Vergeßt Mozart (1985)

After Mozart’s death in 1791, people who had been part of the late composer’s life gather at his deathbed: Mozart’s wife, Constanze Mozart; the composer Antonio Salieri; Mozart’s patron, Baron Gottfried van Swieten; and director Emanuel Schikaneder, librettist of Mozart’s last opera, The Magic Flute. Also present is Count Pergen, head of the imperial secret service, who questions those gathered in order to establish the cause of death. A flashback tells how Mozart stages a musical contest before Joseph II, but his rival Salieri wins. Another flashback depicts Mozart’s initiation into the Freemasons’ lodge by Baron van Swieten. Influenced by its ideals of equality and brotherhood, Mozart rebels against his aristocratic employers, who regard him as a lackey rather than an artist. This leads to a discussion between Mozart and Count Pergen, who considers the Masonic lodges a threat to the authority of the emperor and the Church. Franz Demel, a wax-figure maker who died at the same time as Mozart, successfully asked the composer to give his wife, Magdalena, music lessons while Demel was making Mozart’s wax figure. In another flashback, Count Pergen recounts how, before his marriage to Constanze, Mozart was to be obliged to make an annual compensation payment if the marriage did not go ahead. But Constanze prevented Mozart from signing, saying he did not need to accept such an obligation. Shortly after moving into their shared home, Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro, with which he intended to challenge reverence for authority. Even during its premiere, at the time of the first tremors of the French Revolution, Emperor Joseph II decided to have the opera taken off the stage. While Mozart struggled with health problems and Constanze suffered from his spendthrift ways, Baron van Swieten refused to lend any more money to his fellow lodge member, who was so extravagant. A little later, Mozart took advantage of Constanze’s stay at a spa to have an affair with Magdalena Demel. During this time, a masked stranger commissioned a Requiem from Mozart. The troubled Mozart was convinced that the Requiem was intended for him; but Schikaneder managed to cheer him up with a cheeky joke. Even while he was working on The Magic Flute, Mozart was offered the opportunity by Baron van Swieten to compose La clemenza di Tito for the imperial couple, Leopold II and Marie Luise. To van Swieten’s outrage, however, he declined because of The Magic Flute. After the premiere of The Magic Flute, the Masonic lodge, at its final meeting, honored the opera as an act of support by their brothers Mozart and Schikaneder. Regarding the night of Mozart’s death, Count Pergen suspects that Mozart was poisoned for betraying Masonic secrets through the composition of The Magic Flute, especially since the Masonic oath prescribes death for treason. Schikaneder, in turn, would have been condemned to carry out Mozart’s death sentence with mercury. It emerges, however, that Mozart took the mercury to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. While Count Pergen accuses Salieri of envying Mozart, Constanze thinks Mozart contracted an infection during Salieri’s orgies. As Count Pergen blames everyone present to some degree and searches for the chief culprit, Salieri in turn accuses him of having Mozart eliminated on the government’s orders. Another flashback, however, identifies Demel as the mysterious person who commissioned the Requiem, intending in this way to draw crowds to Mozart’s wax figure. Demel’s furious wife destroyed the figure and, in the ensuing confrontation, killed her husband. Count Pergen tells those present that Demel had destroyed his figures in a fit of madness and then died by suicide; Mozart himself had died quietly. Since the dead inspire more passion than the living, Count Pergen orders those present: “Forget Mozart!”