Somebody else's refrigerator

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, the second of two children to survive infancy. His musical talent was recognized early; soon he was touring Europe with his parents and sister. His first compositions came when he...

Are you snoring yet?

Let's try this again.

Salieri stared dully at the dagger in his right hand; then, with a cry, he thrust it into his chest and slumped forward...

I don't have this blog hooked up to any medical equipment, but if you are like most of us, your pulse quickened a bit as you read the second example. You probably wanted to keep reading it, even if I couldn't be bothered to make it sound a little less like a dime store novel.

It's not as if the first example doesn't get some readers. It's full of important information. Kind of. But the problem that remains goes to relevance. What does it matter to me (selfish being that I am) what year somebody else was born, even if he was Mozart? I see examples of this principle in action all of the time.

For instance, I learned a long time ago that most of my listeners never set foot on this website. Sites that offer searches for various composers or pieces of music will find stuff from all over the web. Then they "hotlink" to the recordings and play them from their own platform. In some cases they don't acknowledge where they got the recordings, but in others they offer a chance to visit the source. Most people don't take them up on it. They don't care where it came from, they just want the pretty sounds. A recording of Mozart is a recording of Mozart no matter where it comes from. Sometimes even the Mozart part doesn't matter, so long as it is pretty.

That explains why branding is so difficult. But there is another force at work. Information is not very exciting to most of us. It doesn't elevate the blood pressure, sharpen the senses, threaten our survival or promise quick reward. Besides, there is information and there is information.

As I type this, my wife is relating a story to a third party about something we learned yesterday while vacationing in Portland. Most of the narrative details involve the emotional reactions of the persons involved in a conflict that led to the creation of an Oregonian landmark. There are plain facts, but most of these are not a part of my wife's narrative. The story is woven out of human behavior. It is still factually correct, it is still history, but it is the kind of history that eschews names and dates in favor of feelings and desires. These are the things that swirl below the surface of each of us, and are common to everyone. Things we can relate to. Writing an opera by age 9 or a symphony at 4 or whatever is just like reading the accomplishments of somebody else's child on somebody else's refrigerator. The only thing we can remember afterward is being jealous.

When I taught a class on the movie Amadeus last year I observed that the dramatist had made a brilliant decision to see the play and then the movie through the eyes of Salieri, and his dark, brooding feelings. Had Schaffer done what most movies about composers do, which is to record the accomplishments of the composer, in chronological order, desperately trying to make up for the biographical nature of the film by making the love life as crashing as possible, Amadeus wouldn't have been half so interesting. Instead, he chooses for his protagonist someone to whom we can relate. Not because we've ever thought seriously about murdering someone (necessarily), but because Salieri's beef with God is that he doesn't think he got a fair deal. He was going to be chaste, industrious, and faithful, and God was supposed to make him the greatest composer ever. God cheated on the deal by making a loutish childish buffoon a better composer than Salieri. If you work hard you are supposed to succeed. This plainly isn't fair. Is there anybody who doesn't feel like life didn't deliver on everything they thought they had coming?

1756 is just a year. But feeling aggrieved is a basic drive. It dominates the entire inner world of huge portions of our citizenry. Even the relatively well-adjusted can't quite wriggle from its grasp.  Watching in rapt horror to see what Salieri will do next is what moves the film forward, not Mozart's next concert. It is a brilliant conceit. It is so good that Peter Schaffer can't help making it a part of the movie itself.

Mozart is trying to sell the concept of his next opera to the Emperor. Tired of operas with high-flown themes of gods and nobles, he sticks up for the common person. He says, "Who wouldn't rather hear from his hair dresser than Hercules?"

It's not just the alliteration that lands the line. It's the pitch itself. Salieri will never be Hercules.

But he makes a hell of a hair dresser.
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Amadeus as opera

One of the ways to approach the movie "Amadeus" is to think of it as opera--as a drama with a story and a lot of spectacle. There are in fact several things the movie has in common with operas that Mozart himself wrote.

