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(Steve Warren, Update)

There were other stage, screen and television roles, but his next big success was as Mozart in the Broadway production of Amadeus. He and playwright Peter Shaffer were good friends, he says. "I used to go over for dinner every Sunday while he was writing it, but when you're in the theatre you don't talk about those things." Shaffer had him in mind for the role when he was writing it, Curry claims, but the director cast Simon Callow in the London production before Curry had a chance at it. He tried to see the show but it was sold out, and happened to be reading it the next day when Shaffer called to talk to him about doing it in New York. As to the play's vulgar, irreverent portrait of Mozart, Curry believes it to be accurate. "Have you read his letters? They're just crammed with fart jokes and bum jokes."

(Ian McKellen, Playbill; photography by Martha Swope)

There is much talking to the audience, sometimes with the charm and chutzpah of a stand-up comic; often with the aggression and bile of a psychopath. I have to cajole and attack, to whisper and to declaim. Paul Scofield, playing the part in London, says it’s more wearying than King Lear. Yet talking afterwards in my dressing room or at the stage door (and how refreshing is Broadway’s enthusiasm after the polite approval of English audiences), I am repeatedly asked the same three questions about the part. Question 1: What on earth do you think about as you wait for the show to begin? Answer: I do a few little voice exercises; arrange my long robe so it won’t, hopefully, entangle in the wheels of my chair; and then go to sleep. Question 2: What are those cakes you eat on stage? Answer: They are made principally of yogurt and Cool Whip. (And for that admission, I don’t hope to receive from the manufactuers a free lifetime’s supply of the icky combination!) Question 3: Did you do a lot of research into the life of the real Salieri, whom you portray? The answer to that is less simple. Antonio Salieri was the most famous musician of the 18th century, well-paid and much decorated. Yet such is the transience of riches and success (and such is the theme of Peter Shaffer’s play) that had I wanted to research the true life story of my character, I could have found little other than a portrait or two and a few paragraphs in the numerous biographies of Mozart. The point is that until Amadeus, Salieri was no longer at all well-known: so I was happy to rely on Shaffer’s research and to know that my responsibility was to play only his tune and not add any new themes of my own. (Suppose I had discovered that the original Salieri had an aversion to cakes!)

a lot of it is a result of obsessing and needing to hoard information whenever i get into a specific interest, plus a general enjoyment of doing online research that helps me comb through a shit ton of information LOL.

the first and most obvious source for finding things is through google, where i use the time search feature to capture things like news clippings from 1978-2005 ish (my cutoff of interest). the second is the internet archive (IA)—mostly the text contents section—which is endless, but you can use the time slider and filter by subject to narrow things a little. for both search engines, you never want to clog the search with conjunctions (ex. “and”) or articles (ex. “the”) unless you’re using them with boolean operators (the IA has a guide).

other than the two above, it’s useful to have a list of directories or alternative archives to reference. pretty much any university library has a resources page where you can see many different freely accessible organizations dedicated to preserving old film/tv/news. for example, see here the university of maryland’s list of film/tv archives.

if you want to look at behind the scenes info, i try to get more familiar with the people involved in production. obviously there’s a wealth of interviews with forman/shaffer and actors, but i think people often miss folks like directors of photography, set designers, FX artists etc. so check out the imdb and then go searching their names to see if something comes up! sometimes you can see works in progress that they’ve posted as part of their portfolio which i find super neat! some pretty well-known sites for hosting video and art include artstation, vimeo, and behance.

the thing to know is most of my process lets me get through a mountainous haystack of information, so the stuff you see is less of me knowing where the needle is, and more of getting used to sorting through stuff till i prick my finger 😭

“I got a phone call from Miloš Forman who said, Do you want to try to make a poster for the movie Amadeus? [...] "I started to do doodles and came up with some ideas, but then I realised that the whole big image the producer, Saul Zaentz, was interested in was the figure of Salieri, the dark figure with the mask, death, and something like that had already been used before in London for the play. [...] “And I have to say that until today Americans, if they would know my work and most of them probably wouldn’t, if I say I did the poster for Amadeus then they know it. [...] But it was an incredible calling card when I came to New York and was looking for work as an editorial illustrator. This was a power card I had."

A Parody Album

[...] A Little Nightmare Music is probably the only dream opera ever written. It is based on an actual dream that P.D.Q. Bach had on the night of December 4, 1791, the night that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died and Antonio Salieri didn't [...]

The American composer and parodist Peter Schickele created a one-act opera parodying Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, premiering at Carnegie Hall in 1982 as a "newly exhumed" operatic work under the comedic pseudonym P.D.Q. Bach. A Little Nightmare Music is a play on Mozart's own Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ("A Little Night Music"), as is the loose plot of the opera towards the play. You can listen to the full album here.

"She's on Broadway as Mozart's Wife"

(Alvin Klein, The New York Times)

In her own fashion, the actress Suzanne Lederer was herself chasing Constanze. ''I've been after this part ever since Peter wrote it - I was the second choice the first time around,'' she declared recently, recalling her disappointment when ''they decided to hire British actors'' for the play's New York opening in December 1980. [...] ''We've added more sex and violence,'' she said with a giggle. ''I'm thrown around like crazy. It's very visceral and tactile and I love it. I used to be afraid of falling, but I'm not anymore. The floor seems so much closer after doing this show.'' [...] ''And before Constanze, I knew nothing about classical music. Now I listen to Mozart and say, 'Hey, my husband wrote that.' ''