Rehearsal Day 15

26th June 2019

Workshop with the Salieris, Mozart and Constanze

We discussed the plan for the evening over a cup of mint tea –– to focus on particular sections of the writing, with a gentle exploration of the text and the characters for everyone.

I also voiced awareness of the need of the actors to read the entire play together to the end and to explore text that is intense towards the end (Mozart particularly).

Dividing the Salieri text is also important. My theory at this stage is that it almost doesn’t matter who takes which lines (not including the very obvious moments: where Salieri is in conversation with another character, for example). Whatever the Salieris say will be right, once they have the character nailed down –– physically, vocally, psychologically –– and are sensitive and in tune with one other. Particularly following the ‘…ghosts of the future…’ speech that had worked so well in the workshop on The Amadeus Project: Day 12, it feels like the atmosphere and the intensity will carry the work.

The discussion between Mozart and Constanze of her role and character, her relationships within this society was lively and impassioned; ideas and notions around her as a young woman and the actor playing a youthful woman. Seems playful and lovely at this stage of the work.

Warm up

Moving around the studio space in Clair’s house, using and exploring surfaces that may be sometimes ignored: the walls (as support sometimes), wherever and whatever appealed. As we did this individual work, we listened to the music choices made by each of the actors present as their characters.

Various readings of the text

We read Act 1, Scene 7 where Salieri and Mozart meet for the first time and talk music. Mozart takes Salieri’s offering of the march he composed for Mozart and alters it easily and quickly. He is utterly unaware of the implications of his actions on another, it seems. (Note to self: explore this a little further –– might he be more aware and disregarding of the implications??)

We seek an understanding of Salieri’s developing jealousy and self-induced humiliation; his inability to see what his place could potentially be, if his role to date has now been usurped, as he assumes.

In Scene 11, Constanze secretly comes with Mozart’s manuscripts and is propositioned by Salieri. She reacts with astonishment and, in the turning of the status, she humiliates him by hitting him ‘on the botty’. Her laugh at him in that moment –– brilliant.

Scene 12, at the end of Act 1, Salieri is alone. We read the monologue about him and his conversation with God. He will turn from God, because he knows that Mozart is the favoured one; that the music he himself composes is not because he has been chosen.

The bargain he had made with God years earlier, to compose music to celebrate his divinity, is discarded and cast aside. From now on God is his eternal enemy, ‘Nemico Eterno‘. The intensity of rage is red-hot in this speech, a hard, cold tone with God.