When you watch this movie properly, with the music tuned up and the picture as big as possible, it's hard not to fall in love with it. Mozart's music permeates the whole movie and it does so in an excellent fusion with the pictures. There were some masterfull scenes that I felt in a way that I had never felt before in a movie: Mozart's first steps, the improvisations, Salieri's thoughts throughout his life... also, the tears of Salieri as he reads Mozart's originals, and of course the finale with Mozart writing the Requiem to Salieri... the combination of music and images in these few minutes is just... splendid.
The movie also shattered my image of Mozart as this rich, serious and austere composer. His depiction as an arrogant, brut young man, although not 100% accurate, still permeates my mind. The words of Salieri regarding this aspect are just stuck into my head:
All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?
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.
