Amadeus quotes

View Quote Mozart: "Confutatis maledictis" - when the wicked are confounded. "Flammis Acribus Adictis." How would you translate that?
Salieri: Consigned to flames of woe.
Mozart: Do you believe in it?
Salieri: What?
Mozart: A fire which never dies, burning you forever?
Salieri: Oh yes.
Mozart: Why must I submit samples of my work to some stupid committee just to teach a thirteen-year-old girl?
Count Von Strack: Because His Majesty wishes it.
Mozart: Is the emperor angry with me?
Count Von Strack: Quite the contrary.
Mozart: Then why doesn't he simply appoint me to the post?
Count Von Strack: Mozart, you are not the only composer in Vienna.
Mozart: No. But I'm the best!
Constanze Mozart: Stop it!
Mozart: I am stopping it! Slowly. There? See? I've stopped. Now we're going back.
Constanze Mozart: No!
Mozart: Yes, yes! You don't know where you are! Here, everything goes backwards. People walk backwards, dance backwards, sing backwards, and even talk backwards.
Constanze Mozart: That's stupid.
Mozart: Why? People fart backwards.

View Quote Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man! But I assure you, my music is not.

View Quote I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.

View Quote It's unbelievable, the director has actually torn up a huge section of my music. They say I have to rewrite the opera. But it's perfect as it is! I can't rewrite what's perfect!

View Quote On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.

View Quote 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!

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

View Quote 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.