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"I have never actually been able to buy anything of official religion", Peter Shaffer once wrote, but then he added as "inescapable fact that to me a life without a sense of the divine is perfecty meaningless." Man's primordial need for worship and the spiritual impoverishment of modern civilization are in fact central and recurrent themes in Shaffer`s plays.
In Amadeus, music is the voice of God, and Amadeus, "the one God loves" as his name translates, is not simply a talented composer, but someone who bespeaks a mystery in melodies, who conjures the magic of being in his notes. As in his preceding 'God-hunting' plays Equus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Shaffer's Amadeus stresses a contrast between the clerical image of God and a concept of God as the spirit, who "bloweth where it listeth", be it as a divine genius in the "obscene child" Mozart, be it in the passion of a seemingly mentally disturbed boy as in Equus, or be it in the radiant figure of a heathen God king as in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. In each of these plays a middle-aged, socially prominent man of conventional faith is confronted with an inspired youth who somehow represents the idea of God. As a central motif the protagonist is always deeply drawn to the manifestation of the divine, but, agonized by his own spiritual aridity next to "God's flute", he has to destroy his antagonist. As a structural analogy between various Shaffer plays, the tragic conflict never lies in the ambiguous personal situation alone, but is triggered and hightened by a clash of religious concepts.
In his youth Salieri is shown as a practical man, and his God is a God of bargains, who stares at the world "with dealer's eyes". When Salieri enters into the Faustian pact with God, promising to pay for fame with a virtuous life, he addresses God in a statue of "an old candle-smoked God in a mulberry robe", fabricated by salesmen and set in a church. He acts as a rationalist and speaks the reasonable language of trade and religious orthodoxy, until he is confronted with someone who presents a fundamental challenge to reason as such and thus to his religion: Mozart as God's chosen one is a deeply paradoxical character, offensive even in terms of conventional behaviour, inspired genius on the one side and vulgar, vain and infantile snob on the other one.
Yet in spite of these seemingly insurmountable contrasts, it is exactly this paradox which suggests the idea of the divine. It is also this paradox to which the playwright Shaffer pays his homage in depicting Mozart's art, the "mystery" as he calls it, for "the best of Mozart's works", he writes about Mozart's music, "demonstrate the thrilling paradox at the heart of created things." Whereas Salieri's music is as spiritless as his faith, Mozart's music becomes a heavenly voice, "the spirit singing through it, unstoppable". He is the one who, in contrast to the "Italians" like Salieri, grasps the complexity of life in his art, and he is the one who says about himself "My tongue is stupid. My heart isn't."
In an article in the New York Times in 1984, Shaffer draws a line from here to his own apprehension of the divine which he characterizes as "very largely esthetic". The existence of Mozart or Shakespeare, notably the creation of works like the C-Minor Mass or the last act of Anthony and Cleopatra, justify for him a belief in the value of mankind in spite of all the horrors in the world. In these great works of art lies a depth of spiritual awareness and a purity of faith, untainted by the constraints of institutionalized religion, which he considers as ultimately humane, yet beyond the grasp of instrumentalizing reason:
I suppose what is most distressing to me in reading history is the way man constantly trivializes the immensity of his experience; the way, for example, he canalizes the greatness of his spiritual awareness into the second-rate formula of a Church - any Church; how he settles for a Church or a Shrine or Synagogue; how he demands a voice, a law, an oracle, and over and over again puts into the hands of other men the reins of repression and the ship again of Sole Interpretation. To me, the greatest tragic factor in History is man's apparent need to mark the intensity of his reaction to life by joining a band.
Peter Shaffer, "'To See the Soul of a Man...,'" New York Times, 24 Oct. 1965
Whereas the greatness of man's spiritual awareness is celebrated by a clearly religious subtext in depicting charismatic figures like Mozart, their fate also provides a pessimistic view on society's capacity to deal with the challenge.
The existence of an inspired person is both a revelation and an offense to the less gifted, and Shaffer is very clear about the destructive potential of their responses. Although the representatives of social and religious convention like Salieri are deeply moved by their encounters with people who seem to be in touch with the divine, they have to destroy what they cannot bear next to them. The vitality of the inspired rival moistens their own spiritual dryness but mocks it at the same time to the point that Mozart's infantile giggle sounds like the laughter of God to Salieri's ears, sneering at his artistic infertility. Salieri is portrayed as spiritually and physically sterile, a minor artist and a hollow man, pitted against the fertile potential of Mozart. His hollowness is highlighted by his hypocrisy, pretending superiority over others, but once confronted with a truly superior being, he is not able to tolerate its existence. His vanity yearns for sole public attention, and he strives for fame up to the point that it corrupts his own being - he has to be remembered, so he insists, "if not in fame, then in infamy."
The tragedy of characters like Salieri lies in their painful awareness of their own mediocrity next to their inspired adversaries. Whereas the rest of society does not even notice the divine spark in Mozart ("too many notes", as listeners dryly comment on Mozart's opera), Salieri sees that God has indeed gifts for his beloved ones, but he has to acknowledge the fact that God chooses his benevolents not according to the rules of religious orthodoxy: God is not bribed with a virtuous life. Fundamentally challenged in his understanding of the divine, Salieri's rage against God, his envy and his murderous plotting mirror society's incapacity to live with a revelation outside of religious conventions or beyond the grasp of human understanding. Salieri's apparent triumph, Mozart's death, highlights the power of convention and mediocrity to silence the voice of God; however, Salieri's "undiminishing pain" suggests the anguish of his success: the barrenness of an impoverished state of being, the remaining existential need for deliverance.
This pessimistic view on man's capacity to confront the extraordinary is not without parallel in Shaffer's earlier works: The divine, manifesting itself in paradoxical, passionate or archaic characters, is always to be destroyed by reducing it - under great suffering - to the state of "normality" (Equus), of "civilization" with its "gifts", namely "greed, hunger and the cross" (The Royal Hunt of the Sun) or - as in Amadeus - to the state of "mediocrity". Intensified by an explicitly religious vocabulary, Shaffer's plays thus insist on the spiritual void of what is conceived as "modern civilization" - and on the importance of an ultimately humane sense of the divine to find a meaning in life.
Kristine Hannak