The very first sounds we hear in the movie are the opening, crashing chords from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. They are the very opening chords from the beginning of the overture, and they are there to foreshadow the chords that will sound in the opera's final scene when the dead commandatore, whom the Don has killed, comes back from the beyond to drag him to his punishment in hell. In the movie, these chords are also there from the beginning, and then don't come back until near the end of the movie. In this case, they have been repurposed to represent Salieri, in costume, trying to kill off Mozart by commissioning a Mass for the Dead, and then scaring him into thinking it is for his own funeral. These chords also represent Mozart's father in judgement over his son (at least in Mozart's imagination) and their second use is during the scene in which Mozart sees his father, who is visiting Vienna. The father's first appearance is at the top of a flight of stairs with Mozart at the bottom. After the accompanying dramatic chords have ceased, Mozart bounds up the stairs joyfully to see this glowering individual clad in black crying "Papa!" In this case, the somber music seems not to make any sense, but it paves the way for the later sepulchral symbolism, not to mention hinting that Mozart's relationship with his father may be a bit complicated!

This kind of use of a recurring idea is common to art, and in opera can depict characters or ideas, as in Wagner's celebrated letimotives. But this motivic connection isn't used so bluntly in many of Mozart's operas, and, in the movie, this is really the only instance of a repeated musical cue. The other pieces used in the soundtrack are heard only once.

Mozart's opera Idomineo includes a character making a vow to God in order to secure victory in battle. Enlightenment thinkers were not keen on the idea of vows to God. There were several reasons they didn't work, among them that a contract needed to be between equal parties, and obviously God and a human are not close to equal. There is also no way to be sure that God accepts the deal (an anxiety that Salieri deals with in the movie by saying to the priest after he relates the death of his father "If you were me, wouldn't you think God had accepted your vow?"). Finally, the enlightenment thinkers were deists, who didn't believe God interfered directly in the affairs of men anyway.

There is a long tradition, in opera and literature (and Greek tragedy, etc.) of persons trying to get their way by vow and oracle, and generally coming to a bad end, because in the end, God, or the gods, or fate, turns out to be too strong, or just plain inevitable. Salieri tries to have his way and it doesn't work, either. Yet he persists in his plot to scare Mozart by coming to his door in a mask and asking him to write a Requiem.

Salieri's plan to wear a costume represents another operatic convention. In Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte, for example, a major plot point revolves around two men dressing as foreigners to woo each other's girlfriends (in order to win a bet, which obviously makes it a great idea, right?). That the girls don't recognize the lads is essential in order to make this farce work. That Mozart would somehow not recognize Salieri, his close colleague, who in real life spoke poor German with an Italian accent, doesn't really make any sense unless you are so immersed in the drama not to notice.

Amadeus is full of such resonant connections. Even Mozart's own Marriage of Figaro, with its tale of servants one-upping their noble lords finds an echo in Mozart, the commoner with an attitude, somehow besting the aristocratically appropriate Salieri.

Of course, the relationship between art and life is often tantalizing, and Peter Shaffer plays this card frequently, as in the line about Hercules vs. the hair-dresser, or when Mozart's scolding mother in law morphs into the Queen of the Night (one of my students' favorite scenes).  Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, with the play inside the play, there are many levels to this movie. It is a movie whose characters are creative artists, whose subject matter seems to deal so often with artistic products, and whose story is itself another tale told by a creative genius. Like the character who wakes from a dream only to find himself inside another dream, there is no inside and outside. The works of art present in the movie (and some that are not) shine light on the plot of the "real life" itself. Mozart and Salieri, and everyone else in 1780s Vienna, are living inside the plot of their own opera. 

Oh, heavens!

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I'm going to take a break from my Monday series on Amadeus for a couple of weeks due to the holidays. There will still be blogs on Mondays, but the subject matter will be different. 

Goes to Motive

Seven years after the rumor of Mozart's poisoning by Salieri had consumed Vienna, the news had made its way to Russia. In 1830 Alexander Pushkin wrote a short dramatic poem about it. He did no research, and his portrait of the two composers might owe more to an imaginative interpretation of the poet's relationship with his own critics (guess which one they were?) than to anything historical, but it did supply a couple of necessary ingredients in the making of "Amadeus."

