SOURCE: Adair, Gilbert. “What's Opera, Doc?” Sight and Sound 54, no. 2 (spring 1985): 142-43.

In the following review, Adair examines the relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus.

In the beginning, probably, was the word; or name: Amadeus. Futile as it surely must be to speculate on the various mazy processes of free association rippling through an artist's consciousness when a project enters its formative stage, it might just be worth playing the game with Milos Forman's Amadeus—not only was creativity the subject of Peter Shaffer's play, it was a shortfall of creativity that constituted its own tragic flaw. Why, then, did Shaffer call it ‘Amadeus,’ instead of ‘Mozart’ or, like Rimsky's opera, Mozart and Salieri? Because the word's Latinate coda made it sound more like a ‘title’? Because the us suffix rhymed it, intertextually, with Equus? Or, which seems likelier, because in it lurks deus, Latin for god...