"It goes with the harmony!"

"I treat them just like my own children."

"Yet they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one."

"Excuse me, Majesty, but what do you think these could be?"

"I'm working on something that's going to explode like a bomb all over Europe!"

"A single note, hanging there, unwavering."

"Travels fast in Vienna."

"Just leave them with me. I assure you they will be quite safe."

"As you honour the father who has devoted his entire life to yours..."

"I don't like what he did with your opera. It was common."

"I was the most famous composer in Europe."

"Forgive me. We all have patriotic feelings of some kind."

"No one doubts your talent. It's your literary judgment that's in question."

"Mozart, that's wonderful! Wonderful!"

"No! It's right that he should hear! I'm sick to death of it."

"Govern your tongue, Mozart! How dare you!"

"After that, I'll be the richest man in Vienna. I'll pay you back double. Anything."

"It's not indecent. It's highly moral, Majesty."

"I want to meet this young man. Chamberlain, arrange a pleasant welcome for him."

"Madame Cavalieri is here for her lesson, sir."

"Majesty! I don't like to talk against a fellow musician."

"I think you overestimate our dear Viennese, my friend."

"It's entirely new.It's so new, people will go mad for it."

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

"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."

"And do you know what happened? A miracle!"

"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 the voice of God."

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

"All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise Him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?"

"From now on, we are enemies... You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation."

"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!"

"It was terrifying and wonderful to watch. Now a madness began in me. A madness of a man splitting in half. Through my influence, I saw to it Don Giovanni was played only five times in Vienna. But in secret, I went to every one of those five - all alone - unable to help myself, worshipping sound I alone seem to hear. And hour after hour, as I stood there, understanding even more clearly how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son from beyond the grave, I began to see a way - a terrible way - I could finally triumph over God."

"My plan was so simple. It terrified me. First I must get the death mass and then, I must achieve his death."

"His funeral! Imagine it, the cathedral, all Vienna sitting there, his coffin, Mozart's little coffin in the middle, and then, in that silence, music! A divine music bursts out over them all. A great mass of death! Requiem mass for Wolfgang Mozart, composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri! Oh what sublimity, what depth, what passion in the music! Salieri has been touched by God at last. And God is forced to listen! Powerless, powerless to stop it! I, for once in the end, laughing at him!"

"The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? Hmmm? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it; very different when, when you, when you have to do it with your own hands."

"Your merciful God. He destroyed His own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory. He killed Mozart and kept me alive to torture! 32 years of torture! 32 years of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter, all the time fainter till no one plays it at all, and his..."

"I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater, conferring on all who sat there, perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar."

"That was not Mozart laughing, Father... that was God. That was God laughing at me through that obscene giggle..."

"He was my idol. Mozart, I can't think of a time when I didn't know his name. I was still playing childish games and he was playing music for kings and emperors. Even the Pope in Rome! I admit I was jealous when I heard the tales they told about him. Not of the brilliant little prodigy himself, but of his father, who had taught him everything."

"My father, he did not care for music. When I told him how I wished I could be like Mozart, he would say; 'Why? Do you want to be a trained monkey? Would you like me to drag you around Europe, doing tricks like a circus freak?' How could I tell him... what music meant to me?"

"Astounding! It was actually, it was beyond belief. These were first and only drafts of music, but they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. He had simply written down music already finished in his head! Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. It was clear to me that sound I had heard in the Archbishop's palace had been no accident. Here again was the very voice of God! I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink-strokes at an absolute beauty."

"It is miraculous!"

"Leave me alone."

"Do you know who I am?"

"Are they?"

"Can you recall no melody of mine? I was the most famous composer in Europe. I wrote forty operas alone!"

"Here, what about this one?"

"I didn't. That was Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."

"Are you sure you can't leave these and, and come back again?"

"These, are originals?"

"[last lines] Mediocrities everywhere... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you... I absolve you all."

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

"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!"

"Why must I submit samples of my work to some stupid committee just to teach a thirteen-year-old girl?"

"Is the emperor angry with me?"

"Then why doesn't he simply appoint me to the post?"

"No, but I'm the best!"

