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A few days before I started watching Amadeusan influx of young people has filled my Tik Tok For you Page: performance of various works by Bach on different orchestral instruments and remixing each song to modern music. This was all thanks to a passing trend, but it briefly made me wonder if classical music is making a comeback in digital pop culture.
If the same children watch the new five-part series Sky TV series, I think they would be amazed. Amadeus goes far beyond music education for the uninitiated, delving deeper into the supposed rivalry between composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri than ever before.
This isn't the best example I've ever come up with, but ideologically I'm right. The constant, unsteady tension in the air means you're never completely at rest – but for now Amadeus narratively sound but visually questionable.
Sky saved its best show of 2025 for last with Amadeus
If you look at YouTube In the comments to the video above, fans of the original play (by Peter Schaffer) and the subsequent film (directed by Milos Forman) are unhappy that the same story is going to be retold. Honestly, I don't blame them. We can hardly lay claim to TV and film adaptations that have no cultural value in themselves, but I don't think Amadeus can be tarred with the same brush.
Even if both of our previous versions had been flawless (a three-hour film is, in my opinion, far from structurally sound), another adaptation would have to add a fresh perspective. Luckily for us, that's exactly what Amadeus does.
Without giving too much away, the series includes Shaffer's own journey to writing his play, and the final scene of episode five breaks the fourth wall in a way that I'm not sure I've ever seen attempted on television. Skye's creative risks went unnoticed, and the rest of the series is equally ambitious.
Sharp captures Mozart's supposed fiery temperament as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and it is the basis of all the chaos of the story. No single episode can contain the multitude of emotions bursting at the seams as Salieri's Mozart (and sometimes both) collapses, celebrates, or threatens to jump out of a window (this is our unintentionally hilarious opening, so watch out).
Amadeus throws everything and the kitchen sink into its narrative, and the charged environment is almost a character in itself. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is the main reason you need to watch it.
Some of our actors have iPhone faces and that's a problem.
None of this is to say that our lead trio aren't exceptional in their own right. The praise for our destructive duo is well deserved, with both Sharpe and Bettany delivering career-best performances. I'm wondering if Bettany will be particularly keen to distance himself from the upcoming Marvel series? VisionQuestbut maybe that's just me being a franchising cynic.
While Gabrielle Creevy (Constance Mozart) hits the right note as the long-suffering mediator between musical rivals, something about the cast bothers me. In my opinion, all the younger members (by this I mean around 40 years old) look like they have an “iPhone face”. I mean, just by looking at them, you can tell they've seen an iPhone in their life.
Makeup and costumes in Amadeus are beautiful, but they don't hide the fact that some of the actors themselves are too modern. Despite this, Sharp particularly surprised me with how stunning his raucous, obscene and hilariously arrogant take on Mozart is… I just have to put aside the fact that he clearly knows how Wi-Fi works.
The five-episode series does suffer from the classic problem of narrative lag between episodes 3 and 4, but when everything else has such a frenetic energy, it's not hard to miss. This, of course, includes the music that Sharped has learned to play (and not just wave his arms while the camera is cleverly positioned to hide the truth).
As exciting as the scandal, drama and confusion of 18th-century Viennese society was, it all comes back to the music. It helps us understand the world, the struggles of Mozart and Salieri and ourselves in the process, and has also pushed me to make conscious additions to my regular work. Spotify playlists.
Their work is that both tortured composers ultimately wanted to be remembered, and thanks Amadeusa mixture of almost everything in their lives, music still comes first.
Broadcast Amadeus from 21 December in the UK on the following offers:
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