Putting the ‘Deus’ in Amadeus

In the second episode of Joe Barton’s captivating and anachronistic Amadeus, Vienna’s renowned court composer Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany) is convinced God has abandoned him, and Bettany — sloughing off the years of constraint he practiced as the android Vision in the Marvel cinematic universe — ensnares the series in his self-loathing. Sitting askew in a church pew with a sneer affixed on his face, Salieri seems like he’s about to list a litany of complaints to, presumably, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Will Sharpe), the wunderkind who has upstaged Salieri, and whose infant son’s death inspired the funeral mass Salieri just attended. Then the scene’s perspective shifts, and Amadeus reveals that Salieri’s look of disgust is not for his younger rival but for the figure of Jesus Christ hanging on a cross above the sanctuary. “You give me just enough talent to know how little I truly possess,” Salieri weeps, and then he composes himself. “From this time on, we are enemies, you and I,” he promises to God, with such a mixture of conviction and revulsion that it’s clear he’ll do anything to fulfill his next vow: to kill Mozart. Amadeus is a portrait of a man realizing his own inferiority and losing his religion as a result, and Bettany’s incredible rendition of Salieri shapes the series’ rumination on who yearns to command a stage and why.

The five-part miniseries (which already aired in the U.K. and premiered on Starz’s digital platforms May 8) is, like 1984’s eight-time-Oscar-winning film from Miloš Forman, an adaptation of the 1979 stage play by Peter Shaffer. Shaffer’s play imagines a rivalry (key word: imagines) between Mozart and Salieri to tell a story about obsession and envy as corrupting forces. Shaffer won a Tony for his play and a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for Forman’s film, and Barton retains some elements of both: Salieri as an unreliable narrator and a frame story that involves him insisting he was responsible for Mozart’s mysterious death. But as a storyteller, Barton is primarily interested in how pairs of people navigate the power dynamics between them (think of the personal and professional relationships throughout Barton’s previous series, Giri/Haji and Black Doves), and so his Amadeus reconfigures. Salieri goes from hating Mozart from afar to interacting with him constantly, and Mozart from an innocent turning to Salieri for advice to a more socially attuned figure immediately aware of Salieri’s disinterest in creative solidarity. In addition, Amadeus expands the perspectives of Mozart and his wife Constanze (Gabrielle Creevy), choices that help populate this series’ five episodes. By elevating Mozart, making him more hedonistic than juvenile, and writing his bonds with his father and Constanze as troubled and competitive, Barton gives a meatier role to his recurring collaborator Sharpe. And by making Constanze less forgiving of Mozart’s infidelities and eventually Salieri’s confidante of sorts, Barton moves her from a supporting character to a more load-bearing point in the series’ primary triangle with her own ambitions and resentments.

Amadeus begins in Salieri’s old age, introducing him as a man forgotten by the Habsburg Empire he once served and the fans he once had. After he tries to kill himself by jumping out a window, Salieri is visited by Constanze and regales her with his “confession” of how, and why, he killed her husband years ago. The story then moves to Vienna a decade before Mozart’s death and intermittently jumps back and forth between Salieri’s recounting (with Constanze all but rolling her eyes at his insistence of his importance in her husband’s life) and the trio, when Salieri was in a position of power, Mozart had freshly arrived in Vienna, and Constanze was an aspiring opera singer. As the court composer, Salieri has a close relationship with Emperor Joseph II (Rory Kinnear, adding another imperious-dick character to a filmography rife with imperious dicks), who tells Salieri he’s unveiling economic, social, and religious reforms and will need Salieri to redo one of his old operas in support of these initiatives. “A return to past successes is what’s needed in delicate times,” he orders Salieri in an early moment of the series’ nudging metaness, and Salieri — who has been struggling to write something new — takes that as another blow to his ego. He needs the emperor on his side to retain his elevated status, and Bettany plays Salieri like a tightly wound blowhard, all obsequious, gritted-teeth smiles by day and then furious, near self-flagellation at night as he kneels before the cross behind his piano, praying for God to speak through him.