One of these is a motive. In the poem, Salieri has to inform Mozart of his own talent. Hardly the "conceited brat" of the movie, Mozart innocently runs some of his music by his older rival, who, unable to contain himself, exclaims "what depth, what profundity!" Mozart seems not to get the point. "What, is it good?" he asks. "My God, Mozart" returns Salieri. "You don't deserve yourself!" More to the point, Mozart doesn't even recognize his own genius. Salieri alone knows it ("It's I who know!").

Given that Salieri was the more successful composer, lauded by all Vienna, favored by the emperor, and with a string of box office bonanzas to his credit not just in Vienna, but in Paris and Italy as well, one might wonder what could have motivated a man like that to want to kill a less successful rival. There was, after all, enough room on the operatic stage for both of their productions (one composer couldn't write more than an opera or two in a single year, and the needs of the public were enough to keep several in business). What Pushkin does is to answer that question, and to do it well enough that what might seem like a long-shot answer is no longer even questioned by the public today. Of course he did it because he alone knew that he wasn't the greatest composer and it was killing him! The rest of Vienna might have thought he, Salieri, was the greater, but he knew the real truth, and he couldn't stand it!

I'm reminded of an essay by Mark Twain ("What is Man?") in which he makes plain that it is the desire to secure one's own approval that takes precedence over everything else; that even when rescuing another person from drowning, it is not an act of altruism stemming from the desire to keep another from harm, but because one's own scheme of values, one's own inner conscience, requires it. In the end, says Twain, we are answerable first and last to our own inner psychological needs. Thus, it didn't matter what Vienna thought, it mattered what Salieri thought. 

Since the drama that unfolds is all in Salieri's mind, there isn't any need for historical evidence to back it up. And it has the genius of transferring the drama from out in the material world of things and events and into the theater of Salieri's own conscience, and, by extension, into ours.

Because all of us, as the movie will make clear, are Salieri. 

Well that explains it!

It started with a rumor. Rumors tell us why, and give an event purpose. They also comport with what we think we know about the way things work.

  “Mozart is dead,” a Berlin newspaper wrote in December of 1791, less than a month after his death….”Because his body swelled up after death, some people think he was poisoned.”

Although his doctors later went on the record saying his symptoms matched the same disease that carried off any number of his fellow Viennese that same winter, Mozart couldn’t just die that way. After all, he was young, and a genius. You can’t just die of some random disease when you are a young genius, right?

Nobody seems to have been saying who did the poisoning at this point. At least, we have no written accusations. In fact, if there was any poisoning, one of the hundreds of theories about Mozart’s death suggests that he may have been doing it himself, taking frequent doses of medicine that, not uncommon to the 18^th century, had some ingredients in it that were harmful, like mercury, for instance.

It wasn’t until 1823 that a suspect was connected with the crime, and this bit is rather sensational. Antonio Salieri, a ripe old 73 years old, and probably in only partial custody of his wits, tried to kill himself. This much is history. And the rumor that swirled around Vienna afterwards was that he had confessed to the crime of killing Mozart.

People who were with him tried to undo the damage, claiming, in a signed newspaper article, that they had been with Salieri the entire time, and that he never said any such thing. And there is the story that on Salieri’s deathbed he dismissed the whole thing as nonsense.

But it was an attractive rumor. Even Beethoven’s friends were talking about it. We know because in the conversation books of the then completely deaf composer are the written queries and responses of those friends, and these seem quite certain that Salieri is guilty of the crime. Since Beethoven could speak, we do not have records of his answers.

The rumor persisted. It was, after all, very useful. It explained why Mozart had not made more of an impact earlier in the musical world. Musicologists of the succeeding century, often a combative bunch, liked to take out their ire for the non-recognition of Mozart’s genius on the fickle Viennese public, giving themselves the sacred duty of righting a great wrong, and giving the great man a reputation and a career supposedly denied him in life.

The people, on the other hand, the same ones who in many cases had made some of this operas and instrumental pieces the 18^th century equivalent of smash hits, or at least minor hits, needed a reason that all of this came to such a premature end.

