Steve Schwartz wrote:

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

Oh, it is very nice of you to send this critique but you promised nothing.

>The scene deals with Mozart trying to finish the Requiem before he dies.
>Salieri appears as tormentor.

This is an interpretation.  I always saw Salieri as an colleborator in
this scene, not as a tormentor.  His first motive may be to torment but
he begins to colleborate with Mozart seeing in the end that he had had the
most intense moments of his life and lost someone he could have been happy
with.

>What strikes me first -- and what I had almost totally repressed -- was
>the appallingly bad writing.  ...
>
>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.]

This may not be very good writing but the point is the writing of a
play must not be very good because it is the character who speaks, not a
brillant writer.  Take Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman.  Willy
Loman does not utter brillant sentences because he is no brillant mind.
And Mozart is dying!  He is surely not in the mood to utter stuff in
brillant style.

>"God can't want it unfinished?" Why not? Why does God even enter into this
>at all?  ...  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.

This is not accurate criticism.  Please show where Shaffer throughout the
play (and the movie!) does not make anything of the idea of God.  And of
course it is not realistic.  The whole play is a kind of fantasy - why do
you expect it to be realistic?

>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.

God, Steve, the guy is DYING! What do you expect Mozart to recite in his
last moments, sick and at the brink of collapse? Something in
hexameters?

>Where's the poetry? The closest Shaffer comes is "rooms of smiles,"
>which he immediately ruins by explaining it to the meanest intelligence.

A playwright does not have to be poetic.  Shakespeare is very poetic but
he, too, knew when to stop poetry.  Arthur Miller is very seldom poetic
and his plays are great literature.

>...  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.

It is Shaffer's good right to introduce a new side of Mozart even in the
LASt scene.  Again I say: the guy is dying!  It is not farfetched to
give Mozart a mood of remorse and self-pity.  In the movie this worked
extraordinarily 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.

I wonder when you will give us a critique of the libretto to Don Giovanni.
It is not better poetry than the lines you quoted.  Throw it all into the
garbage can?

>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.

Which is a good thing.  Take Puccini's Tosca: full of effect and
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.

It IS his doing because it is his collage work.

>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.

This does not mean that these words must be very poetic.  You may think
that the passages you quoted are bad literature.  I don't think so.  It is
not elegant prose but then these are the words of a dying man.

>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.

Come down, have you really read Brecht? I do Brecht regularly in school and
there are a lot of better prose authors than Brecht.

Now, how do you explain that Amadeus became a world success? Because
everyone is stupid? Because the play is only a spectacle? How do you
explain that this bad playwright wrote a lot of successful plays, take
Equus.  I think you just don't like Shaffer because he dared use Mozart in
a play and in a witty and successful play, too.  If it had been Goethe you
would possibly say: So what?

Robert