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Amadeus Revisited
By Samuel Terrien

"Salieri seems to be the central character of Shaffer's play, since he remains on stage from curtain rise to curtain fall. Yet the title is Amadeus, a name which suggests 'the gift of God, the love of God, the one whom God loves.' Mozart's genius is God's gift, undeserved, unmerited, totally inexplicable. It affronts Salieri's talent, labors, and virtue. It also undermines his piety. Both Salieri and Mozart are 'shattered by grace,' but the results of such a spiritual upheaval are antithetical."

The film version of Amadeus, by Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman, swept through Europe and North America during the last year or so. It may be the occasion for revisiting the original play which deals with Christian theology and, perhaps for this reason, has been misunderstood by secular and even religious critics. Amadeus presents in art form a disquisition on divine grace and divine fatherhood, although the latter point has been omitted from the screen adaption.

The Christian apprehension of divine grace, especially when it appears to contradict human standards of morality, does not fit the modern temper. Those who were shocked by the portrayal of Mozart in the play may have, in fact, reacted against the disturbing sharpness of Shaffer's theology. A New Yorker critic thought that "the whole notion of dictation from God is an insult to Mozart." A consulting editor of The Christian Century went so far as to charge that the play "finally insinuates a cynical view of life which is far worse than a courageously maintained nihilism." Does the text of the play bear out the validity of these judgments?

I

The rivalry between Signore Antonio Salieri, Hauptkapellmeister of the Habsburg court in Vienna, and the musical marvel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an obscenely impish, arrested adolescent, is not Shaffer's subject but the occasion for his theological venture. The legend of Mozart's murder by Salieri, already brought to the stage by Pushkin a

Samuel Terrien is Davenport Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and the Cognate Languages at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of numerous books, including The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology (1978), and is a1so well-known for the expert way he relates theology and the arts in his teaching.

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century and a half ago, provides the background for the dramatist's purpose.

Did Salieri actually poison the young genius who had stolen from him the limelight? Or was it that Salieri had used a psychological form of torture to render Mozart's existence unbearable? Rumors flew thick throughout Vienna soon after Mozart's death. It was said, for example, that he had been poisoned, not by Salieri but by Franz Hofdemel, a jealous husband, whose wife Mozart had seduced. She had a nervous collapse when she heard that Mozart had died. Hofdemel stabbed her and then committed suicide.

According to another equally sordid tale, it appears that Franz Xaver Süssmayr, a one-time pupil of Salieri, who had become Mozart's student and copyist, was carrying on an affair with Constanze, Mozart's wife. He squired her at the Baden resort and wanted to get her husband out of the way. We shall probably never know. In any case, such details are largely irrelevant, for Amadeus is not a biographical play. Its several levels of discourse, organically integrated, lie elsewhere.

The most important theme is a polemic against mercantile religion. A subsidiary theme, woven into the first, is that of fatherhood, borrowed from the Don Juan legend. At the end of the play, haunting phrases from Don Giovanni preface as a foil a fresh understanding of faith in God, not the heavenly tyrant, but the compassionate God of the psalmists and Jesus. Unfortunately, this final element has been soft-pedaled and in fact eradicated from the screen adaptation.

That mercantile religion is the dramatist's target appears in the initial scene. As the curtain rises, the aged Salieri, thirty-two years after Mozart's death, sits raving in his bedroom armchair at center stage. Like the rebellious Job of the biblical poem (ch. 19), who wished that his words be engraved on the rock with a brass and iron pen so that generations yet unborn might hear his case, Salieri addresses his audience as "Ghosts of the Future." Lights go up over the entire theater, and we know that we are being involved.

Haunted by Mozart's memory, Salieri speaks of his parents' religion in the Italian village of Legnago. "Their notion of God was a superior Habsburg emperor, inhabiting a Heaven only slightly farther off than Vienna. All they required of Him was to protect commerce, and keep them forever preserved in mediocrity" (Act One, Scene 2). This is exactly what Salieri, talented as he was, demanded of his God. "My own requirements," he continued, "were very much different…. I wanted Fame. Not to deceive you, I wanted to blaze like a comet across the firmament of Europe!" (ibid.). Were these requirements so different from those of his parents? Not really. He too worshiped a mercantile God. He expected a clean balance sheet to exist between his moral virtue and the divine bounty. Do good and be good! Work hard! Use your talents to the hilt! Surely, God will then do his part. Is this not what the catechism teaches?

