‘Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life. Amen.’

This is the prayer, the most famous, adored and revered musician of his time is whispering every night in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. That composer, who was to teach indisputable legends to be, such as Beethoven, Liszt and Schubert, was none other but the Royal and Imperial Kapellmeister under Emperor Joseph II for 36 years, having been appointed at just 38 years of age, by which time he had become the most important musical figure of his generation. The man was Antonio Salieri, born in 1750, just six years before his greatest enemy (in his own mind), the child-wonder, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Salieri and Mozart were contemporaries. One developed a passion for music at an early age; the other was touring Europe ‘like a trained monkey … doing tricks, like a circus freak’, and at the age of ten he was one of the most skilled instrumentalists of the time, and already a composer. One would quickly become a royal musician in Vienna; the other would struggle as a Kapellmeister in Salzburg. One would fall reluctantly in love with the music of his younger enemy; the other would loathe his protégé for his mediocrity. One knew he did not possess the gift, but would play his cards right with an Emperor who had no ear at all, yet liked his music; the other thought of his own work as perfect, and would behave with arrogance among his peers. One would achieve all the plaudits for his pompous style; the other would be ridiculed for having ‘too many notes’ in his operas. One would live in piety, only to deny God; the other would be a libertine, ignoring all the scriptures’ moral commandments. One would become the voice of man and mediocrity; the other would be remembered as the voice of God and indescribable beauty.

It is easy to see why Sir Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus is the only of his plays that truly endures the test of time, in an otherwise illustrious career. The play is neither a historical play, nor a period piece, nor a true biography, but in Salieri and Mozart, the dramatist has found a battle not only between power and glory, but primarily between eternal and ephemeral greatness. Salieri was made the saint of mediocrities (quite unjustly), while Mozart the saint of all saints. The Italian composer remarks in the play:

‘He had simply written down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.’

The irony of the play works on many levels. Eternal greatness may not come together with a great personality. But in Amadeus, it is mediocrity that is given the greatest role, and the genius becomes almost a caricature. This is Schaffer’s own genius: he is able to capture within the parameters of the stage all the complexity of gods and the utter mediocrity of men, and still achieve a drama of effective beauty, a heartbreaking tragedy, and a satire that can make you laugh for hours.

John Doyle’s revival of the play at Wilton’s Music Hall does seem to provide all the elements of the play. The period setting of the venue itself, with ruined walls and notices warning the audience about the poor functionality of the building, works wonderfully with the stage art direction, with faded pictures, expressive empty chairs, and musical instruments - all creating a haunting world, rotting with mediocrity, crying for greatness.

A group of musicians perform Mozart’s timeless tunes, as well playing all the minor parts. They are all faceless instruments in the hands of the grand orchestrator Matthew Kelly (Antonio Salieri), and his lead violinist Jonathan Broadbent (playing the youthful Mozart). The concept of the direction has stunning potential to express the core struggle of the play, seen through Salieri’s deathbed dreams. Doyle does away with realism, in order to demonstrate the real dilemma of the play: whether to believe the theory that Salieri poisoned Mozart. There is never a physical enactment of the deed itself, except a stunning excerpt (‘You are poisoned with me, I am poisoned with you!’), which leaves the audience with a desire to explore and ponder whether he has done it indeed.

Matthew Kelly is a good Salieri, in as much as he manages to expose a sense of goodness even in his most extravagant rages. We feel the unfairness done by God to him, as he is capable of recognising the purest expression of his own craft, yet never able to realise it. Yet, Kelly lacks that Italian passion, the over-the-topness of emotion, mingled with gentleman’s gallantry, and Catholic piety, which would ease our acceptance of Salieri as something more meaningful than a straightforward demon.

The real problem lies in Broadbent however. Schaffer’s Mozart is an arrogant ‘shitwit’ with an annoying laugh and a fondness for extreme sexual practices. Broadbent manages to show us this character, but he never manages to be Wolfie. Except in the last encounter with Salieri, in which Mozart is reduced to ‘nursery rhymes’, the acting seems rather amateurish, undermining the wunderkind’s role as the perverse voice of beauty. All we are left is with an interesting Salieri, and a faint vision of what Mozart should have been.

Plausibly, Doyle could not have done any better given the circumstances. Schaffer’s Amadeus is the type of beast that just screams for a big budget adaptation, in which Mozart must be played by a great actor, and also a great pianist. Forman, in his 1984 film adaptation, was able to employ some of the best recordings of the pieces in the play ever made, thanks to clever editing. On stage, it is up to the performers to live up to Salieri’s poetic description of his first encounter with Mozart’s music:

On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.

At Wilton’s Music Hall, we get only a rather average intonation of the lyricism that has become legendary. The true effect is achieved only when a recorded version of Requiem plays in the background of the final scenes. As if by a sudden revelation, we are faced with beauty in its purest form, pouring relentlessly with litheness and simplicity, akin to a nursery rhyme, screaming and longing for the life that should never have been lived, for an output that seems to have existed at the creation of time. And so, inspired, we head home, put on some Mozart pieces, relax and think of Salieri. We’d realise that his grief was in vain, for God could not stop his own voice for the sake of a man’s riches and vanity.

Till 14 October 2006.