Something for Thursday

If you’ve seen the great movie Amadeus, you may recall a scene toward the end when Salieri, having driven poor naive Mozart to his literal deathbed, takes him home after he collapses during a performance of The Magic Flute, and then–under the guise of friendly helpfulness–grabs some paper to help Mozart compose a section of his Requiem (because Salieri is actually planning to pass the Requiem off as his own composition once Mozart is dead).

Of course the scene is utter fiction–Salieri and Mozart had no such adversarial relationship, and while a local noble did scheme about stealing Mozart’s work and claiming it as his own, it wasn’t Salieri, who lived a long and productive life after Mozart’s death and certainly did not end up in a sanitarium–but it’s an interesting piece of drama anyway, because it depicts how even adversaries can find themselves working collaboratively on a shared goal (no matter why the goal happens to be shared), and it underlines the film’s main theme of Salieri being a gifted professional musician who still can’t grasp the depths of Mozart’s genius, even when Mozart himself is sitting in the same room, talking him through it.

Someone took that scene from the movie and cut it together with a very clever animation of the actual score of the Confutatis (the section of the Requiem on which Mozart and Salieri are working). I love this kind of thing: when someone takes a piece of great filmmaking and uses it as a starting point for more terrific filmmaking.

Share This Post