Peter Shaffer re-wrote history in his "black opera" Amadeus, then re-wrote the play for Milos Forman's color extravaganza, but its gist remains intact. It is the confession, 32 years after Mozart's death, by his supposed murderer, Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), a mediocre composer who alone, in his envy, perceived the sublime genius of Mozart's music-and vowed to avenge the God who lent divinity to such an "obscene child." Amadeus must be taken on its own terms or not at all; that is, not as historical drama, certainly not as a biopic, but as the vision of a man (Salieri, perhaps Shaffer) obsessed by questions of genius and mediocrity. Seen through Salieri's eyes, Tom Hulce's Mozart never veers from a cartoon portrayal of the "obscene child" (Hulce's portrayal lacks the dark resonance of the British stage version); he is indeed an unlikely if not unworthy vessel of divine inspiration-yet paradoxically, one in whom divine intervention could be the only explanation for his talent. None of which has much to do with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (as the beautiful musical passages will remind us), but rather with man's continuing, feeble attempts to understand art. Milos Forman was allowed to return to his native Czechoslovakia to film Amadeus in the still glorious eighteenth century architecture of Prague. He awed critics and public alike with a visual feast that, we suspect, is also one part history, two parts satire.