I find it funny how the original national theater poster for amadeus is so wildly different than any others cause the broadway one was so peak everything else is inspired by it
So! I got something to say about this because I did some research for my thesis.
The image of the original 1979 poster is a reworking of Henry Fuseliâs 1774 pen-and-ink drawing Dante and Virgil on the Ice of Cocytus.
The film poster, by contrast, was designed by Peter Sis at the request of Milos Forman, taking as its model Robert von Nuttâs poster for the Broadway production (1980). It depicts black hooded figure with outstretched arms and barely visible eyes. Despite its graphic stylization, the composition appears to reproduce the features of a typical Venetian mask, the bauta, consisting of a tricorne hat, a domino cloak, and the mask known as the larva.
My hypothesis is that this aesthetic shift was also influenced by another major Mozart-related event of 1979: Joseph Loseyâs cinematic adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartâs Don Giovanni. In this distinctive opera-film, set in an imaginary Venice, masks play a central role, particularly in the finale of the first act, when Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, and Donna Elviraâhaving identified Don Giovanni as the murderer of the Commendatoreâenter his house in disguise during the ball. In Loseyâs film, the masks retain the domino cloak (or tabarro) and tricorne hat, but the traditional larva of the bauta is replaced by a white face with distinctly feminine features. Since the film was released in the United States almost simultaneously with the stage production of Amadeus (Amadeus premiered in September 1979, and Don Giovanni was released inNovember 1979) it is not implausible that it helped shape the visual imagination that would later become iconic.
In Formanâs film, the black carnivalesque figure remains, but the larva is replaced by an original bifront mask depicting the faces of Comedy and Tragedy. This choice appears to invoke the theatre explicitly, not only as the original medium of the narrative (Peter Shafferâs play), but also as a stylistic principle underlying the entire film, whose events and modes of representation are marked by a pronounced theatricality. In an article published in The New York Times ( âPaying Homage to Mozartâ, 1984. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/02/magazine/paying-homage-to-mozart.html.) Shaffer himself stated that the use of masks constitutes a tribute to Mozart, who frequently employed disguises in his comic operas.
I couldnât help but notice, anyway, that the recent blue ray posters have started to introduce the double faced mask as an iconography: meaning that, in fact, now it is this specific icon mostly associated with Amadeus!















