A FILM ABOUT LOVING GOD, NOT MOZART
Today is the 265th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, and I’ve been thinking about “Amadeus”. It is by no means an accurate history, nor does it claim to be, any more than Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” purports to give an impeccably researched history of medieval Scotland. In fact, I would argue that the real focus of Amadeus is not Mozart at all.
Why is it called “Amadeus”? Why not “Wolfgang”, or “Mozart”, or perhaps more accurately “Salieri”, who is the narrator and main character? I believe that the title tells us that it is at heart a meditation on the nature of religious faith.
“Amadeus” is Latin for “loving god”, and Antonio Salieri is presented as a deeply devout man. While highly successful and renowned, he is nagged by the knowledge that he is no genius. He undergoes a crisis of faith when he encounters Mozart, a profane insufferable younger man who possesses gifts that Salieri desperately wishes were his.
The injustice tears at him. He has done everything right — he was an altar boy, he prays devoutly, he leads a virtuous life. Doesn’t God owe him the genius He has instead bestowed on this awful little obscene competitor? Of course Salieri, if he really wished to love God, could have accepted the situation, swallowed his pride, and helped Mozart make his way in life — Mozart clearly is ill equipped to navigate the intrigues of the Viennese court. Instead, he chooses to undermine his rival. God has let him down, and he is sick of playing by the rules.
I am way beyond my pay grade here, and somebody who actually knows something about religion will hopefully correct me if appropriate. But it seems to me that there is a collision in “Amadeus” between the Old Testament and the New Testament conceptions of God. In the New Testament, people can reasonably expect to be recompensed if it is deserved. Even those who suffer miserably on earth will earn an eternal reward. So there is incentive to be good; it is an investment that will pay off.
In the Old Testament there is no concept of the afterlife, and God can be outrageously capricious and cruel. Life is unfair, and good people suffer and die, with no heaven to look forward to. Virtue is not necessarily rewarded with God’s favor; the reason to behave in a moral and decent manner is simply because it is the right thing to do. Certainly evil will be punished, but there tends to be a lot of collateral damage — Job’s children and all those first-born in Egypt for example.
It seems to me that in “Amadeus”, Salieri has a New Testament conception of God. If God is love, then, why isn’t he getting a little more of this love? But if Salieri had approached his predicament with a more Old Testament worldview, he might have said, “This is outrageously unjust. So what else is new? Still, I gotta be a mensch.”
