Pursuits: The desire to be famous

You may know Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s famous play about the death of Mozart.

The central character is not the boy genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (from whom the play gets its name) but an obscure composer called Salieri.

 

The play is written from Salieri’s perspective (it begins with him speaking to the audience) and deals with the rumour that Salieri poisoned Mozart. Historians dismiss the gossip about Salieri’s role in Mozart’s untimely demise (he died young) but the conceit of Shaffer’s play is that Salieri actually wants people to believe that he killed Mozart.

 

   And why would he want that? Well, because Salieri is a competent composer but his tunes are relentlessly mediocre. He knows that even though contemporary opinion ranks Salieri and Mozart on par, this is due to the ignorance of the audience. Eventually, he is certain, Mozart’s genius will be recognized and his tunes will live on for centuries. Salieri’s music, on the other hand, will be forgotten.

 

   But Salieri has no desire to be forgotten. He knows that his music is not good enough to stand the test of time. But he believes that if he encourages the rumours that he murdered Mozart, then history will remember his name – if not as a great composer then as the poisoner of Mozart.

 

   It is not as good as being remembered for being a musical genius. But it is fame, anyway.

 

   I saw Shaffer’s play when it first came out with Frank Finlay as Salieri. It has just been revived in England (Chichester, actually, but it should hit the West End) with Rupert Everett in the Salieri role to rave reviews. And you may have seen the movie, starring Murray Abraham as Salieri. Everett’s performance has been hailed as career-defining and my guess is that when Abraham eventually passes on, the one role that will be mentioned in all the obituaries will be his Salieri.

 

   What gives Amadeus its power? Why is the play always being revived? And why are actors so keen to play Salieri?

 

   Well, some of it has to do with Shaffer’s skill as a playwright. But no matter how good a writer Shaffer is, it does seem a bit odd for a play about a composer that nobody has heard of, set in a period that nobody can relate to, should be able to draw in the crowds and become a huge commercial success each time it is revived. I don’t think its popularity has anything to do with a love of classical music. There is relatively little of Mozart’s work in the play and the movie was a hit in those parts of America where they are only dimly aware of who Mozart was.

 

"We will bare our souls on TV. And we will provide every little detail of our lives on social media. It is better to be infamous than unknown. And it is better to sacrifice our privacy than to be anonymous."

   My theory is that the play derives its appeal from a theme that is even more familiar to us today than it was in Mozart and Salieri’s time: the desire to be famous.

 

   At one level, you see this desire expressed in the actions of murderers and lone gunmen. Many assassins and would-be assassins (John Hinckley, Mark Chapman, etc.) seem to be motivated by nothing more than a desire to leave their mark on the world and not be forgotten. I would imagine that the same is true of many psychopaths and terrorists.

 

   But you also see the hunger for fame at a more mundane and banal level. Why do people go on to the Jerry Springer show and get into fist fights with their relatives and spouses? Why are so many people willing to risk humiliation on reality shows? Why do people like the Kardashians or Paris Hilton invite the cameras to record their every move? They do it only because they want to rise above their anonymity and become famous.

 

   In that sense, they are not unlike Salieri, who believes that it is better to be remembered as a murderer than to be forgotten and erased from history. Perhaps the only sensible thing Andy Warhol ever said was when he predicted that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. Such is the crushing anonymity of modern industrial society that people will do anything to stand out from the crowd and be noticed. Notoriety of any sort is vastly preferable to anonymity.

 

   You could stretch the point further by looking at social media. It has now got to the stage where people no longer want to have experiences that they cannot show off about or, at the very least, share with others. Go to any tourist site and you will find that visitors are not interested in looking at the Colosseum/Eiffel Tower/Taj Mahal if they cannot be photographed in front of it. That photo will travel within seconds all across the world on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter.

 

   So it is with restaurants. There was a time when only bloggers and Japanese tourists bothered to take photographs of the food on their plates. But now, everyone does it. Cameraphones have made it easy to transmit those photographs not just to friends and family but to millions of strangers on social networking sites.

 

   You could argue that social media allows people to bond with each other and therefore, encourages the spread of friendship. But I am coming around to the view that social media actually increases the distance between us. We no longer bother with conversations. Instead, we enjoy solitary experiences and then share them with the world through the magic of technology.

 

   Are we that different from Salieri? I don’t think we are. We hate our anonymity so much that we will do anything to try and stand out or to be remembered. We will bare our souls on TV. And we will provide every little detail of our lives on social media. It is better to be infamous than unknown. And it is better to sacrifice our privacy than to be anonymous.