‘Amadeus: Theatrical Cut’ 4K UHD Blu-ray (review)

Warner Bros.

Let’s start with a spoiler: Salieri did not actually kill Mozart.

The accusation started as Viennese society gossip that Alexander Pushkin turned into a play, which became the libretto for an opera by Rimsky-Korsakoff before Peter Schaffer turned it back into a play in 1979.

Following in the thematic footsteps of Equus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Schaffer told a story of a joyless older protagonist who bitterly envies a younger, semi-delusional rival who has nevertheless been touched by God.

Amadeus—Mozart’s middle name, literally “beloved by God”—was revised almost continuously for each new production over the next three years, until producer Saul Zaentz optioned it for Miloš Forman.

Reportedly, Schaffer was relieved: not because of the money, but because it meant he could finally stop rewriting his play.

But first he had to get through one last revision, and it was a big one.

The stage version of Amadeus gave us a Salieri who, while short on talent, is also curiously seductive. He makes wicked asides to the audience like Shakespeare’s Richard III. He nearly gets to sleep with Mozart’s hot wife. The creator of the role was a young and sexy Ian McKellen; Frank Langella later stepped into the Broadway production, giving Salieri a malevolent, Dracula-like charisma.

And so fans like me were naturally shocked when Forman announced that the part of Salieri would be played by… F. Murray Abraham. Who? This was not a good omen: Abraham seemed like a talented guy, but Byronically sexy he was not.

Turns out Miloš Forman was going another way.

Forman grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia, and his movies typically celebrate bad boys who rebel against soulless authority: Randle McMurphy against Nurse Ratched, Larry Flynt against Jerry Falwell, Andy Kaufman against, well, Tony Clifton I guess. Where Schaffer had envisioned Mozart as a conceited brat who just happened to be wildly talented, Forman’s Mozart would be a rule-breaking rock star.

Here again, the casting choice was an odd one. Mark Hamill had played Mozart on Broadway and lobbied hard for the role, but Forman said he didn’t want a “spaceman” in his movie. Thus the title role went to the guy who played Pinto in National Lampoon’s Animal House, Tom Hulce.

As it turned out, the casting worked… but it was in service of a very different story than Peter Schaffer’s stage play.

As Forman put it, why should we admire the man who destroyed a genius? Better to focus on the genius. As Mozart scratches out his scores—thwarted by an overbearing father (Ray Dotrice), a dull-witted Emperor Joseph II (the mega-talented but justly cancelled Jeffrey Jones), and a cabal of court insiders led by Salieri—we’re invited to see the inner demons that fuel his greatest works.

As in the play, the filmed Amadeus goes heavy on the operas. This is a cinematic necessity: it lets us see flying actors and dwarfs and big sets and Twyla Tharp choreography instead of watching oboists and cellists for two hours and forty minutes. This is a Mozart who’s liberated by his adoring fans. He can play the piano at parties while being held upside-down. He can show his ass to an archbishop while taking bows. In one of the movie’s best scenes (one of the few that survived more or less intact from the stage version), he can turn Salieri’s anemic welcome march into an unforgettable melody from The Marriage of Figaro.

The movie Amadeus was a joy to watch.

You could forgive how Forman reduced Salieri to an emotionally constipated antagonist who does not get to almost seduce Constanze Mozart (Elizabeth Berridge). There’s a really fun scene where Don Giovanni is staged in a parody version with two guys in a horse costume and a whole bunch of little people on trapezes (Kenny Baker plays one of them, so at least one Star Wars actor made it into the movie).

In another scene, famously parodied by Family Guy, a masked Salieri invites Mozart to “do Salieri” and Mozart plays a stodgy melody that ends to knowing applause and a loud simulated fart. The coarseness adds to the movie’s realism, as do Forman’s use of natural lighting and 18^th Century locations in his native Prague. The Dolby Digital recording of Mozart’s music, under Sir Neville Marrier’s direction, has amazing presence: you can hear the musician’s fingers pressing the keys of their instruments. Hulce plays Mozart with boyish élan and Berridge delivers a warm, sadly underrated performance as Constanze.

The movie even gave us something that the play didn’t: a believable ending.

Where the play has Salieri literally shouting Mozart into losing his mind—an embarrassing note of melodrama—movie Salieri simply works Mozart to death. As the dying composer dictates his Requiem from his deathbed, we see Salieri struggling—and miserably failing—to understand how Mozart works his magic.

