Here’s my position. If you are going to create a miniseries about the life, death and music of one of the defining geniuses of the last 1,000 years of western civilisation, and if you are going to use as your source material a script for a great play that was made into a near-perfect film beloved by almost everyone for its wit and immense, profound themes rendered accessible and moving, and for the fact that it had two of the most extraordinary performances ever committed to what may still then have been celluloid – well, you had better be pretty damn sure that you are bringing something new, exciting, different, richer, cleverer, even more illuminating to the table. Otherwise you are going to look like a bit of a berk.
And so, my friends, to the new six-part drama Amadeus, about the life, death and music of Wolfgang A Mozart, one of the defining geniuses of the last 1,000 years of western history. Co-creators Joe Barton and Julian Farino have retained parts of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play and the 1984 film starring Tom Hulce as Mozart and F Murray Abraham as his rival composer Antonio Salieri, reworked them into lesser forms, and surrounded them with lesser – flat, airless, banal – scenes. Shaffer’s driving interests in the corrupting power of envy, the survival of religious faith under duress, the mystery of talent and what we expect to come from genius are mostly reduced to pale, petty versions of themselves. The performances – well, we’ll come to those.
The main narrative is told as a confession by an aged Salieri (Paul Bettany) to Mozart’s widow, Constanze, instead of the film and play’s priest. He is clearing his conscience, not endangering his soul. It is an early, telling, lowering of the stakes. When the main narrative does begin, we meet Mozart (The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe) as he falls out of a carriage and pukes in the street in front of the daughters of his landlady-to-be. It is 1781 – 10 years before his death, a caption tells us – and he has arrived in Vienna from Salzburg, leaving his furious father behind, keen to make a name for himself in the new city and confident that he will.
And he’s right to be. Soon he is playing in front of the emperor (Rory Kinnear) and enthralling all with his talent while Salieri stares in incredulity and embryonic despair, then goes home to try to compose something that will rival what this new boy can do. But Salieri’s tragedy is of course that he knows, even before days spent toiling at his harpsichord, slaving over an empty stave, that he cannot – that the life he knew is effectively over. That he is the only one at court with the talent to recognise Mozart as a world-changing genius is only the bitter icing on an already poisonous cake. The rotting cherry on top is that Mozart is not the sophisticated, semi-ethereal being he should be but “a repulsive creature” who, in the court composer’s disbelieving eyes, cannot deserve this gift from God.
From there, we watch Salieri’s bitterness and his work to undermine Mozart increase, while Mozart enjoys initial success then falls into penury – partly thanks to Salieri’s machinations and partly thanks to his own arrogance and idiocies.
There is so little to grab on to throughout, let alone to love. Emblematic of its crassness – de facto, but more so in comparison to the film – is the famous moment when Constanze brings Salieri the manuscripts of Mozart’s work that he has asked for. Can he keep them for a while, he asks? And she says no, because they are originals and he doesn’t make copies. Do you remember the speech from Salieri that originally accompanied this moment? “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall” – that one? Here, the camera simply pans from Mozart’s immaculate pages to Salieri’s papers full of crossings-out. And that, at best, is where we are throughout the six episodes – ever striving to make the ineffable effable. “Diminishment” does not begin to cover it.
Bettany as Salieri does well with a script that offers him no chance to compete with F Murray Abraham’s Oscar-winning performance. Sharpe as Mozart is, likewise, hampered, but even controlling for the script’s banality, his performance is a thin, half-hearted thing. His Mozart looks and sounds for all the world like Richard Ayoade’s Moss in The IT Crowd – effectively a milquetoast with a drink problem, which in turn makes Salieri’s “repulsive creature” sound like an overreaction and his abandonment of God over choosing to let genius reside there faintly ridiculous.
It makes you hope that 2026 will be the year of new thoughts, new dramas and no more reworkings. Especially not of Amadeus.
• Amadeus aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now in the UK, and can be streamed on Binge in Australia.
