Amadeus Is One Movie That Didn’t Need a Director’s Cut

Too many notes?

F. Murray Abraham stars as Antonio Salieri, renowned musician and court composer to Emperor Joseph II of Vienna, who becomes obsessed with the life and work of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce). Salieri, who has pledged to God that he’ll live a life of dignity, faith, and chastity in exchange for success and acclaim as a composer, cannot reconcile that the sublime, almost divinely inspired music of Mozart is created by a ribald “creature” he views as immature, irresponsible, and obscene. So in the movie’s entirely fictionalized plot, Salieri secretly and successfully hatches a plan to destroy the young composer, ultimately leading to Mozart’s death at age 35.

Amadeus, both the play and the movie, is not meant to be accurate or truthful to history: Salieri did not contribute in any way to Mozart’s death. Shaffer’s play and Forman’s film, instead, aim to offer up a deeply profound question: is artistic talent or genius truly a gift from the divine, and what price is one willing to pay for it?

“Whatever was not directly connected to the plot, I just cut it out,” Forman told The A.V. Club about his effort to trim Amadeus from three hours to two and a half. Therein lies the key to why the theatrical cut of Amadeus is, in our view, better than the longer home video version. While one shouldn’t sit down to watch the theatrical cut of Amadeus expecting the pace of a summer action tentpole, the movie actually does move quite fluidly and quickly simply because the storytelling and acting are so good. Most of the additional scenes, however, do not add anything essential to the story, which instead becomes slower and more deliberate. So even at just an additional 20 minutes in length, the “director’s cut” seems a bit more sluggish and bloated by comparison.

Some of the excised/restored material is merely extended versions of existing scenes, such as an early discussion between the elderly Salieri and the priest who comes to hear his confession. There is also a longer scene involving the mother of Mozart’s wife Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge), which is more comic relief than anything else, as is a later sequence where Mozart attempts to teach a young student while her father’s dogs ceaselessly bark at him. There are also a number of discussions—between Mozart and Constanze, Mozart and Salieri, Salieri and Baron von Swieten—regarding Mozart’s finances, a theme that becomes overly repetitive in the “director’s cut.”

Salieri and Constanze

A combination of two scenes, however, does provide some crucial character development for two of the film’s leads and adds meaning to the film’s climactic moments. It involves a visit by the fiercely protective Constanze to Salieri’s house where she begs him to help Mozart get an appointment to the emperor’s court. Salieri tells her to return that evening, basically implying that she must have sex with him in return for sponsoring her husband to the emperor.

Constanze reluctantly but self-assuredly returns that evening and begins to undress. Salieri, however, remains the same character who earlier in the film vowed a life of celibacy in order to achieve success. Upon seeing Constanze acquiesce to his sordid demands (and perhaps desires?), the composer grows suddenly indignant. It is unclear if he is pretending to be shocked and outraged to mock her, or whether he is using it to cover his own sense of shame self-digust, but he calls for a servant to lead the bewildered and humiliated woman out—but not before she hurls one of Salieri’s candelabras across his study. The scene shows the lengths to which Constanze will go to help her husband and secure their future, and provides context for why she is so furious to find Salieri at her dying husband’s bedside at the end of the film, upon which she immediately throws him out of their apartment. Her antipathy toward Salieri makes less sense without the scene in Salieri’s study.