Every story needs a good villain.

Salieri was a foreigner. His music was going out of style.  And his last name even begins with an S.

I mean, what else could you possibly need?

Who wants to know?

                                                            

“There will, indeed, be some incredible passages, but, when you write a comedy and want applause, you must exaggerate somewhat and not adhere with too much fidelity to the reality of things.”
                                                     –Mozart, letter to his father, 1781



It's not exactly my favorite part of Amadeus. In fact, it makes me a little queasy.

It isn't part of the movie itself. It's the trailer. I played it for the class I taught about the movie, mostly to show how material from the opening of the play had been re purposed in the theatrical trailer. Said trailer focuses on all of the rumors and innuendos, all the outrageous bits, all of the scandals and the things that would absolutely shock you, good little theater goer with your high-end morals. But of course, you are there because of the rumors, and the gossip, and the naughty bits, because, as the narrator slimily breathes "that's what you reallllly like."

That doesn't exactly stick the landing for me. It's not quite up there with "we were just following orders" but it does have the ring of every person who has ever shown violence on the screen or in other forms, or peddled any product that kills, telling anyone who has a problem with this that, hey, they are just giving people what they want.*

Which has the advantage of being largely true.

It also has the air of anxiety. This is a film that will seem to be about the life of a classical composer. And he's dead. And he's got a wig on. Why on earth should we care? Oh, right. Revenge. Betrayal. Intrigue. Lust. All the good stuff.

This is presumably why they tried so hard to market the movie this way. To get people to see it.

It does not suggest that historical truth is going to be their first priority. Unless it just happens to be really "dizgusting."

Add to this the natural mechanism whereby human beings tend to remember fiction much more readily than they do history. Why, you ask? Another time. But they do. Ask a certain generation about George Washington and out come stories about cherry trees and silver dollars. Ask people about Mozart and...

There is much about this movie that is either historically accurate or at least might be. And a great deal that isn't. And the way to get a handle on it is this: if it's the stuff you remember, the stuff that sticks with you when you leave the theater, it is probably false. The historically accurate stuff is the part you don't really notice. It's in the details.

Those details are fascinating, based on copious research, and played with endlessly to produce new combinations. They are, in the end, not what the movie is about. But if you want the truth, and you are able to go out and find it independently of the movie, it is a very interesting thing to see.

It's the plot that doesn't ring true, and all of the dramatist's decisions to move it forward and make a gripping tale out of a mass of circumstances.

And it's not that the author lies to you, exactly. Most of the time he just presents the material in such a way that you do that yourself.

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* This is also why our mothers fed us cookies and cake for every meal as children. Because that is what we really wanted. Really? Yours made you eat vegetables? Sucker.

Nothing but the truth?

People who have seen "Amadeus," and even people who haven't, when asked if they think the movie is presenting actual history usually hedge their bets a little. Being sophisticated, worldly types, we all know Hollywood tends to stretch the truth, play with it, or bury it completely if the result is at least supposed to provide a more entertaining alternative. But of course, when asked about the life of Mozart, what comes out is from the movie. And why not? That's all most people know. They didn't read books about him, program notes, pamphlets: most people spend no time at all thinking about Mozart, or even being particularly curious. So, naturally, the movie, even if we know it probably is not exactly true, still represents Mozart in our minds, if only because it has no competition.

This can be frustrating for people who know that history and would really prefer people didn't get their history from entertainment, and consequently get the two of them mixed up.

If you happen to be particularly scrupulous in this regard, there are plenty of resources out there to try and help you sort out the truth from the not-so-truthful.

But if that's all you're after, you're kind of missing the point of Amadeus. It isn't a documentary, that's for sure. It isn't really meant to be used to teach people about Mozart (this means you, music teachers!). Its relationship to history is actually quite complicated. Some things are carefully researched; some things are made up, but with a pedigree. And there is value in knowing the history itself, because when you do, you can start to appreciate the genius of the dramatist and how bits of what really happened provide the jumping off point for something completely new and important. But you're still missing the point.

