Gluck s post, Majesty, but not his salary. That would be wrong. JOSEPH: Gluck got two thousand florins a year. What should Mozart get? SALIERI: Two hundred. Light payment, yes, but for light duties. JOSEPH: Perfect fair. I m obliged to you, Court Composer. Here we see that Salieri betrayed Mozart when he was not around, while held courtly manners in front

of him. In real life, nothing can prove us that Salieri was or was not a jealous character. However, we can say that Salieri s jealously might have been true, as he had high posts and Mozart could seem to him as a threat. On the other hand, as Salieri had such honorable career inside the court, he could have done something to prevent operas like The Abduction from the seraglio , The Marriage of Figaro , and Cosi fan Tutte from being presented in the court theaters. He had influence enough to prohibit these operas and he did not. Besides, if his jealousy were obsessive as it is shown, others would have noticed. And all that is reported about Salieri is that he was a small-town, earnest young man, filled with a Single desperate desire to serve God. Again, in the play Salieri must

be exactly how he is portrayed because his personality is the plot itself. His jealousy is the main plot of Amadeus . In any other way Shaffer could convey his intentions. Another element that was controversial in the release of the play is how Mozart s character is portrayed. In Amadeus there are examples of Mozart using inappropriate language, lacking respect for the emperor and behaving like a child. However, it is said that at that time, if he behaved the way he does in the play towards the emperor, it would result in banishment from the court. At that time, it was impossible to imagine someone addressing an emperor the way he did. Mozart is portrayed as a spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine man. However, Shaffer himself tells that this portrait of Mozart was indeed

excessive: The theatrical portrait of Mozart in Amadeus is clearly excessive and one-sided, at least in the expositional first act. It has been made so deliberately by crowding together into an hour s time instances of Wolfgang s most unattractive behavior, so as to provide ever-increasing fuel for Salieri s equally mounting sense of outrage. This is dramatically essential, because at the end of the act, Salieri has to explode in a furious, pain-racked, violently aggrieved address to his God, upbraiding him for choosing a patently unworthy man to be his divine instrument. But what is documented is that Mozart was extremely irritable. A sort of child. All his sentiments had more violence than depths. 1804. So Mozart personality was exaggerated in order to convey the plot. Being

like this, we would give a minimal reason for Salieri being jealous. It was intentional to make Mozart as a silly person so that Salieri s rage would have a motif. With these discussed elements of the play, it seems noticeable that a playwright or any writer is free to use any ornament needed to convey what he wants to transmit to the readers. Shaffer, although being a Mozart scholar, used some fictional elements to write his story about the relation between the two composers.