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On the Structure of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 1984
- pp. 299-313
- 10.1353/mdr.1984.0033
- Article
- Additional Information
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On the Structure of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus WERNER HUBER AND HUBERT ZAPF On its first appearance, Peter Shaffer's play about the rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri met with rather mixed reactions from professional theatre critics. I With theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, however, Amadeus has been enjoying tremendous popUlarity. Its world premiere was given on November 2, 1979, in London's National Theatre, where it ran in repertory for eighteen months before the production was transferred to the West End in July 1981. After its American premiere in Washington, D.C., in November 1980, the play opened on Broadway in December of the same year, where it was greeted with enthusiasm similar to that ofits later receptions in France, Austria and West Germany.2 The great number of awards Amadeus has earned itself and its author also make it "officially" the most successful (and best?) drama of recent years. In order to mediate between the extreme positions of possible reactions to Amadeus exemplified by the unsympathetic critic and the enthusiastic playgoer, we would like to draw attention to a dimension which has hitherto been neglected, it seems, in discussions ofthis play.3 In what follows, Amadeus will be reconsidered as a dramatic composition, a theatrical artefact. This essay is mainly concerned, then, with structural aspects of Amadeus in the broadest sense. This is understood to comprise questions of thematic organization, coherence and form, as well as the complex mechanisms ofinteraction between stage and audience. 1 As internal evidence from Amadeus (i.e., the entry in Beethoven's Conversation Book)4 and other sources suggest, the rumour of Salieri's alleged crime (the elimination of his arch-rival) was fairly widespread in the 1820S. Of course, it constituted part ofthe legend surrounding Mozart and the more or less 300 WERNER HUBER AND HUBERT ZAPF infamous circumstances of his death (viz., the variety of medical reports regarding his final illness). It does not really come as a surprise to learn that, especially in the case ofthe genius Mozart, historical facts have been tampered with in the writing of legendary and edifying accounts ofthe great man's life.5 Peter Shaffer is by no means the first nor the last to exploit, for dramatic purposes, the sensational rumour that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri. As early as 1830, Alexander Pushkin wrote a "tragedy in two scenes" entitled Mozart and Salieri (the original title being "Envy"), which was later set to music as an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov (1898). Pushkin's piece, a short dramatic sketch, depicts Salieri reflecting on his motive, that is, envy, before he insidiously pours poison into Mozart's cup; and Mozart dies playing his Requiem on the piano. Only recently, the Austrian writer Hans Ungar has dealt with the very same matter in his play Aqua Toffana, subtitled Auszuge aus den Tonbandprotokollen des Mozart-Salieri-Hearings (first produced in Salzburg in February 1982). Starting from the hypothesis that Mozart died from arsenic poisoning - "aqua toffana" being the popular name for the effective mixture Ungar imagines what form a hearing on the case could have taken. He has twelve expert witnesses give evidence to the effect that Salieri is finally exonerated. Within the context of Shaffer's other plays, Amadeus bears great resemblance to Equus (1973), his play about an obsessed youth, Alan Strang, and his sober psycho-analyst, Martin Dysart.6 Stemming from a childhood experience of deep frustration, which he suffers at the hands of his overprotective mother and his (working-)class-conscious father, Alan's obsession with horses develops into a form ofequine worship with sexual overtones. Consequently, when confronted with the opportunity of experiencing sexual love with his girl-friend, Alan feels inhibited by the horses and their accusing gazes. He gouges out their eyes in the stable. All this is revealed retrospectively and analytically within the framework of the psycho-analytical treatment the boy is given by Dysart. This dried-up intellectual and humanist, on whom passion is lost, in a way cannot help but admire the boy, whose perverse acts are indicative of a sublime gift, a capacity to comprehend and surrender to a fulfilling idea...