"Amadeus" is a work of art. It isn't meant to tell us what happened, or how it happened. In order to "get it" we need to be looking in a different direction completely. And that, in the end, is where this blog series will be leading us.

Bring your preconceived notions. And a lighter.

Blogging Amadeus

One of the greatest movies ever made about a composer--which is not really about the life of a composer at all--is the movie "Amadeus." Based on a play by Peter Shaffer, directed by Milos Forman, it was released in theaters in 1984, and is now available on DVD in a "director's cut" in which some scenes that were cut for time in the theatrical release were restored in what is now a three-hour run time. Since you don't have to watch it all at once this is more than justified, although if you have a young audience, some of the deleted scenes might better be passed over. In one of them we see a little more of Mrs. Mozart than the film review board might be comfortable with.

I've recently taught a course on this movie, and thought it would be worth trying to translate some of it into a blog series, partly to help teachers who want to use the movie in their classrooms, as well as general film buffs who wondered about the historical authenticity of the film and other matters. And if any of my students would like to use this blog to continue the conversation--or if anyone else wants to jump in--you are welcome.

This blog series will take place on Mondays. (Mondays=Mozart). I plan to follow the general outline of the class, which began with a lengthy prologue in which we discussed the film as history or not, and if not, what it actually is and how we might appreciate it even if we find fault with it, then got into the actual history of the people involved, found out where Peter Shaffer got his ideas for the film by tracing a Viennese rumor through a poem by Pushkin and an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, and then dove into the film itself, not entirely in score order, taking on various big topics as the occasion warranted.

See you back here on Monday!

The Salieri Syndrome

Poor Antonio. He gets to be the poster child for also-rans everywhere. And blamed for a crime he did not commit, to boot.

We save a special scorn for the losers of the championship games. The ones who never got there in the first place, or who can't manage to win as many games as they lose, we don't concern ourselves with. But we want to make sure the ones who challenge for the title feel our wrath, even if we have to torch Icaraus' wings ourselves.

And we have to have winners. My favorite example in this regard is the uproar over baseball's All-Star game several years ago in which a meaningless mid-season exhibition game ended in an extra-innings tie because both sides ran out of pitchers. How dare we not have a winner and a loser! Just because there are 162 games a year in which ties are not permitted and an expanded playoff so that mediocre teams can topple the ones who really earned it is no reason to think Americans can get to sleep after a game that denied half of them their bragging rights!

Knowing who won the game is an important shorthand. It allows an athletic contest to be summed up succinctly around the office in the morning. It permits causal conversation between those who know something about the game and those who know next to nothing.  It allows you not to pay much attention to the details, have the game on in the background, note that some people are throwing a ball around, and move on . Or you can get very passionate about all the statistics and argue about a player's worth. Either way, the winning settles everything nicely. It isn't debatable. Somebody won the game and it is easy to know who. The smaller group who pays close attention knows who and so can the much larger group that doesn't care about the game nearly as much. If you want something to catch on you have to appeal to both groups.

The arts have never solved this problem. If you don't know much about the arts you probably aren't interested in going to a concert or a museum. For the more adventurous there are plethoras of program notes and books and plaques on the museum wall. They can be very interesting--or not. There are certainly plenty or people trying to communicate what they know and love about what is itself a fascinating form or communication. But they can't tell you who won. They can tell you who the important figures are, and they are, after all, history's winners. But in, say, classical music, we don't have head to head contests.

Well, except for one. Thanks to a movie, everybody knows Mozart beat Salieri by a mile, and Salieri got really sore about it and bumped Mozart off. It doesn't have to be history. It fills a need to know who won.

It is quite possible that most folks wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Mozart's music and Salieri's. The internet right now is filled with defenses of the man's music, saying he got a bad rap from the movie, that he is really a genius. This overstates the case a little. Having heard some Salieri myself, I think it is fair to say the man knew how to compose and it should be recognized that he was highly regarded in his day, and with good reason. But there is an obvious qualitative difference when it comes to Mozart.

