Robert Peters replies to me on Amadeus:

>It tells that someone who wants to make a deal with God and thinks that
>the giving of gifts like musical talent can be manipulated by a "good"
>and morally correct life-style will be surprised about life's unfairness.

Does anybody seriously believe this idea? I can't quite accept the fact
that an 18th-century person would believe it, let alone a modern.  After
all, there are such things as the book of Job and Voltaire's Candide.

>This is, in my opinion, a bone with a lot of meat.

In mine, a straw man.

>The movie shows us how unhappy Salieri has, how he works to destroy Mozart
>and how shattered he is at his actual death, after the first real intense
>human contact he had when composing the Requiem with his colleague - this
>is a bone with a lot of meat.

Why? What on earth makes you think so? Why isn't it merely sentimental
longeurs? Of course, I would never attack a work of art on its ideas if
the play itself were good enough to distract me - the language, the
particularlity and precision of the observation, etc.

>Mozart is just a symbol for the problem of how to deal with genius when
>it comes your way, Shaffer could as well have taken Goethe, Dante,
>Shakespeare.

Yes, he could have.  Indeed, there's no good reason at all why the
character is called Mozart, rather than Goethe or even Fred.  This speaks
to the issue of particularity and precision, or rather to its lack.

>He took Mozart in a play full of clever ideas, some of them, as I
>have shown above (Steve, only my opinion I am entitled to but proven
>a bit better than your statements), pretty original and moving and
>thought-provoking.

Original? Hardly.  Moving and thought-provoking? I don't doubt that it
moved and provoked you and several million others.  As for me, I'll take
Richard II or The Master Builder.

>But I guess if you want to be biased against emotional art you won't be
>able to see things in a different way.

Who says? After all I've written on Vaughan Williams, Faure, and Richard
Strauss? Them's fightin' words, pardner!  I *do* dislike sentimentality,
which is simply sentiment that the writer hasn't earned.

Steve Schwartz