In 1985, Miloš Forman’s screen adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s stage play Amadeus swept the Academy Awards, winning eight Oscars, including best picture. In that acclaimed film, F Murray Abraham’s Antonio Salieri seethed at the divine gift bestowed upon Tom Hulce’s “vulgar” Mozart – a rapscallion whom God appears to have mischievously made his instrument on Earth.
In the new biographical drama Chevalier, from writer Stefani Robinson (a Writers Guild of America and Emmy award winner for the TV series Atlanta) and director Stephen Williams, the polarities are reversed, with Mozart finding his celebrated genius overshadowed by that of a rival. That this rival would later be reductively referred to as the “Black Mozart” adds a further turn of the screw, although according to Bill Barclay, whose 2019 “play with orchestra” The Chevalier dramatised this story previously, “in many cases Mozart… should be called the ‘white Chevalier’”.
