The Gospel According to "Amadeus"

Last night, I viewed the 1984 film Amadeus with my kids. I hadn’t seen it for decades, and I’d forgotten the many famous scenes in this story: the scene where Salieri meets the young “vulgar” Mozart who is playing an adolescent, sexual game on the floor and under the table with Constance; the perhaps most famous “too many notes” scene, where in the Emperor Joseph criticizes Mozart’s new opera The Marriage of Figaro for having “too many notes.” And then there is perhaps my favorite, the last scene, where the old Salieri is wheeled out into the larger asylum and declares himself the patron saint of mediocrity and blesses the madmen around him.

But this time around, I was perhaps most challenged by an early scene that makes this movie “theological,” when Salieri prays as a young boy to become a great composer who sings his praises to God. The lad loves music and bargains with his deity, “Make me a great composer and I will give you my praise, my…industry.”

A Theology of Prayer

Most of this film is about the answer to that prayer and what it looks like to the older man. Salieri indeed becomes an important court composer in Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, a place where his music is even celebrated when it is premiered. But we see all of this through the lens of the covetous old man, who seems to be the only person in Vienna to recognize that it is Mozart who has been given the divine gift.

So much for prayers for greatness, for great art, one might say.

The movie can be considered a fictional account. It makes up a great deal about Salieri’s role in Mozart’s early death, for example. And Salieri tells this story as someone who has rejected God, when the evidence I've seen is that the real Salieri worked and wrote a great deal for the church in his retirement. But in the movie, he declares himself to be against God's designs.

Less fictional, meanwhile, and probably more accurate, is the way that Mozart is constantly shown in the act of composing. The movie shows the young composer walking away from arguments with his father and his wife over income, closing the door, and getting to work on his music, which at any given moment is clearer to him than a passing domestic quarrel.

Meanwhile, Salieri fritters his time away with his students and his schemes to find out what Mozart is up to. The film also provides some theology according to Salieri, who chooses to recognize God as the source of his adversary’s gift, and this can only torment him like an Old Testament King Saul, who wants to have the younger David executed. Salieri is not a modern nihilist. He very much believes that God is behind his own misery. He doesn't belittle God. He hates God because he doesn't like God's choices.

What We Might Want to Think

This is perhaps first a movie about jealousy and creativity, certainly. But there is also this twisted theology running through Salieri's motivations as a character. What does this movie have to tell us about prayer? What does it mean to say that we can pray? One thing does come through to me: As sovereign over the universe, God has his own inscrutable plans, as inscrutable to me most of the time as they are in the movie to Salieri. In the words of TerryTaylor, “We live upon this dark surface, and God moves upon the deep.”

As for my own prayer, it comes down to this: I'm not sure that my choices and character are all that well aligned with God's. When I do pray, the first part of it is a struggle as I try to work through all of my own issues with my nature—my selfishness, my feelings of unworthiness in the face of the infinite, my anger, my desire to get back at people.

I'm comforted in that I sometimes see these layers of “personality” in the Psalms attributed to David—the Old Testament version of the "man after God's own heart" who was not afraid to pray that God would “smite” his enemies.

Perhaps one lesson should be learned from this old movie and a broken down character like Salieri--I believe there always is something to learn when human nature is rendered accurately. I am reminded that no matter how much I repress and try to hide, my life is always an open book before God. And there are other points of view out there, other needs. God may be planning to use someone else as his "instrument." But the problem as I am made to see it in "Amadeus" is this: I’m more like Salieri in my prayers than I’ll ever be like Mozart in my compositions.