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Salieri's ambition led him to go further. His capacities, which were not negligible, inspired him to dream of a far higher destiny. He wanted not only to obtain fame but also to reach beyond the limits of the human condition. And he perceived the nature of his pride: it was a titanic hubris. He sought "to snatch the Absolute." He knew, of course, that the Absolute belongs to God alone, but that is precisely the target of his craving, "to blaze like a comet across the firmament of Europe," but in one special way. "Music! Absolute music! … A note of music is either right or wrong absolutely! Not even time can alter that: music is God's art" (ibid.).

Shaffer offers a mirror in which we look at ourselves, and we find a Faustian figure desiring to snatch "the art of God."

II

Salieri re-enacts the drama of the Garden myth. He wishes to eat the fruit of absolute knowledge. The meaning of the Hebrew idiom in the Genesis story is not the knowledge of good and evil, but the divine gnosis which makes a human being a god. Those who wish to read the myth of Eden literally are in effect seeking to exculpate themselves from the guilt of every man and woman who tries to exceed the relativity of humanhood, thereby claiming rights upon God. Voltaire said that Roman Catholics in France were like Protestants in England: they believed in a God who gives only when he receives--un dieu donnant-donnant! Shaffer wants us to scoff at the idea of a public accountant in the heavenly spheres.

Unlike Goethe's Faust, however, or the Dr. Faustus of Thomas Mann's novel, who senses the demonic aspect of evil as a personified Satan, Salieri fools himself into believing that he deals with God. "By twelve," he said, "I was stumbling about the poplar trees bumming my arias and anthems to the Lord. My one desire was to join all the composers who had celebrated His glory through the long Italian past! … Every Sunday I saw Him in church, painted on the flaking wall. I don't mean Christ. The Christs of Lombardy are simpering sillies, with lambkins on their sleeves. No! I mean an old candle-smoked God in a mulberry robe, staring at the world with dealer's eyes…. Tradesmen put him up there. Those eyes made bargains, real and irreversible. 'You give me so-I'll give you so! No more, no less!' " (ibid.). This last phrase punctures sacramentalism whenever the sacrament is used to better human fortunes, legalism whenever the law is obeyed to make human beings feel right with God, and piety whenever it pretends to exercise power over God.

Salieri's religion is sincere. "I was a sober sixteen, filled with a desperate sense of right. I knelt before the God of Bargains" (ibid.). The trouble with a religion which is only religiosity lies in its illusion. The lad thought he heard God's voice, saying, " 'Bene. Go forth, Antonio…. Serve Me and mankind, and you will be blessed.' … 'Grazie!' I called

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back, 'I am Your servant for life!' " (ibid.). Unlike Salieri, many saints have been amazingly skeptical whenever they thought they had received messages from beyond.

Soon afterwards, the young composer met the Austrian emperor in Vienna and concluded that his bargain with the Almighty had been accepted. Religion pays. "Doth Job fear God for nought?" asks the district attorney of heaven in the folktale which introduces the biblical poem. Religiosity is the religion of self-interest, whether individual or national, that is projected onto the screen of infinity. Karl Barth jocosely observed, "At the end of the day, God must hate religion."

III

It was at the very moment of his triumph-musical, social, worldly and, therefore, religious-that Salieri's neat calculations were shaken out of their sockets. He tells us the reason: "The same year I left Lombardy, a young prodigy was touring Europe. A miraculous virtuoso aged ten years. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" (ibid.). Salieri seems to be the central character of Shaffer's play, since he remains on stage from curtain rise to curtain fall. Yet the title is Amadeus, a name which suggests "the gift of God, the love of God, the one whom God loves." Mozart's genius is God's gift, undeserved, unmerited, totally inexplicable. It affronts Salieri's talent, labors, and virtue. It also undermines his piety. Both Salieri and Mozart are "shattered by grace," but the results of such a spiritual upheaval are antithetical.

