I’m Salieri (On Talent)

So I was re-watching Amadeus the other day. It’s one of my favorite movies, even though plenty of people say that it isn’t historically accurate. Whatever. I don’t care. I love it. I’ve seen it several times, but this time there was a character I especially noticed and related to—that I hadn’t really before.

Amadeus is laid out like this. 

There’s the Emperor; he’s the great patron of the arts, who supports Mozart in his music. 

He wants to be a music fan; he listens to a lot of music. But he has zero natural musical talent himself. He has so little musical facility that he doesn’t even know what good music is vs. what great music is. When asked to critique Mozart’s work, the Emperor has nothing to offer beyond “Too many notes!”

Then there’s Mozart. Mozart is a musical genius. I could explain, but I think it’s better to let Salieri talk about Mozart’s talent: 

“[Mozart] 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.”

I have very rarely been in the presence of a true Mozart-level talent in the writing world. But every so often I get a chill down my spine reading a book—or listening to something someone is reading—and I know that this person is at least close. But wouldn’t we all kill to be like that? To write the perfect novel as if it were dictated to us from above? To have our book come out—within a few drafts, at least—exactly as we envision it in our minds? I believe a true Mozart of the noveling craft is a rare animal indeed.

And then—between the tone-deaf Emperor and the cosmically blessed Mozart—there’s Salieri.

 Salieri is the court composer. He’s good at what he does. His music is perfectly serviceable. But it doesn’t soar like Mozart's. He’s human; he struggles with his music. He drafts and redrafts. And when it’s done, it’s never quite perfect. It could always be better.

Still, Salieri is no Emperor. He’s talented enough to recognize Mozart’s genius. He’s just not talented enough to ever get there himself.

And it’s torture.

[SPOILER!] This is what eventually drives Salieri mad in the end. Being near phenomenal talent, being able to recognize it for what it is—and yet never having the capacity to achieve it himself. Salieri is desperately ambitious and truly loves his art. But he just doesn’t have the capacity to be the composer he truly wants to be.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt like Salieri while I’m writing. I’m good at what I do. But when I read certain authors, I am all too aware of what my own art will never achieve. And every day, when I sit down to work on my novels, I’m painfully aware of how far away they are from the vision of them that I have in my head.

I think a lot of us feel like Salieri, toiling in the mud with the other flawed humans, eking out each little tiny success through massive amounts of blood and sweat—for years or even decades. I think most novelists never stop feeling like this, no matter how much success they find. If there’s any writer ever who talked about writing a whole novel—not just a few transcendent scenes here or there—like it was being dictated from above into their head, I would like to know who they are.

Then again, I was talking to a friend about my Salieri issue a while back—after more than a few glasses of wine, I’ll admit. And just as I ended my rant—with an overly dramatic, drunkenly emotional “and then I realized—I’m Salieri!”—my friend looked at me and said, “yeah, but doesn’t Mozart die young and get buried in a pauper’s grave in that movie? And didn’t Salieri do pretty well for himself, as court composer?”

Well. Technically, Salieri winds up in an insane asylum. But before that, yeah. He has a good, stable career as a musician in the highest court in the land. 

So I have to admit--that made me see this in a different light. Do Salieris struggle? Hell yes. Is it torture, sometimes, to recognize the work of a Mozart and know that what you're doing is just not even coming close? Absolutely. But Salieris are also stable, successful artists. They make good livings for themselves through their art. Sometimes they're acclaimed. Other times they feel dismal about their own talents. But I have a feeling that, in the noveling world, at least, even people I would categorize with Mozart-level abilities sometimes feel like Salieri. Because novel-writing is an extremely demanding task. 

Maybe even the Mozarts of the world still secretly feel like Salieri. Maybe the Mozart state of being is more of an ephemeral than a permament state--it's something you might achieve with one really transcendent scene or poem or novel, but not throughout your career.

And the rest of the time, maybe we're all Salieri--and maybe that's not such a bad thing to be.