Amadeus — Salieri's complaint against God

What the work does

Miloš Forman’s Amadeus opened in September 1984 and won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham). The film is adapted from Peter Shaffer’s 1979 stage play of the same name; Shaffer wrote both the play and the screenplay. The play was itself loosely based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1830 dramatic poem Mozart and Salieri.

The film’s central premise is Salieri’s account, given to a Catholic priest in his old age, of his rivalry with Mozart, his belief that he hastened Mozart’s death, and his grievance against God. Salieri’s argument — articulated across the film in extended speeches — is that he made a youthful vow of devotion to God in exchange for the gift of musical eminence; that God’s gift to him was the ear to recognise Mozart’s genius but not the hand to produce it; and that God’s actual chosen vessel for divine music was the obscene young Mozart, not the diligent and pious Salieri. Salieri’s closing line, declaring himself the patron saint of mediocrities, is Shaffer’s invention.

The historical Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) was a Venetian-born composer in Vienna and a teacher of Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt. There is no historical evidence that Salieri murdered Mozart; the rumour was current in Vienna in 1791-92 and was repeated in Pushkin’s poem but is not accepted by Mozart historians. The film treats the rumour as the play does — as dramatic frame, not as historical claim. This entry follows the film, not the historical record on the question of Mozart’s death.

Salieri’s complaint as a form

Salieri’s extended grievance against God runs in a register the biblical tradition knows well: the complaint against God, voiced within the framework of address-to-God. The complaint is not nihilism (Salieri does not deny that God exists); it is not atheism (Salieri does not say there is no God to address); it is accusation directed at the God who is taken to exist.

Three broad biblical traditions sit in this register.

Job

The longest sustained complaint against God in scripture is Job’s, across Job 3-31. The form is repeated argument with three friends about why Job has suffered, with Job’s part of the dialogue containing extended complaints to God about the conduct of his life.

Some representative complaints:

“Why did I not perish at birth? Why did I not die as I came from the womb?” (Job 3:11, BSB)

“Why then did You bring me out of the womb? Oh, that I had died, and no eye had seen me! If only I had never come to be, but had been carried from the womb to the grave!” (Job 10:18-19, BSB)

“Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power? Their descendants are established around them, their offspring before their eyes. Their homes are safe from fear; no rod of God is upon them.” (Job 21:7-9, BSB)

The last of these — why do the wicked live on — is closest to Salieri’s complaint structurally. Salieri’s grievance is not that he himself suffers; it is that the gift of music has been given to the wrong person. Job 21’s why do the wicked prosper is the same shape of question: the wrong person is enjoying what the right person was promised.

The lament psalms

The Psalter contains roughly 50-60 lament psalms (estimates vary by counting method). Most include some complaint against God. Psalm 73 is particularly close to Salieri’s structure: the psalmist’s complaint that the wicked seem to prosper while the righteous suffer, with eventual movement (within the psalm) toward acknowledgement that the moral picture changes with longer time-horizons.

Psalm 73:3-5 voices the complaint:

“For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are well-fed. They are free of the burdens of others; they are not afflicted like other men.” (Psalm 73:3-5, BSB)

The psalm closes (after the turn in 73:17) with a recognition that the psalmist’s earlier view was senseless and ignorant (73:22). Salieri’s character makes no such turn; the film stages the complaint without resolution.

The “why have you forsaken me” tradition

Psalm 22:1 — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — is the opening complaint of the psalm Jesus quotes from the cross (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46). The complaint-to-the-still-addressed-God is, in scripture, a position consistent with continuing to address God. Refusing to address God at all would be different from complaint; complaint remains within the relational frame.

What Salieri’s complaint shares with these, and where it differs

Salieri’s complaint shares with the biblical lament tradition:

• Address to God within the framework of belief. Salieri does not stop believing; his complaint is to a God he takes to be real and to have wronged him.
• The grievance is the distribution of gifts. Salieri’s is musical talent; Job’s is health, family, status; the lament-psalmist’s is moral order.
• The witness frame. Salieri narrates to a priest; Job to friends and to God; the psalmist within the temple-prayer tradition.

Salieri’s complaint differs from the biblical tradition in two respects:

• The film does not stage a turn. Job has a turn in chapters 38-42 when God answers (without explaining); the lament psalms typically turn at some point within the psalm; Salieri’s grievance remains the grievance to the end.
• The film’s complaint is voiced in conscious aestheticism. Salieri’s grievance is about art and about who got to make it; the biblical complaints are mostly about life, justice, the moral order. The shapes overlap; the registers differ.

This entry does not adjudicate Salieri’s grievance or the biblical responses. It documents that the complaint-to-God form, used by Shaffer’s Salieri to dramatise his quarrel with the distribution of musical gift, has a long canonical antecedent, and that reading Shaffer’s character with Job’s complaint chapters open produces an instructive parallel rather than a source claim.

For the wider treatment of how popular phrases reach toward divine inscrutability, see God works in mysterious ways. For the related Ecclesiastes register on the apparent absence of moral order, see Eternity in the heart — Ecclesiastes 3:11.

To read the relevant complaint passages in other translations:

• Job 3 — NIV →
• Job 21 — NIV →
• Psalm 73 — NIV →