As promised, I'm delivering a critique of the deathbed scene of Shaffer's
Amadeus, scene 16, "Mozart's Apartment."

The scene deals with Mozart trying to finish the Requiem before he dies.
Salieri appears as tormentor.  Mozart lapses into hallucination and
childish reminiscence and an ubi sunt on the glory that might have been
his.  His wife rushes to his side (she's been out of town) and tries to
comfort him, but Mozart is deep in the throes of trying to complete his
final masterpiece and doesn't hear her.  Constanze tells of her love.
Van Swieten (representing the callous public) fobs off the widow with a
pittance.  Constanze becomes hard and very business-like, in a sense as
philistine as the public.

What strikes me first -- and what I had almost totally repressed -- was
the appallingly bad writing.  We have here an emotionally-charged set
of circumstances, considered in the abstract.  How does one master these
emotions in a work of art? Mastery is necessary.  As Oscar Wilde once
noted, only a heart of stone could read the death of Little Nell without
laughing.  And Dickens is a far greater writer than Peter Shaffer.  What
do we get from Shaffer? Excerpts will suffice.

   MOZART: It's not finished! ... Not nearly! ... Forgive me.  Time was
   I could write a Mass in a week! ... Give me one month more, and it'll
   be done: I swear it! ... He'll grant me that, surely?  God can't want
   it unfinished! ... Look -- look, see what I've done.  [He snatches
   up the pages from the table and brings them eagerly to the FIGURE.]

"God can't want it unfinished?" Why not? Why does God even enter into this
at all? Don't tell me it's realism -- the ravings of a sick mind or Mozart
conceivably could have said or thought something like this -- because the
stage direction indicates that Shaffer isn't interested in realism and,
as several people have already pointed out, this isn't an historic Mozart.
I have no problem with an idea like this coming up, but it's a cheat to
merely mention and not explore it.  It becomes a cheap way to "elevate
the tone" of the play: Be sure to mention God.  Indeed, Shaffer does this
throughout the play, which may indicate that this is an idea important to
the play, but he never makes anything of it or anything of his own from it.
We merely see the same situation (in various guises) repeated.  We never
get any deeper.  God -- should he exist -- may be indifferent, but why
should I care? Certainly, Shaffer gives me no reason to.

Mozart again:

   Oh it began so well, my life.  Once the world was so full, so happy!
   ... All the journey's -- all the carriages -- all the rooms of smiles!
   Everyone smiled at me once -- the king at Schonbrunn; the princess
   at Versailles -- they lit my way with candles to the clavier -- my
   father bowing, bowing, bowing with such joy! ... "Chevalier Mozart,
   my miraculous son!" ...  Why has it all gone? ... Why? .. Was I so
   bad?  So wicked?  ... Answer for Him and tell me!

A really good actor can probably get some of this stuff over, but --
holy cow!  ...  -- he really has to work.  Shaffer gives him no help.
Again, this is a bald recital of themes and events, and fairly corny at
that.  Where's the poetry? The closest Shaffer comes is "rooms of smiles,"
which he immediately ruins by explaining it to the meanest intelligence.
Mozart asks if this is deserved punishment in, again, the baldest terms.
However, why does he think this? I mean, why does the character called
Mozart think this? It really hasn't appeared in the play.  Mozart is crude,
but certainly not evil.  We haven't a clue, because essentially Shaffer's
metaphysics is tacked on.  It's window-dressing designed to hide the
maudlin melodrama which he doesn't otherwise control.  It is *not*
integrated either into character or into action.  The central dramatic
intelligence of the play has to be Salieri.  Everything is submitted to his
judgment and is refined by his character.  This is, I admit, a shrewd move
by Shaffer.  Genius at Mozart's level is ultimately incomprehensible.  We
need the reactions of someone closer to us.  This is certainly Pushkin's
strategy as well.  However, granted that Salieri might think in the terms
that Shaffer presents, why should we care about what he thinks? The failure
of linking the ideas to the character of Mozart I find in the character of
Salieri as well.

I have by no means cited the worst passages.  I've cited relatively the
best.  I will skip over in decent silence Mozart's hallucination of his
father and Constanze's declaration of love.

Nevertheless, the scene makes an effect -- a profoundly moving effect
on many people.  I submit several reasons, none of which insult that
audience.  First, the scene contains a tremendous amount of what Aristotle
would have classified as spectacle.  At various points in the scene,
Shaffer specifies the playing of portions of Mozart's Requiem.  This is
a powerful piece of music, and it lends its power to the scene.  However,
this is only minimally Shaffer's doing.  Second, Shaffer also specifies
lighting and stage movement, and I can't deny he has a very good eye for
these.  If the play were mimed, it might have been better.  Ultimately,
a play comes down to words, and Shaffer never uses them very well.  In a
play of ideas, the dramatist had better make you care about those ideas.
Otherwise, you waste your time.  How does a dramatist do this effectively?
He chooses meaningful words which illustrate these ideas in characters and
actions.  Shaffer does little more than hang a placard and nudge his elbows
in your ribs to make sure that you understand that you have met with a Big
Moment.  I'd call his dramatic method faux-Brechtian in that his method
distances an audience.  Unlike Brecht, however, he has neither the language
nor the intellect to make you think about the philosophical problem he
seems to want to present.

Steve Schwartz