The people of Mozart's time and place complained that his music was too complicated, just as they did about every other composer history remembers. It took some getting used to, and it doesn't have the kind of predictable repetition that allows you to hum along on first hearing, nor does a single melody reign supreme without dialogue from the supporting cast. In the end, though, somebody figured out that Mozart's music had something in it that humankind would want to keep around. That small group of devotees, the ones whose ears could tell them something the rest couldn't hear, somehow got their way. Now he is everywhere, and the bulk of humanity, most of whom really don't care that much, know at least this--Mozart is champion. He won the title. Suck it, you losers.

The reason they know it is partially by that same mysterious process through which they knew Bach, and Beethoven. Those passionate scholars spread the word, and over the decades, stars were born. But Mozart got an extra bonus. He got a playoff game in the public imagination in which he beat Antonio Salieri. Think that isn't important? Nearly everybody I've talked to knows that the movie isn't really history, and that Salieri probably didn't poison Mozart. And then in the next words out of their mouths they demonstrate that what they think they know is precisely what was in the movie. Why wouldn't it be? What else does the public know about Mozart? Are Mozart biographies flying off the shelves?

Salieri, I thank you. You are helping to keep the Mozart industry alive and flourishing. Not by producing highly dedicated, informed, passionate Mozart lovers, but by keeping the name on everybody's lips. Those ordinary, semi-informed people have an important role to play. Just ask the NFL. I hope you will absolve us, not for being mediocrities, but for abusing you so. Most of us, if remembered at all, get used for something very different after our death than we stood for in life. History is written by the winners, after all. Anyway, you didn't have a bad run. And you were head opera composer for a while, and those Viennese had to blame somebody. So now your are a household word. It is a good thing the emperor liked your operas so much.

Otherwise we would all be fingering somebody like Leopold Kozeluch, whose name I can barely spell or pronounce. Or Padre Martini, whose name lacks that wonderful S that Murray Abraham used to such effect. Or Guiseppi Bonno, who sounds too affable to be guilty of murder. Or some other composer in Mozart's Vienna that had reason to dislike the little man with the brash temper. How about Domenico Cimerosa?

No, you were perfect. And what wasn't perfect got a makeover. And now some of us are actually listening to your music. I listened to your Requiem the other day, in fact.

Not a bad piece. And just the right number of notes, too.

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This week on pianonoise.com, Bach's little organ fugue, Haydn's a few measures short of a minuet, and the piano in disguise. You'll see what I mean on the homepage, updated every Friday.

Mediocrities, I absolve you!

You can't get your history from Hollywood. Everybody knows that.

But we do anyway.

Drama is so much more memorial than history anyhow. Remember what year the Revolutionary War started? Anything about the Stamp Act? How about Washington flipping a coin across the Delaware River?

The last one didn't happen. Which is why that and some dubious arborcide are exactly what an entire generation knows best about our first president.

When it comes to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, everybody knows he was poisoned by Antonio Salieri. Which, of course, didn't happen either.

What makes the matter so much more intriguing, and fun, however, is that, if you believe accounts of an early biographer--Mozart's wife's second husband, who is supposed to have gotten the story from Mozart's wife--, Mozart did actually entertain the notion that he had been poisoned shortly before he died of rheumatic fever. Also, there was a rumor in Vienna, much later, that Salieri did the poisoning. That doesn't mean it happened, however, and neither was Salieri the man in the mask who commissioned the unfinished Requiem. But the Requiem? unfinished. And a guy with a mask? that story goes back to Mozart's widow also, and has to be at least partially true. Mozart was writing on order from an unknown patron. It wasn't Salieri, but it is still a very strange way to commission a piece of music.

At the intersection of myth and fact is a wonderful movie that was released in 1984 by the name of Amadeus, whose director, Milos Forman, died this week. It is hands down the best movie ever made that isn't really about the life of a composer. If it was a more careful biography it would have been a snooze, just like all of the bad Beethoven movies I've seen. But its writer Peter Schaffer, also deceased, was expert at sifting facts, legends, rumors, and just making stuff up in a way that makes Amadeus a fascinating film. It works wonderfully well as drama. As history, it should be approached with caution. And yet, the man did his homework into the real characters at the film's center so well that there are hundreds of true to life details. Things like Mozart's strange laugh, for which there are contemporaneous letters. Or his interest in fart jokes. Mozart's own letters give away his obsessions with this region of the anatomy. Or Salieri's love of sweets. Or the way Mozart composes while playing billiards. These can all be supported by letters and documents of the time, and by eye-witnesses.