This is where the casting of F. Murray Abraham starts to make sense: his cruelty can’t quite mask his intense reverence for the man he hates. When Mozart admits that he always worried that Salieri didn’t like his music, Abraham’s Salieri has no choice but to confess that his rival is the greatest composer known to him. And yet he keeps pushing Mozart to exhaustion. He genuinely admires Mozart, and he also hates himself for admiring him. So much that he’s willing to squeeze the life out of his rival just for a few precious drops of inspiration. Abraham’s Salieri weaponizes his awkwardness.

That was the Amadeus we fell in love with in 1984. And then Miloš Forman did what every other major director did in the 2000s: he came out with a director’s cut.

In their commentary track for the LaserDisc edition of Amadeus, Forman and Schaffer drop hints that there was more of Amadeus that had to be cut for time. Some of these were scenes from the play that no longer fit with the new vision—most famously, the one where Salieri tries to charm Constanze into bed and winds up flat-out demanding sex for furthering her husband’s career. A brief, painful flash of nudity as she nerves herself to comply before Salieri coldly rings the bell for a servant to show her out. A mini-sequence where Mozart tries to teach piano to a wealthy merchant’s daughter but is interrupted by howling dogs. Additional moments with Christine Ebersole as the opera diva that Salieri chastely lusts for, but who winds up sleeping with Wolfie.

Some of these edits were included as deleted scenes in various home video editions, but Forman always stood behind his decision to keep them out of his theatrical release. Until, after the debut of Blu-ray, he did an about face: why not let people enjoy a longer, fuller Amadeus in the comfort of home? Released as Special Edition: The Director’s Cut in 2002, the two-disc set proclaimed itself as the movie’s final, definitive version.

But there’s a problem with the restored scenes: as Joseph supposedly told Mozart after watching The Abduction From the Seraglio, there are simply too many notes. At best, they provide some color and depth to the narrative: once you’ve seen Constanze’s humiliation, it’s easier to understand why she hates Salieri’s guts. But it’s not enough to justify the toll they take on the pacing, and they’re tonally out of step with the movie. Most of the terrible things Salieri does to Mozart are revenge against a God who refused to bless him with talent. Watching coldly as Constanze strips naked is cruelty with no purpose.

The decision by Paul Zaentz (the late Saul’s nephew and successor) to present a restored 4K edition of the theatrical version is both welcome and long overdue. The quality is stunning. On the LaserDisc commentary, Forman notes that he has only two requirements from his cinematographers: he wants black to look like black and human flesh to look like human flesh. The restored theatrical version achieves all of that and more. Mozart’s music gets the depth and range it deserves. The narrative once again flies like an arrow to its target, sprightly despite its long run time.

If there’s any serious flaw in Amadeus, it’s one that’s common to screen depictions of genius (looking at you, A Beautiful Mind). It’s the middlebrow fantasy that talent is a gift, not something you work to achieve, and that talented people are either undeserving or unappreciative of their gifts. Both Mozart and Salieri work hard on their compositions, but only Mozart is rewarded with brillance, and we’re meant to see that as unfair.

This is the cultural legacy of Amadeus.

Not only did it turn Mozart into—in the words of Falco—a Zuperztar, it ironically revived interest in the long-forgotten music of Antonio Salieri. You can see monuments for all three musicians in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. At the absolute center of the graveyard, its high-rent district, is a cenotaph to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his original gravesite in St. Marx cemetery is unknown).

Against the cemetery wall is a modernist plexiglass marker for Johann Hölzel, aka Falco, who sang the only German-language song to top the U.S. charts, “Rock Me, Amadeus.” And then, against that same wall but as far from Mozart’s as it’s possible to get, is Salieri’s humble stone. He did not kill Mozart: they were occasional but friendly rivals, and mostly they were colleagues and friends.

Thanks to Schaffer and Pushkin and the gossiping Viennese, Salieri will only ever be remembered as the patron saint of mediocrities, staring through the bars at those whom God has unfairly rewarded with genius.

According to Amadeus, that’s most of us watching the movie. If we can still celebrate the Mozarts among us despite the hot tears of jealousy streaming down our cheeks, then surely we can admire the glory of Amadeus as it shines once more in its original, intended version. Sure, it’s a middlebrow vision of genius.

But as middlebrow visions go, it’s still soars.

Extras include a new Making-Of featurette and an archival Making-Of from 2002.