In chatting with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, Chris Matthews compared the Clinton Machine to the composer Antonio Salieri. In fact, Salieri was the leading composer in Vienna until Mozart came along. But paraphrasing Chris’ telling of it: Salieri was just a workman, a technician. Mozart had inspiration, the feeling, the spirit. Their relationship was famously dramatized in a play by Peter Schafer and adapted in a Milos Forman film. What follows is inspired by Chris Matthews metaphor and in some cases draws on a rescrambling of the dialogue of Peter Schafer.
SALIERI: Ta Ta Ti-Ti / Ta Ti-ti Ta / Ti-Ti Ta Ti-Ti / Ta Ta Ta
STUDENT 1: I’m sorry, I don’t follow you. I’m not trying to be difficult, I just don’t understand.
SALIERI: Can’t you hear it? There’s a cadence… the text has a built in meter to it... Give it to me –
“Health care spend-ing:” Ta Ta Ti-ti… “is kil-ling us:” Ta ti-ti ta.
STUDENT 2: But doesn’t “ta ta ti-ti” detract from the message?
SALIERI: Idiot! You don’t say “ta-ta ti-ti”
STUDENT 1: Cuz I thought we were supposed to drive through to the punctuation.
STUDENT 2: Yeah right…
SALIERI: Fools! The meter. Is the message. The meter. Creates the message.
A VOICE from without:
This was the moment when the improbable beat what Washington always said was inevitable.
SALIERI: What?
THAT VOICE:
This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long - when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause; when we finally gave Americans who'd never participated in politics a reason to stand up and to do so.
SALIERI: Who said that?
STUDENT 1: Pat Buchanan?
STUDENT 2: Marianne Williamson?
THAT MELODIOUS VOICE:
This was the moment when we finally beat back the politics of fear, and doubt, and cynicism; the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment.
SALIERI: I feel dizzy… almost to falling.
THAT CAMELOT VOICE:
Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment - this was the place - where America remembered what it means to hope.
STUDENT 1: Oh. My. God. It’s Mozart. It’s. Mozartttt! Wahoo! I love you Mozart
MOZART: I love you too!
SALIERI: Mozart? Is that the boy Mozart?
STUDENT 2: And look the ruddy-nosed Count’s embracing him.
STUDENT 1: Nice gig if you can get it.
SALIERI: You know this child? The impetuous Mozart?
STUDENT 1: Uh, yes, hello? YouTube? Facebook? Hello?
STUDENT 2: Listen: “The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It's not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white.”
The STUDENTS swoon in rapture.
SALIERI: Can you remember no melody of mine?
From here on, SALIERI speaks to GOD:
SALIERI: Why God, why? Why do you torment me this way? How do your deaf ears suddenly awaken to hear him?
STUDENT 1: Displace one note and there would be diminishment.
STUDENT 2: Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.
SALIERI: I offered up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote.
STUDENT 1: “It's about the past versus the future.”
STUDENT 2: “It's about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today…”
SALIERI: In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen. And I delivered on, well, at least 1 of those 3.
STUDENT 1: Did you fav him?
STUDENT 2: I totally faved him? You too?
More rapture.
SALIERI: But 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 will block him, I swear it. …until the last dog dies.
