I'm mediocre and proud of it

I love the movie Amadeus, and the play it's from by Peter Shaffer. Sometimes people complain about it being inaccurate, but it isn't a biopic. Shaffer took real people and created an imaginary story, about the composer Salieri who is confessing to a priest (and in the play, to the audience) that he murdered Mozart, and why and how.

I want to explain why I love it, but I have to share a few scenes from the story.

The main theme of the story is mediocrity, and that's most clear in the play. As a child Salieri looks down on his parents whose only wish is to remain "preserved in mediocrity." He wanted to "blaze like a comet across the firmament of Europe." Salieri prays to God for fame: "Let me be a composer! Grant me sufficient fame to enjoy it." He becomes the most successful musician in Vienna.

Then Mozart comes to town...


He's filled with terror because he fears God hasn't chosen him as his conduit... this is God's music. He finally convinces himself that what he heard was an accident.

Until he meets Mozart...


And sees his music...

Now for the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his nakedness. Tonight at an inn somewhere in this city stands a giggling child who can put on paper, without actually setting down his billiard cue, casual notes which turn my most considered ones into lifeless scratches. Grazie, Signore! ...And my only reward--my sublime privilege--is to be the sole man alive in this time who shall clearly recognize your Incarnation! Grazie e grazie ancora! So be it! From this time we are enemies, You and I!

He achieves fame, but watches his music die, as Mozart's lives on and grows more famous:


At the end of the play he tells us this:

What had I begged for in that church as a boy? Was it not fame? ... I was to be bricked up in fame! Embalmed in fame! Buried in fame--but for work I knew to be absolutely worthless! This was my sentence: I must endure thirty years of being called 'distinguished!' ...and finally --his Masterstroke!-- when my nose had been rubbed in fame to vomiting, it would all be taken away from me. Every scrap. I must survive to see myself become extinct!

As his final act against God and attempt at immortality he writes a note falsely confessing to poisoning Mozart. He'll go down in infamy! Then he slashes his own throat.

Unfortunately he survives the cut, and ends up in the nut house where no one believes him. Mediocre to the last.

And when you feel the dreadful bite of your failures--and hear the taunting of unachievable, uncaring God--I will whisper my name to you: Salieri, Patron Saint of Mediocrities! And in the depth of your downcastness you can pray to me. And I will forgive you. Vi saluto. Mediocrities everywhere--now and to come--I absolve you all. Amen!

I love the destroyed look on the priest's face at the end.

I first loved the movie because of the music, of course. As a young 'un, unversed in the Ways of Mozart, it was a revelation. And it's a really entertaining story with first rate acting and character actors. (There it is!) But what I came to appreciate was the theme of mediocrity.

Because we're not all geniuses. We all have a few things we're really good at, and those things are often in our character, or reflected in our relationships, and measured this way perhaps we all possess a spark of genius. But when it comes to being a Great Athlete or a Great Artist or a Genius Businessperson etc., these tangible things that might leave a record behind that future generations (besides our own kids) will be interested in... well no, most of us won't be that person.

And that knowledge ruins Salieri's life. Except for the melancholy beauty of that last scene where he puts on the mantle of Patron Saint of Mediocrity, and absolves the poor men he's locked up with, and absolves us.

If my fiction is never published, Salieri absolves me. If it's published but little read, Salieri absolves me. If I never get the kind of job I want, Salieri absolves me. If I do and I'm terrible at it, Salieri absolves me. I'm certainly not going to let any of this ruin my pleasant little mediocre life.

I don't need to be an instrument for God's voice. I'm content to be... God's janitor.