Screenplay: Amadeus (screenplay)

Summary
Peter Shaffer's screenplay for Amadeus frames a flamboyant, tragic tale of genius and envy through the confession of an embittered composer. The story is narrated by Antonio Salieri, now an old man confined to an Austrian asylum, who recounts his lifelong obsession with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. What begins as admiration quickly curdles into obsession as Salieri becomes convinced that God has bestowed a divine gift on the vulgar, irreverent Mozart while he himself was denied such favor despite pious devotion and hard work.
The narrative unfolds largely in flashback, tracking Mozart's meteoric rise and reckless brilliance in Vienna, his explosive creative output, and the social and professional consequences of his behavior. Salieri's attempts to thwart and comprehend Mozart culminate in a complex interplay around the composition of the Requiem, where secrecy, manipulation, and awe collide. The screenplay closes on a haunting note of confession and moral collapse as Salieri seeks absolution for a lifetime spent both worshipping and trying to destroy another man's genius.

Main Characters
Antonio Salieri serves as both protagonist and unreliable narrator, driven by a corrosive mixture of reverence and resentment. He is portrayed as disciplined, pious, and socially adept, yet incapable of reconciling his mediocrity with his religious faith. Salieri's voice structures the film as a personal indictment and a theatrical self-justification, giving the story its moral weight and psychological tension.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is depicted as a prodigy possessed of effortless brilliance and scandalous vivacity. He is depicted less as a historically accurate portrait and more as an embodiment of chaotic genius: vulgar, childish, obscene, and incandescently inventive. Their relationship is complemented by figures such as Constanze, Mozart's loyal wife, who endures poverty and social scorn while protecting her husband's legacy, and secondary courtiers, musicians, and patrons who reflect Vienna's aesthetic and moral climate.

Structure and Style
Shaffer adapts his stage play into a screenplay that preserves theatrical intensity while expanding scene and scope to exploit cinematic possibilities. The screenplay keeps Salieri's monologic tone, but uses visual flashbacks, montage, and musical sequences to dramatize the contrast between appearance and reality. Dialogues remain sharp and witty, with scenes constructed to heighten dramatic irony: the spectator often perceives Mozart's genius more clearly than the characters around him do.
Music functions almost as an additional character; the score and the depicted compositions are integrated into the screenplay's rhythm, punctuating revelations and emotional shifts. The writing balances moments of grand spectacle with intimate psychological excavation, moving fluidly between public performances, private crises, and Salieri's confessional interludes.

Themes
At the heart of the screenplay is a meditation on artistic creation, divine justice, and the corrosive effects of envy. Shaffer probes whether genius is a gift, a curse, or an accident of temperament, and interrogates the ethical responsibility of the artist and the observer. Salieri's moral disintegration becomes a study in how faith can be perverted into resentment when confronted with inexplicable superiority.
The screenplay also explores the tension between formality and fecundity: discipline versus spontaneous inspiration, social respectability versus obscene truth, and public acclaim versus private torment. The result is a tragic parable about the limits of human comprehension in the face of transcendent art.

Legacy
Shaffer's screenplay amplified the play's central questions by exploiting film's visual and aural resources, helping to create a cultural touchstone that reinvigorated interest in Mozart and in debates about genius. Its layered narration, vivid characterizations, and integration of music into narrative structure have made it a frequently cited example of how stage material can be transformed for cinema while retaining philosophical urgency and dramatic intimacy.