Archbishop Colloredo:
"Your son is an unprincipled, spoiled, conceited brat!"
Salieri:
"That was Mozart. That! That giggling dirty-minded creature I had just seen, crawling on the floor!"
Mozart:
"It's unbelievable, the director has actually torn up a huge section of my music. They say I have to rewrite the opera. But it's perfect as it is! I can't rewrite what's perfect!"
Salieri:
"Actually, the man had no ear at all. But what did it matter. He adored my music."
Salieri:
"The restored third act was bold, brilliant. The fourth... was astounding."
Mozart:
"Sire, only opera can do this. In a play if more than one person speaks at the same time, it's just noise, no one can understand a word. But with opera, with music... with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!"
Mozart:
"Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus... people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!"
Constanze:
"Wolfie, I think you really are going mad. You work like a slave for that idiot actor who won't give you a penny. And here, this is not a ghost! This is a real man who puts down real money. Why on earth won't you finish it? Can you give me one reason I can understand?"
Mozart:
"It's killing me."
Salieri:
"Mozart! Mozart, forgive your assassin! I confess, I killed you..."
Salieri:
"He was my idol. Mozart, I can't think of a time when I didn't know his name. I was still playing childish games and he was playing music for kings and emperors. Even the Pope in Rome! I admit I was jealous when I heard the tales they told about him. Not of the brilliant little prodigy himself, but of his father, who had taught him everything."
Salieri:
"Your merciful God. He destroyed His own beloved, rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory. He killed Mozart and kept me alive to torture! 32 years of torture! 32 years of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter, all the fainter till no one plays it at all, and his..."
Salieri:
"From now on, we are enemies - You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation."
Salieri:
"All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?"
Salieri:
"I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint."
Mozart:
"Will you stay with me while I sleep a little?"
Salieri:
"I'm not leaving you."
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
"Forgive me, sire. I'm a vulgar man, but I assure you that my music is not."
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