"Confutatis maledictis - when the wicked are confounded. Flammis Acribus Addictis. How would you translate that?"

"Do you believe in it?"

"A fire which never dies, burning you forever?"

"Sire, only opera can do this. In a play if more than one person speaks at the same time, it's just noise, no one can understand a word. But with opera, with music... with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!"

"Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus... people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!"

"Keep it Majesty, if you want. It's..."

"Where did I stop?"

"We ended in F Major?"

"So now - A minor. Suddenly."

"The Fire."

"Common time."

"Start with the voices. Basses first. Second beat of the first measure - A. Con-fu-ta-tis. Second measure, second beat. Ma-le-dic-tis. G-sharp, of course."

"Third measure, second beat starting on E. Flam-mis a-cri-bus ad-dic-tis. And fourth measure, fourth beat - D. Ma-le-dic-tis, flam-mis a-cri-bus ad-dic-tis."

"Do you have that?"

"Sing it back."

"Good. Now the tenors. Fourth beat of the first measure - C. Con-fu-ta-tis. Second measure, fourth beat on D. Ma-le-dic-tis."

"Fourth measure, second beat - F. Flam-mis a-cri-bus ad-dic-tis, flam-mis a-cri-bus ad-dic-tis."

"Now the orchestra. Second bassoon and bass trombone with the basses. Identical notes and rhythm."

"The first bassoon and tenor trombone -"

"It couldn't be simpler."

"With the tenors. Exactly. The instruments to go with the voices. Trumpets and timpani, tonic and dominant."

"Oh no. Now for the Fire. Strings in unison - ostinato on all - like this."

"Second measure on B."

"Do you have me?"

"Show me."

"Good, good - yes! Put it down. And the next measures exactly the same, rising and rising - C to D to E, up to the dominant chord. Do you see?"

"Yes, yes - go on. The Voca Me. Suddenly sotto voce. Write that down: sotto voce, pianissimo. Voca me cum benedictis. Call me among the blessed."

"C Major. Sopranos and altos in thirds. Altos on C. Sopranos above. Vo-ca, vo-ca me, vo-ca me cum be-ne-dic-tis."

"Yes, and on 'dictis'."

"And underneath, just violins - arpeggio. The descending scale in eighth notes, and then back suddenly to the fire again."

"And that's it. Do you have it?"

"Then let me hear it. All of it. The whole thing from the beginning - now!"

"It's killing me."

"I'm so ashamed."

"Of what?"

"I was foolish. I thought you did not care for my work or me. Forgive me. Forgive me..."

"Papa, the rule is you can only give a penalty that can be performed in the room!"

"But my penalty! I got to have a penalty!"

"Tea? Who wants tea? Let's go out! This calls for a feast. You don't want tea, do you, Papa?"

"I know, let's go dancing! Papa loves parties, don't you?"

"What? How you can be so boring? Tea..."

"Yes, papa. Name it. Name it, I'll do anything you say. Anything."

"How could I not?"

"I... I never knew such music could exist."

"There are no words to describe it. One hears it, and one simply thinks, Salieri!"

"No, no! One hears such sounds, and what can one say but... Salieri!"

"I cannot leave alone a soul in pain."

"It makes no difference. All men are equal in God's eyes."

"Yes, I know that! Oh, that's charming! I'm sorry, I didn't know you wrote that."

"The man you accuse yourself of killing."

"Offer me your confession. I can offer you God's forgiveness."

"My son, there is something dreadful on your soul. Unburden it to me. I'm here only for you. Please talk to me."

"I know a little. I studied it in my youth."

"Here in Vienna."

"I can't say I do. What is it?"

"Because His Majesty wishes it."

"Quite the contrary."

"Mozart, you are not the only composer in Vienna."

"Stop it!"

"No!"

"That's stupid."

"Wolfie, I think you really are going mad. You work like a slave for that idiot actor who won't give you a penny. And here, this is not a ghost! This is a real man who puts down real money. Why on earth won't you finish it? Can you give me one reason I can understand?"

"Wolfie!"

"May I offer you some tea, Herr Mozart?"

"Is it not good?"

"Herr Mozart, why don't you name your son's penalty?!"