Paul Bettany Joins Will Sharpe in Sky’s Mozart Series ‘Amadeus’

[kingsuperman]

Paul Bettany has joined the upcoming limited series "Amadeus," which tells the story of famed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Will Sharpe).

Bettany will play Italian composer Antonio Salieri, Mozart's longtime rival. https://t.co/VsZaTdtqWx
- Variety (@Variety) April 9, 2024
Paul Bettany has been cast as Antonio Salieri, opposite Will Sharpe’s

Comments

[para1]

If you want to watch a boring biopic about an 18th century composer, Gary Oldman's Beethoven film is right there.

Amadeus is not a biopic about Mozart or Salieri, and thus its historical accuracy is totally besides the point. It's about the Salieri in all of us when we are faced with people God apparently loves and blesses above all. (One of the translation of Amadeus is literally "God's Beloved"). The people who are blessed with talent, genius, beauty, or even luck we can only dream of possessing. Shaffer's play and the film is about envy, it's about fairness, it's about the illusion of a just world, of not getting what you deserve, taken to an extreme.

You could make the exact same movie or play if you made it about Shakespeare and Robert Greene. Or about Rembrandt and some middling Flemish painter no one could pick out of a line-up these days. The tension, the quality is in this narrative of envy and not in biographical details.

I generally think this remake is a poor idea. But a straight-up biopic will not make a better or more interesting story.

[kaiserschmarrn]

I disagree with your premise that real history can't make for compelling narratives. That composer biopics are often boring (because they tend to be ignorant of history and what makes it interesting) and that Shaffer's play is great (because it doesn't care about history either but has a point to make) is rather beside the point since we have plenty of media that manage to tell a thematically rich story as well as respect basic tenets of the historical setting and figures it uses to tell that story. It doesn't make sense to act like it has to be either/or in the year 2024, we can expect and demand better, especially with subject matters that have been abused as much as this particular setting.

There's two things that period dramas can do to be respectable: either adhere to a setting and make up the characters that you need for your fiction or portray characters based on real people - with the latter, there should be a level of interrogation of widespread popular myth, otherwise you're simply going to feed a fantasy that tarnishes the very fabric of that which you're pretending to be interested in portraying.