Salieri is unmoored from his traditional beliefs by the spectacle of genius in an impertinent and immoral Mozart, who effortlessly captures "divine music" which eludes the arduous labors of a reasonably talented artist. At the same time, the grace which transfigures Mozart the musician yields, on the surface, negative results. His deprivation of artistic approval from the court, his economic destitution, and his social alienation combined with the certainty of his own musical superiority over others, makes him a vain, presumptuous, irresponsible, and misanthropic egotist. Nevertheless, he is the recipient of a grace, a different sort of grace. In the end, Mozart learns through immense pain how to respond to his ultimate destiny, and the play resolves itself in the mystery of death and reconciliation.

When religion is used as a tool to fulfill one's self-centered desires, it proves itself to be despicable. In dramatic terms, Shaffer exhibits a psychological struggle similar to that of Jeremiah against the Jerusalem priests, of the Joban poet with the scribes of nascent Judaism, of Jesus affronting the Pharisees, of Saul of Tarsus rebuking the wavering Peter, of Augustine opposing Pelagius, of Luther misunderstood by the hedonistic bishops of Rome. Shaffer presents in theatrical style the perennially offensive-and ignored--dilemma between salvation by faith and salvation by works. The former is always a surprise. The latter is nothing but a burden. Amadeus portrays the dread and the wonder of the mystery which led Saul of Tarsus to regard the blue-bloodedness of his

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aristocratic genealogy, the rectitude of his orthodoxy, and the heroism of his orthopraxy, as "mere garbage" (Phil. 3:8).

Because the underlying thought may be too strong for our taste, and Shaffer has exaggerated for stage effects Mozart's infantile pranks, we choose to resent the excesses of language and especially the caricature elements as a violation of historical reality. However, we may well favor this double subterfuge in order to ignore the playwright's purpose which hurts our self-respect and undermines our sense of morality.

Salieri's universe is smashed. Behind closed doors he hears Mozart's Adagio in E flat from the Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments (now listed as K. 361), and he reflects upon his mounting agony: "It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers-bassoons and basset horns-[ … ] And then suddenly, high above it, sounded a single note on the oboe. [ … ] It hung there unwavering, piercing me through, till breath could hold it no longer [ … ], throwing long lines of pain around and through me. Ah, the pain! Pain as I had never known it. I called up to my sharp old God [ … ], 'Tell me, Signore! What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable, yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it Your need? Can it be Yours?' …" (Act One, Scene 5). Salieri discerns in the Mozartian sound "a need … ever unfulfillable." This is his way of saying that through Mozart's music, not through his own, he has communed with divinity.

This awareness only made the gulf between a shabby human being-Mozart-and the supreme artist-again, Mozart-the more incomprehensible. Shattered by that grace, a grace which eludes him, Salieri loses his faith. "I was suddenly frightened," he recalls. "It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God-and that it issued from … a creature whose own voice I had also heard-and it was the voice of an obscene child!" (ibid.). He now stands in the presence of absolute music, not his own, but that of another, who is morally unworthy. He wallows in his deprivation. He lives again for us the Garden myth and the poem of Job. With sudden comprehension, he sees himself as destitute as if he had eaten the fruit of absolute knowledge. "Capisco! I know my fate. Now for the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his nakedness…." He thereupon turns against the God of his youthful illusion who has let him down. Like Job, he faces his divine enemy. "You gave me the desire to praise Youwhich most men do not feel-then made me mute. Grazie tanti! [ … I Why! What is my fault? … Until this day I have pursued virtue with rigor" (Act One, Scene 12). The religious man refuses to accept that grace is unearned. "They say God is not mocked," he shrieks. "I tell You, Man is not mocked! … They say the Spirit bloweth where it listeth: I tell you NO! It must list to virtue or not blow at all! [Yelling] Dio ingiusto, You are the Enemy! I name Thee now--Nemico Eterno! And this I swear: To my last breath I shall block You on earth…." (ibid.). He glares upward. Then he hisses to the audience: "What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons!" (ibid.).

