"Amadeus, Director's Cut", Featuring the Berkelium String Quartet
474 24th Street, Oakland
August 4, 2025
When I learned that The New Parkway Theater was screening Miloš Forman's visually stunning biopic “Amadeus,” along with a pre-movie string quartet performance, I couldn’t wait to lounge on one of the theater’s comfy sofas and take it all in, even for a late-ish Monday evening showing. The multi-award winning 1984 film is an eminently re-watchable story: a celluloid confessional booth where the audience eavesdrops on what is revealed to Father Vogler in a lunatic asylum, the confession of the aged and ailing composer Antonio Salieri (1750 – 1825), whose intense jealousy of a talent he doesn’t possess has brought him to believe that he is a murderer. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) may have been Salieri’s nemesis and envisaged victim of the mortal sin he confesses to, but it is God who’s Salieri’s true arch-rival. “There is no God of mercy, Father,” Salieri tells the young priest in this glorious tale filled with some of the greatest music ever written. “Just a God of torture.”
I wasn’t aware that the already long film was to be the 20 minute longer director’s cut until the introduction by one of The New Parkway’s employees. But, never having seen that version of a favorite movie I’ve watched many times, I was ready for the just over three-hour running time. And I was even more ready for the quartet, hoping they’d perform pieces by Salieri, played brilliantly in the film by F. Murray Abraham. The screening was the first of the “Music Legends Film/Concert Series” featuring the Berkelium String Quartet, a new chamber ensemble of Bay Area musicians founded in September 2024.
Violinist Dan Flanagan, an instructor of violin at U.C. Berkeley, introduced his fellow quartet members: Karen Shinozaki Sor on violin; Jacob Hansen-Joseph on viola; and Michael Graham on cello. Flanagan told the two dozen or so people in attendance that “Amadeus” is based on the play of the same name by Peter Shaffer which premiered in 1979, and that although Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did indeed know each other, their relationship in the play and film is fictionalized.
The Berkelium String Quartet performing Antonio Salieri’s “Fugue for String Quartet."
First up was Salieri’s “Fugue for String Quartet” (“Fugue in G major”), a brisk, energetic piece that was lovely and lively; it came and went in the blink of an eye. Next was a movement from Mozart’s “Dissonance Quartet” (“Quartet in C major for Strings”), one of Mozart’s most studied compositions and a gorgeous work performed by the quartet with élan. I’d hoped for more Salieri, especially because “Amadeus” focuses mainly on Mozart’s works (obviously). But that was it. Just two pieces?! I thought. Then again, anything more would have kept attendees in the theater until well after midnight.
The quartet took a bow to a smattering of applause, the lights went down, and it was time for the evening’s feature. The fraught first movement of Mozart’s Symphony no. 25 in G minor sees Salieri’s valet, played by Vincent Schiavelli, frantically running up stairs, the candelabra in his panicked grip dripping wax. Once inside Salieri’s bedchamber we see the composer bloody and on the floor, having attempted suicide by slashing his throat.
Told in flashback with Salieri’s confession to Father Vogler set in the present day (circa 1823), “Amadeus” carries the viewer through Salieri’s life as court composer to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, where he meets Mozart for the first time and his resentful jealousy is kindled. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is rendered as something of a gauche buffoon, making Salieri’s invidiousness at his talent all the more acute. Throughout the tale and its many extremely well-edited scenes, Salieri describes his efforts to sabotage Mozart, emerald green with envy and furious at how God mocks him through the magnificent genius of “that giggling dirty-minded creature.” It is riveting and heartbreaking.
41 years after its release the movie holds up incredibly well, due in no small part to the music performed by Sir Neville Marriner and The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, fantastic cinematography by the late Miroslav Ondříček, the excellent costumes, and the detailed sets (with Prague standing in for 18th century Vienna). The extra 20 minutes of the director’s cut didn’t add much to the story, but the additions didn’t bother me, mainly because the photography is so luxuriantly rich.
“I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.”
The ending of the film is one of the most poignant and heartrending scenes in cinema. “Your merciful God…” Salieri sneers with a laugh to Father Vogler. Rather than being absolved by the priest who is astounded at the confession he’s just heard, it is Salieri who does the absolving, blessing his fellow asylum inmates as he’s carted through the madhouse’s corridors in a wheelchair. “I speak for all mediocrities in the world,” he says. “I am their champion; I am their patron saint.”
If you somehow missed “Amadeus” over the past four decades I implore you to see it, especially on the big screen. You may not get the added bonus of a live string quartet, but you’ll certainly share in Signore Salieri’s musical torture. And it’s exquisite.
The next "Music Legends Film / Concert Series" with the Berkelium String Quartet will be at The New Parkway Theater on Wednesday, September 8, featuring "Paganini" by Klaus Kinski (1989), with a performance of Paganini's String Quartet no. 3
