‘Amadeus’: Shaffer’s Supreme Achievement

Abstract

Amadeus is Peter Shaffer’s most accomplished and successful drama to date. Starting from a tantalising rumour regarding the untimely death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791, Shaffer fashions an absorbing costume spectacle built on ambition, aesthetics, politics and metaphysics. During the final weeks of his life, an ailing and destitute Mozart claimed aloud that he was being poisoned by Antonio Salieri, court composer to Emperor Joseph II and, at the time, more successful than Mozart. The story erupted again thirty years later when an aged and deranged Salieri confessed in writing to having killed Mozart. And then, lending still more credence to the gossip, Salieri unsuccessfully tried to take his own life. Artists before Shaffer — Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov, among others — had drawn on the dubious murder theory,¹ but Shaffer’s approach to the mystery is unique, because Amadeus moves well beyond a simple dramatisation of the juicy gossip. The competitive antagonisms between the two musical figures are reconfigured into a metaphysical enigma. Moreover, Shaffer’s design approaches the themes imaginatively from an unlikely perspective by centring Amadeus on Salieri, not Mozart.