Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State

1984 movie Amadeus puts the creative process of the genius of W.A. Mozart at the center

• The movie exaggerates Mozart's failings and underappreciates the talents of Antonio Salieri, who might not have been amazing at his craft but he was pretty darn good
• Manufacturing such a huge chasm between the two made the movie more exciting overall
• Every highly productive person - we don't even have to speak of geniuses here - often ends up surrounded by resentful and mediocre people who have too much time on their hands
• Mediocre talents are rarely inspired to be around people who are better at the craft than they should be
• They conspire to block and destroy, deploying whatever means they have at their disposal to make it happen
• In the fictional account, this is what Salieri did to Mozart
• He blocks him from getting students by putting out salacious rumors about him and pays for a housemaid who is actually his spy to report back on what Mozart is working on
• While the story is fiction, the moral drama here is real and affects the whole of history
  1. In that scene I describe above, Mozart was putting music to the following words from the famous Sequence of the Death Mass: “Confutatis maledictis, Flammis acribus addictis: Voca me cum benedictis.” A loose version of the message might be: In the afterlife, the wicked are doomed to eternal flames, while the good are surrounded by saints.
  2. So when Salieri puts himself in a position to help write up the Requiem Mass, his real purpose was to steal the music and pretend to be the real composer while having it performed at Mozart’s funeral.
  3. There is this scene in the last days of Mozart when rival composer Antonio Salieri is taking musical dictation from the great man on his deathbed.

   
  

https://brownstone.org/articles/mozart-mediocrity-and-the-administrative-state/