The best parts, of course, the parts you remember, didn't actually happen. I'm still in the process of tracking some of this down, but I can tell you that there were plenty of people who thought that Mozart's music was too learned, too complicated, even if the Emperor himself never accused Mozart of writing "too many notes." And there was a real war going on between those who wanted German opera (which included the Emperor) and those who did "incline to the Italian," though it would be a stretch to paint Mozart as a guy who was striking a blow for democratic ideals in opera and against those stories of gods and goddess who were "so lofty they act as if they shit marble!" And then there is my favorite line in the movie, when Emperor Joseph is watching a bunch of dancers jostling about on stage silently because the accompanying music has been banned (by his own manipulated decree). Confused, he asks, "I don't understand....it is modern?" and nails the reaction of a large section of the movie's audience to the most uncompromising art of their own era. It isn't anything Joseph would have actually said, but it is the perfect joke/social commentary, and it says volumes about us.

I'll be participating (as organist) in a concert this weekend in which is presented Mozart's famous last work, the Requiem. It is filled for me with great memories of things cinematic that didn't really happen, such as the scene discussing the Day of Wrath movement, when Salieri's eyes grow wide when asked if he believes in the eternal judgement and wrath to come and he says fervently "oh yes!" turning the knife to torture the dying Mozart some more.

We all have our own interpretations of the movie, and of the Requiem itself. Tim Coles, the concert's conductor, says he find the piece "very honest." This is in distinction to later Requiems by composers like Brahms and Faure, whose music emphasizes comfort and solace, as if they were trying to engage in platitudes and to pull back from death's final punch. But it could be argued that Mozart's account is really colored by a pretty dark theology which was steeped in doctrines that persisted in Catholicism from the Middle Ages on through the Enlightenment, and that his music is really more about the standard grist from the flock-frightening mill than a personal cry of agony when facing grief and loss.

Whatever the case, Mozart did not finish his Requiem. Where he left off is still a mystery: trying to fulfill the commission and earn the money, Mozart's widow conspired with Mozart's student Sussmayer to complete it without letting anyone know who did what exactly. And the result is now anyone's musicological guess.

But judging from the quality of the music I've been practicing this week, I've a hunch that the movie (as well as at least one scholar) got it right when they suggest that Mozart left off during, or after, the Lacrymosa. It is, to me, the last truly gripping piece in the Requiem, right before the general quality abates and the repetition of (earlier) sections begins (my attention always used to start to wander at this point). And, cinematically, it is the perfect place to complete the story of Mozart's life because it contains one great big dramatic AMEN!, the only place in the entire work with such a close.

In any case, I don't find the ending very satisfying. Classical era composers didn't bring back entire movements to close a work the same way they began. Mozart certainly does not. And then, to have the entire piece end on a chord without a third, so inconclusively...

It could say something interesting about death, futility, frustration, knocking at the gates of what we do not know, but it would be borrowing from a vocabulary much later than that of the 18th century.

History does not seem to care about our debate. The movie, which does, chooses to end with that grand amen. And Salieri ends his beef with God by absolving all of the mediocrities who, like him, wanted to be great and just fell short.

Of course, in Salieri's day, he was a great success. And probably not that jealous of Mozart--he seems to have been very kind to him, actually. Mozart, on the other hand, was jealous of just about everybody, including, once in a while, Salieri.

...Salieri, who, it turns out, also wrote a Requiem. We won't be performing it. It is a bit dull, at least those parts I've heard so far. And do you know who he wrote it for?


For himself! For his own funeral!


Now isn't that just spooky? And a great jumping off point for a dramatist.....

Rest in Peace, Milos Forman.