No one can deny this is a theological play. Because the religious man

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feels deceived, his belief turns into blasphemy. Because the moral man feels cheated, his virtue becomes the trough of malevolence. His lust for his pupil Katherina, hinted at four times in Act One, now overpowers his moral commitment. Even Constanze, Mozart's wife, becomes the target of his sexual aggression. Shaffer slyly insinuates that the repression and the fear of sexuality are often concomitant with spiritual pride and egocentric religiosity.

IV

Mozart's plight is the opposite of that which harasses the religious moralist. Insanely conceited, he is ostracized. Antisocial, he becomes impoverished. Soon his penury appears as the symptom of his misanthropy. At the same time, Shaffer's description of Mozart's infantilism reflects the complexity of the human character, especially that of an unrecognized genius. Beneath the vagaries and the vulgarisms, a childlike innocence remains. Mozart is still Amadeus. Slowly, the gift of grace which flourished-indeed, exploded-in his music overcomes the outward adversity and the inward perversity.

The dramatist succeeds in bringing off this most difficult aspect of his theological intent by interpreting the evolution of Mozart's last years through the double theme of fatherhood, first human and tyrannical-that of Leopold Mozart-and, second, divine and compassionate-that of the God of Jesus. It was a theatrical gamble which might have fallen flat. Shaffer has pulled it off, not by indulging in sermonic platitudes or yielding to didactic wordiness, but by introducing in hesitant, yet unrelenting, cadences, the mystery of reconciliation which Mozart's music, beyond speech, provided. The theme of the Ghostly Father in Don Giovanni is, in the finale, displaced by the theme of the Transcendent Father, not the retributing disciplinarian of folkloric beliefs, but the pathetic comforter of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. The awful strains of Don Giovanni are in the end of the play overcome by the Kyrie and the Pie Jesu of the Requiem.

While the accessory motif of sexual lust appears four times as subjacent to Salieri's envy and disintegration, the fatherhood motif, perhaps not by accident, occurs eight times in the development of Mozart's transfiguration.

At first, we are reminded of Leopold Mozart as the fearful mentor of the adolescent boy who does not grow up. Then the immature son begins to see through his father's selfishness. An ambivalent Salieri seeks to play the part of a surrogate father, but the ambivalence shifts to the level of moralistic theism which confuses paternal tyranny on earth with judgmental accounting in heaven. At that moment, the enormous silhouette of the masked man appears on the backdrop of the stage, while a thunderous wave of dissonant chords engulfs the theater. It is the theme of the Commander in Don Giovanni. Mozart stares, transfixed, at the human image which is at once that of his progenitor and that of his own creation. The figure of the Ghost Father no longer looks at Mozart.

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It is Mozart who looks at him. The offspring has become the begetter. The hitherto immature child has now become the myth-maker of fatherhood. Liberated from Leopold, he is freed from the fear of a paternalistic deity.

The gray, tricorned idol now haunts Salieri, who discovers that the boy he had previously envied is the creator of God's music. The suicidal Hauptkapellmeister now confides to the audience, "The Creature's dreadful giggle" is actually "the laughter of God." Mozart has placed a magic flute upon the lips of the Almighty. At this instant, the artistry and the depth of Shaffer's perspicaciousness reaches its apex. Salieri founders in his spiritual hell, shouting, "Starve out the God!" Mozart rises to sublimity and composes the Requiem.

The masked figure in gray calls to him. No longer the image of his father, Leopold, nor the image of the retributive and fierce God of the traditional churches or of the populace, he is the Deus Absconditus, the Self-Concealing Deity of Second Isaiah (45:1), who still cares for human beings in exile and makes his love, hidden to outsiders, incredibly real. The Requiem reveals a God who accepts and receives the sinner unconditionally. His love is absolutely different from the human expectation: Amadeus!

V

Mozart's Kyrie Eleison is not the begging of a man groveling in the dust, "Lord, have mercy!" It differs markedly from other Masses of Requiem at that time, for its mood is not that of a somber supplication for forgiveness. The mercy has already come. This Kyrie is a song of triumphant ease. Its lively movement of a fugue is set in a galloping tempo which celebrates the certainty of salvation. Its two-beat, almost syncopated rhythm spells joy in heaven and purpose on earth. As the dying man sings, "Papa! … Papa! … Papa," we know that he is no longer addressing his tyrannical father of the flesh, neither is he appealing to the punitive God of mercantile religion, but he dialogues with his transcendent Father in glorious freedom. That God is about to welcome his child, at the last.

