Art & Creativity Quote by Peter Shaffer

A little boast, a little diagnosis: Shaffer is naming a work that refuses to treat music as wallpaper. “Possibly” is doing sly protective labor here, the modesty shield that lets him make a sweeping claim without sounding like a manifesto. But the provocation lands anyway. In most cinema, music is support staff - mood-setter, tear-jerker, suspense machine. Shaffer’s phrasing flips the credit order: not music in service of character, but character in service of music.

Coming from the playwright behind Amadeus, the line carries a specific agenda. Shaffer built stories where the central drama isn’t romance or crime but artistic obsession - the way sound can dominate a room, a mind, an era. By calling music the “leading character,” he anthropomorphizes it: music doesn’t just accompany; it acts, seduces, humiliates, exposes. That’s the subtext of Amadeus in particular, where Mozart’s compositions feel more alive, more morally lucid, than the courtiers who consume them. The real protagonist is the thing everyone claims to love but can’t control.

The context also nods to a late-20th-century shift in prestige culture: film adapting “serious” theater while competing with MTV-era saturation. Shaffer’s claim is a bid for artistic hierarchy - not against pop, but against cinema’s tendency to instrumentalize music. He’s insisting on reverence, on letting sound drive plot the way a star drives a picture, and on admitting the uncomfortable truth his work keeps circling: genius isn’t a personality trait; it’s an invasive force.