Why every great artist needs a nemesis

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Nearly 30 years ago, the debut of “The Fifth Element” introduced “The Diva Dance,” which today holds an elevated position among online challenges. When soprano Inva Mula, who voiced the Diva’s aria, read the sheet music, she told the score’s composer Éric Serra that the human larynx can’t flit between the highest notes or leap across octaval runs with the agility some sections required. Instead, she recorded single notes that Serra digitally spliced together. “The Diva Dance” retains its reputation of being virtually impossible to sing with a natural voice, although a few performers come close.

In the history of musical beefs, some cuts reign supreme. For example, Kendrick Lamar’s hatred of Drake is common knowledge regardless of whether you own either rapper’s albums. Prince’s shocking death in 2016 gave writers a reason to unearth the shady details of his antagonism toward Michael Jackson. Even classical music listeners have their version in what may be the most legendary rivalry of all – the one that also-ran Italian composer Antonio Salieri supposedly nursed with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 

That friction provided the impetus for Peter Shaffer’s Tony award-winning play “Amadeus,” which became a hit movie directed by Milos Forman in 1984. Stage productions of “Amadeus” have run in virtually every decade since its 1979 debut. Forman’s adaptation won eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. Now it comes to Starz as a five-part limited series devised by Joe Barton (“Black Doves”) and starring Paul Bettany as Salieri and Will Sharpe as Mozart.

Now, if you take umbrage at my comparing Mozart to Lamar or Prince, that tells me you weren’t part of the generation who grew up hearing from music teachers that Mozart was the rock star of his day. I’m not questioning the equivalency, just suggesting that the assertion is slightly off target. Back in the ‘80s, some guy named Falco was a rock star for, like, two minutes when his one-hit wonder “Rock Me Amadeus” charted. I would not call his work evergreen. Snippets of Mozart’s, on the other hand, pop up in action movies, video games and TV shows all the time. We take his timelessness for granted in the same way people think anybody can be a star in the Internet age.

But the lasting lesson “Amadeus” teaches us is that real stars have nemeses.

Lamar put Drake on blast in his halftime performance at the 2025 Super Bowl – the climax of which featured his diss track, “Not Like Us,” that only days prior had earned five Grammys. Prince turned down a chance to duet with Jackson on “Bad” over what can only be perceived as a power struggle based on the lyrics. “The first line of that song is, ‘Your butt is mine,’” he told Chris Rock in a 1997 interview. “Now I said, ‘Who’s gonna sing that to who? ‘Cause you sure ain't singing it to me and I sure ain't singing it to you, so right there we got a problem.’”

Years after their deaths, Prince and MJ still have dedicated followings. Currently a movie about Jackson’s early rise, “Michael,” is in theaters and broke box office records in its opening weekend. Neither he nor Prince are around to react to that like Lamar responded in 2024 to his foe with a devastating single he cooked up within 24 hours, and that had millions singing along with it well into the following year.

Of course, Drake has plenty of fans compared to Salieri, who never attained Mozart’s notoriety. At the end of his life, which is where “Amadeus” begins, Salieri views that as God’s great joke.

In his prime, Salieri was a solid songsmith, popular enough to secure a gig as court composer to Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. But Mozart’s genius obliterates Salieri’s limited talent so utterly that the elder musician is bewitched by it. Following Mozart’s successful debut at court, Salieri cozies up to him and pretends to aid his cause. Quietly, though, Salieri sets about destroying him.

What most people don’t realize about the “Amadeus” version of Mozart’s story is that historians posit that it is almost entirely fictional. Shaffer’s script was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 drama, “Mozart and Salieri,” which Pushkin spun from rumors circulating in the wake of Mozart’s death. Pushkin’s text eventually became the libretto that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov employed in his opera of the same name. 

Besides, few would argue Shaffer’s mythmaking lacks representational accuracy. Some of the finest art in the world was inspired by spite-offs, as last year’s PBS documentary series "Renaissance: The Blood and The Beauty" showcased via the three-way cold war between Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. Michelangelo's burning resentment of Da Vinci kept him warm at night, and his hostility toward Raphael fueled his years-long dedication to paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. We know this because Charles Dance recites Michelangelo’s snidest journal passages throughout, bringing a welcome bitchiness to an otherwise staid chapter of art history.

Two reasons Michelangelo shunned Raphael were his youth and good looks. In that vein, every version of “Amadeus” casts a younger heartthrob as Mozart against whoever plays the crusty Salieri. I mean no offense to Bettany or Michael Sheen, who recently signed on to reprise the role for a West End production set for spring of 2027.

But Sharpe’s roles in “The White Lotus” and “Too Much” make him an appropriate vessel for the lascivious vitality that throbs through Shaffer’s imagined version of Mozart, sharpening the story’s implication that Salieri is losing not only his relevance but his potency.

All that said, Salieri is the role that tends to draw the most critical praise and award notices. While both F. Murray Abraham, who played Salieri, and Tom Hulce, who portrayed Mozart, earned Oscar nominations, Abraham went home with the prize.

Regardless, parallels between contemporary artists and Mozart diverge when commercial success figures into the picture. Performers of Prince and Lamar’s caliber enjoy the spoils of their popularity. Both also knew their rivals. In Shaffer’s play and its adaptations, Mozart never knew that Salieri was undermining him while he was alive, and his music only achieved massive popularity after he died.

Meanwhile, Salieri’s invisible seething paralyzes him, turning into the punishment he believes God inflicted on him. “You put into me the perception of the incomparable,” Bettany version says in a bitterly mournful prayer at the end of the second episode, “and then ensured that I would know myself forever mediocre.”

Poor man. But that teaches another more cautionary lesson about collecting nemeses: Salieri never figured out how to channel his gnawing envy into motivation. His mistake was to try to destroy a man whose greatest nemesis was himself, and that singular, burning focus of Mozart’s earned him immortality regardless of what his haters threw at him. Just about anybody can rock with that – including a modern hip-hop artist who transformed a beef into awards gold.

“Amadeus” premieres Friday, May 8 on Starz.

What classics, modern or otherwise, would you like The Swell to spotlight? Let me know in the comments or by email at [email protected] .

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