films-set-in-the-1770s

"While my father prayed earnestly to God, to "protect commerce", I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: "Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life. Amen". And do you know what happened? A miracle!"

"That was Mozart. That! That giggling dirty-minded creature I had just seen, crawling on the floor!"

"[about the beginning of the third movement of Mozart's Serenade No. 10] Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing! The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. And then, suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God."

"[to Father Vogler] All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise Him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?"

"[addressing a crucifix] From now on, we are enemies... You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation."

"So rose the dreadful ghost from his next and blackest opera. There, on the stage, stood the figure of a dead commander. And I knew - only I understood - that the horrifying apparition was Leopold, raised from the dead! Wolfgang had summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the world! It was terrifying and wonderful to watch. Now a madness began in me. A madness of a man splitting in half. Through my influence, I saw to it Don Giovanni was played five times in Vienna. But in secret, I went to every one of those five - all alone - unable to help myself, worshipping sound I alone seem to hear. And hour after hour, as I stood there, understanding even more clearly how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son from beyond the grave, I began to see a way - a terrible way - I could finally triumph over God."

"[to Father Vogler] My plan was so simple that it terrified me. First, I must get the death mass and then I must achieve his death....His funeral! Imagine it! The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin, Mozart's little coffin in the middle. And then, in that silence, music! A divine music bursts out over them all. A great mass of death! Requiem mass for Wolfgang Mozart. Composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri! Oh what sublimity! What depth! What passion in the music! Salieri has been touched by God at last. And God forced to listen! Powerless, powerless to stop it! I, for once, in the end, laughing at him! The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? Hmmm? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it. Very different when, when you, when you have to do it with your own hands."

"Your merciful God. He destroyed His own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory. He killed Mozart and kept me alive to torture! 32 years of torture! 32 years of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter, all the time fainter till no one plays it at all, and his..."

"[to Father Vogler] I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint."

"The man... The music... The magic... The madness... The murder... The mystery... The motion picture..."

"Everything you've heard is true."

"[from trailer] Are we going to appal you with something confidential and disgusting? Let's hope so, because that is what you really like. Unconfessed crimes of buried wickedness - if that is what brings you to us, the prospect of hearing horrors, you shall not go unrewarded."

"F. Murray Abraham - Antonio Salieri"

"Tom Hulce - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart"

"Elizabeth Berridge - Constanze Mozart"

"Roy Dotrice - Leopold Mozart"

"Simon Callow - Emanuel Schikaneder"

"Christine Ebersole - Katerina Cavalieri"

"Jeffrey Jones - Emperor Joseph II"