Constanze, Mozart's wife, has returned. He rests his head on her shoulder. The strains of the Lacrimosa punctuate her expressions of tenderness. Not unlike Marguerite in Faust, the woman incarnates on stage the feminine aspect of God. The heavenly Father is also the heavenly Mother, as the prophets and the psalmists of Israel, who appealed metaphorically to the divine Womb, and the sages, who sang of the feminine figure of Sophia (Prov. 8:22-33), have shown long before Jesus and the early Christians.

At the moment of his death, Amadeus is lifted up into the knowledge that the hitherto unknowable God is crushed by human pain. Human suffering is God's pathos. God gives his very self. The Father immolates his own Son. The Mary of the Annunciation and of the Visitation-the Singer of the Magnificat--is already the Mater Dolorosa. The canoni

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cal words of the liturgy spell out the musical upsurge which transmutes God the Judge into God the Lover:

Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus.
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem.

No more fear, only rest. The day of wrath is for Mozart the sweet Day of the Lord, the Lord's triumphant day. In other settings of the Mass of Requiem, most composers have incorporated the Pie Jesu into the Offertory, which follows the Lacrimosa. Not in Mozart. Shaffer knows that the Pie Jesu is the climax of the Lacrimosa. It also constitutes the climax of the play, Amadeus.

Mozart, dying, beats the measures of his own Pie Jesu. His lips silently pronounce the words. He relives them just as Constanze, repentant and grateful, whispers in his ears: "Know one thing. It was the best day of my life when you married me. And as long as I live I'll be the most honored woman in the world…. Can you bear me?" (Act Two, Scene 16).

As the stage direction makes plain, "The greatest chord of the 'Amen' does not resolve itself, but lingers on in intense reverberation."

VI

Moralists have always abounded under the cover of piety. Some of them are reluctant, or perhaps unable, to discern the wistful but expectant love of God in the poem of Job or in the hard sayings of Jesus on the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust. Likewise, in the play of Amadeus, divine transcendence, precisely because it is transcendence, escapes human rational or empirical comprehension, and yet rescues us from meaninglessness. Faith is not "to do good." Pascal saw that "the law demands what it cannot give. Grace gives what it demands." In her poem on The Sycamore, Marianne Moore remarks, "There is more than just one kind of grace." The kind of grace that borders on the beautiful is often confused with the purely aesthetic. Art only reaches the threshold of the holy, however. But the purely aesthetic may for some be the avenue which leads to the real God-beyond the moral idol. Did not Rilke speak of The Archaic Torso of Apollo at the Louvre as addressing the viewer with startling and embarrassing bluntness, with its command, "You must change your life"? At the same time, when many misread the Bible in order to impose their own power over others, Shaffer offers a sacramental monstrance. Mozart's music is a means of grace.

Those who are startled to discover that the moral character of Amadeus did not reflect the sublimity of his music will remember that artists have almost always to pay a price for the dread of their gift. W. B.

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Yeats put it this way in his poem, "Choice":

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Shaffer pictured a dying Mozart no longer "raging in the dark" but ascending to the light.

God's freedom escapes human moral judgment. This is the lesson of the poem of Job when the Lord asks from the Whirlwind the buffeted but still proud hero, "Wouldst thou condemn me in order to prove thou art right?" (Job 40:8.) In the Pie Jesu, Christians know that divine omnipotence voluntarily curtails itself in the silence and the impotence of Golgotha. The Cross is the death of moral idolatry, and the dawn of life.

Secular as well as ecclesiastical humanists who edify morality into their own image may well "perplex the kindness of God." Others grope in the gloom as genuine but expectant agnostics. No more than Mozart do they find an intellectual solution to the problem of evil. Yet, in their doubt, they know that an immense Reality holds them by the hand. Faith is the taking of a risk which transforms comfort into summons, and the pursuit of happiness into a fever to serve. Amadeus shows the difference between mercantile religion and the theology of grace, which is the knowledge of being known.