The politics of Music circa 1760

Rating: Null/10 (7 August 2015)

Everyone else quite rightly focuses on the music and there is no doubt it is great. Neville Mariner and his orchestra are the epitome of Mozart experts.
But I would open the discussion up and ask viewers to see something else here. The politics of Music. Salieri passes through his active phase as composer and has moved into the realm of politics. There is no doubt Salieri is an expert in that field, sensitive to the political motives of his financial supporter, and able to conflate the issues of German or Italian language for the first Mozart opera in Vienna. Able to manipulate the levers of power within the court to get whatever he wants. A simple word from him can cut the run of Mozart's opera down to the bare essentials.
But politics never satisfies Salieri, he has made his choice and cannot live with it any more. By the time Mozart shows up his skill as musician has faded and all he is left with are clunky, and mediocre products. But this movie simply leaves most of the music Salieri has already done in the past never to be brought up again, there must have been some significant quality that brought him up to the level of Maestro, to the respect of the power elite. You simply do not become court composer with mediocrity.
The character of Mozart that Salieri hates most is his naivetÃ©, a sort of innocence. As a wielder of power there in Vienna, Salieri chooses to use it to kill off this wild child, to destroy the innocent since he is stuck living the life of cynicism and political correctness. His desire is to take credit for the final mass so as to revive his career as musician, since it will be written in his own hand writing and not Mozart's.