"Amadeus is a clear-eyed celebration of Mozart and his music.  He is someone whose genius can stand with Shakespeare's.  Wolfgang is of course dangerous to let onto the stage, because playwright and actors have to live up to a creativity that is almost superhuman.  He also happens to be one of the great theater composers:  his music easily commands a stage.  But if the portrait can be convincing, the fascination is boundless - and makes for high drama.

Shaffer's play of course goes deeper.  It looks unblinkingly at the rest of us, who are neither blessed nor cursed (like Mozart) with genius.  It analyzes with compassion and wit how desperately ordinary most of us are.  For however talented we may secretly think ourselves to be, we remain in the great scheme of things relative mediocrities.  It is only genius - that rarest and most precious of states - that is unaffected by fashion and indifferent to competition.  Only genius goes on creating, whatever the circumstances; it needs neither success nor recognition to sustain it:  van Gogh never sold a painting.  Only genius makes its own rules."

Sir Peter Hall
Amadeus

Sublime - Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major - Movement 1 (the piano run a 2:25 in floats through a quiet house like an angel - volume up):



Read Maynard Solomon's explanation of Mozart's genius displayed in this piece:

"Mozart opens with a five-measure theme, or 'motto,' that strives heroically to lift its own enormous weight and the succumbs. . .Translated into our inexact metaphoric vocabulary, this 'motto' theme may be taken to represent a brief moment of surpassing beauty (a symbiotic moment), whose implications are premature and whose full meaning cannot be grasped until it has been repeatedly lost, forgotten, submerged, and then remembered."

Movement 1 (part two) here.

Movement 2 (part one) here.

Movement 2 (part two) here.

For movement 3, go here.

A moment, please.