Will Sharpe plays amadeus-mozart" rel="tag">Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Starz’s new Amadeus, a five-part miniseries that turns Peter Shaffer’s drama into an end-of-life confession told by Antonio Salieri. The series airs at 8 p.m. Friday, May 8.
Paul Bettany plays Salieri, whose late-1824 summons to Constanze Mozart sets the story in motion as he looks back on his own life and on the composer who eclipsed him. Sharpe’s Mozart appears in a story that also stars Gabrielle Creevy and moves partly through 1781 Vienna, where Salieri is portrayed as a respected composer facing a creative block just before Mozart arrives.
The production comes from Joe Barton and runs five hourlong episodes. Shaffer wrote the 1979 play that inspired it, and that play was itself loosely based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 work; Milos Forman later adapted Shaffer’s drama into the 1984 film. Starz is leaning into the same rivalry that made the story endure: Salieri’s own words in the series frame Mozart as one of several prodigies he has known, and as someone whose name he can barely recall by the time he is speaking from the end of his life.
That distance is the point of the new version. Rather than treating the Mozart-Salieri relationship as a simple clash of genius and envy, the miniseries begins with an old man trying to account for the damage, the brilliance and the humiliation that shaped him. By the time Salieri starts his confession, the question is not whether Mozart was exceptional. It is whether the man who lived beside him can make sense of what that meant.
Amadeus airs Friday, May 8, at 8 p.m. on Starz, and the story it tells is built around the confession Salieri can no longer avoid.