While Salieri struggles to hear the music in his head again, Mozart can’t tune it out. He fled his abusive father, Leopold (Jonathan Aris), for Vienna, but Sharpe gives his puckish-imp characterization enough wounded interiority to make clear that daddy issues aren’t all that ail him. Part of him wishes he weren’t so talented and so besieged by ideas, and Amadeus stages conversations between Mozart and Salieri about their differing approaches to the work — and to where their creativity comes from, nature or nurture, God or themselves — that emphasize both men’s hidden fears and insecurities. But where Bettany’s Salieri is uptight and aghast, a tightly clenched fist made into a whole man, Sharpe’s Mozart is a mischievous shit stirrer with the sunny disposition of someone for whom most everything works out. In Forman’s film, the most uncouth thing Mozart did was fart at the end of a performance. Here, Mozart ejaculates on a tray of meringues before playing a piece that blows Salieri’s mind; gets trashed before a rap-battle-style duel with Italian composer Muzio Clementi; and tells Salieri after the man fails to defend him to the emperor, “Maybe God doesn’t speak to you because you fucking bore him.”

Amadeus tracks that relationship of mutual dislike as it changes over time, as Mozart’s skill pushes Salieri into increasing violence, the two trade operas to one-up each other, and Salieri’s persistent backstabbing sends Mozart and Constanze into poverty. The series incorporates the men’s music vivaciously and stages the operas immersively (although the production design never comes close to the film’s textured mix of gilded opulence and baroque foreboding), and then undercuts all this artistic posturing with a bleak scene that reminds us the Habsburg Empire was sliding into widespread war. With so many lives on the line, why care about these two men? Because they, like the recurring series symbol of a songbird in a cage, demonstrate the universality of feeling trapped by circumstances one can’t control. The narrative advances with the tension of the men’s relationship, with special attention paid to how Salieri’s aggression against Mozart was another avenue for his enmity against God. What the series lacks most in comparison with its 1984 predecessor is a scene that clearly demonstrates how much more talented Mozart was than everyone else — there’s no equivalent to Tom Hulce’s Mozart dictating a piece to F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri in an uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness burst as Salieri struggles to keep up. What this adaptation does offer is a deeper examination of genius as an existential burden in a society that enables others to co-opt it, monetize it, and use it as part of an agenda. Mozart’s downfall was as much caused by Salieri’s hatred and jealousy as it was by the Habsburg Empire refusing to accept his operas because they didn’t align with the monarchy’s alleged virtues and imperialist goals, and Amadeus hits that point over and over as it shows us how willing the powerful are to kill their darlings if they don’t do what’s been commanded.

Again, most of this goes against on-the-record fact. Rather, this Amadeus shares DNA with other historical fictions like The Great, The Favourite, Marie Antoinette, Mussolini: Son of the Century, and Death by Lightning, which by interjecting contemporaneous language and attitudes illuminate how worldviews and norms we thought were relegated to “back then” can still be fascinatingly relevant to today. For all its provocative visuals — Mozart pushing a strawberry into a lover’s vagina and then eating it; Salieri masturbating at his piano as he struggles with writer’s block, and then wiping his crotch with his blank pages of sheet music — Amadeus is, at its core, driven by two questions that feel timeless: Where do our creative inspirations come from, and who are we when they leave us? By filtering those queries through the Habsburg Empire’s labyrinthine court politics and Salieri’s misguided idea that a belief in God deserves blessings as compensation, Amadeus builds a world in which nearly everyone is compromised, patrons and beneficiaries both, by wanting more than we should have or could handle. By the time the series breaks the fourth wall, Salieri transcends this story and becomes an avatar for all the depraved things desperate men will do when they’re convinced they deserve more than they’ve got. All of Amadeus’s contemporaneous stylistic and dialogue choices are a blast, but the series’ suggestion that this kind of guy is plaguing our present, too, feels the most timeless, and the most unsettling.