Amadeus

This is the first music, bursting out with the old Salieri's scream. From the opening image it tells us what tone of story the film will be.

• From the outset the strings drive forward in syncopation, striking hard on the weak parts of the beat and creating a hunted, breathless tension.
• Mozart wrote only two symphonies in a minor key, and this one, composed at seventeen, is one of them. Choosing it as the first piece sounds like the film's declaration that it will show not a sunny Mozart but a dark one.
• Amid the furious tutti there is a passage where the oboe offers a melody on its own. It sounds like a single voice heard in the midst of chaos.
• The music does not follow the scene; rather, the scene is cut to the beat of the music. From the very first sequence one can see the film's principle of laying down the music first and editing to it.

This is the scene in which Salieri hears Mozart's music for the first time and comes undone. The film's most famous lines describing music are set over this piece.

• Bassoons and basset horns (an old instrument of the clarinet family, pitched lower than the clarinet) repeat the same figure, laying down a floor. As Salieri says, it sounds like the wheezing of a rusty squeezebox.
• Above it the oboe holds a single long note that unfurls into song, soon taken up by the clarinet. The heart of the movement is the way the instruments pass the same melody from one to another, like a conversation.
• Written for thirteen wind instruments, the piece has not a single string. The texture of sound made by breath is laid bare.
• In the film the piece breaks off abruptly as Salieri rushes from the room. It is often cited as the prime instance where Marriner's principle of not changing a single note of Mozart was not upheld.

It plays as Salieri leafs through the original scores Constanze has brought. Before pages without a single correction, his faith collapses.

• The chorus begins low and heavy, pleading for mercy, before a solo soprano soars high in the middle section. Mozart is said to have written the part with his wife Constanze in mind as its singer.
• Because the story has Constanze bring this very music to Salieri, the woman in the scene and the soprano in the piece seem to merge into one voice.
• The way the choral voices take up the same melody in turn and build upon it recalls the older church music of Bach and Handel. It bears the marks of the period when Mozart was studying these predecessors' scores in Vienna.
• This Mass was never completed. Together with the Requiem that carries the film's ending, two pieces of church music Mozart could not finish support the film at its beginning and its end.

It is at this very passage that Salieri, who had been thwarting Mozart, hears the music of forgiveness and is spellbound.

• Once all the noisy misunderstandings are cleared up, the Count kneels and begs forgiveness. Here the music suddenly slows and grows quiet. The abrupt change in tempo shifts the weight of the scene.
• When the Countess answers gently, the other characters take up her melody one by one until it swells like a great chorus. The passage shows clearly how the ensemble finale, with many characters singing at once, works as an operatic dramatic device.
• Salieri's description of this music as absolute forgiveness ties into the theme of the whole film. For the one who seeks forgiveness is, in the end, Salieri himself.
• The solemn moment does not last; it soon gives way to a fast, exuberant close. This turn, so fitting for comic opera, also mirrors the film's portrait of a Mozart in whom laughter and sorrow coexist.

In the opera written by Mozart after he lost his father, Salieri sees the shadow of the dead father. This scene becomes the starting point of the scheme that follows.

• The first minor chord of this scene also sounds at the very opening of the opera's overture. The audience realizes that the scene has been foretold from the beginning.
• Mozart uses trombones in this scene. At the time, the trombone was mainly an instrument of church and funeral music, so the statue's voice seems to come from beyond the grave.
• The strings wander restlessly up and down the scale, creating the effect of the ground trembling beneath the stage. The mouth of hell that swallows the hero is opened in sound.
• The Estates Theatre is where this opera actually premiered in 1787. The film's performance scene was shot on that very stage.

This is the music of the night when Mozart calls out the notes from his sickbed and Salieri writes them down. The sound that was being assembled in the two men's heads finally rings out as a finished chorus.

• The men's chorus lashes out fiercely at the damned, and the women's chorus answers very softly with a melody pleading for salvation. This extreme contrast is the heart of the movement.
• The film does not let us hear this piece all at once. Because it builds the music up by calling out the parts one by one, the audience can hear for themselves the layers that make up the chorus and orchestra.
• The dictation scene is a fiction invented by Shaffer and Forman. In reality, the person who completed Mozart's Requiem was his pupil Süssmayr.
• The short rhythm the strings drive relentlessly forward seems to echo the urgency of Mozart composing as if hunted on his sickbed.

This is the music that plays over the funeral procession in the rain. The music Mozart could not finish, leaving only eight bars, sends him off on his final journey.

• The strings descend in pairs of notes broken by rests, a figure commonly explained as an imitation of sobbing. The title itself means tears.
• The chorus starts low and climbs doggedly, one note at a time, growing louder as it goes. It sounds like a picture in sound of grief welling up and overflowing.
• Mozart's autograph stops after the first eight bars of this movement. Because Süssmayr wrote the rest, listening to it means listening while guessing where the composer's hand came to a halt.
• The film puts almost no dialogue into this scene. It leaves the space empty so that the music carries all of the scene's emotion.

This is the last music, following Mozart's laugh. Passing beyond the weight of the Requiem, it closes the film with a simple piano melody.

• The piano alone offers the melody, unadorned, as if singing, and the orchestra takes it up in reply. The basic character of the concerto, a conversation between soloist and orchestra, comes through clearly.
• The piece flows calmly until, in the middle, it suddenly turns to the minor and the piano storms ahead at speed. This design, in which light and darkness trade places within a single piece, resembles the two faces of the Mozart in the film.
• On the soundtrack, the solo part of this piece was played by the English pianist Imogen Cooper.
• This is known to have been a concerto Beethoven cherished, and he wrote out his own improvisatory passage (cadenza) for its first movement.