I have a confession to make. I don't know anything about classical music. I sang in choir for almost a decade. My illustrious career even includes a performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall (true facts!) but I really don't know anything about the genre. The following is everything I knew about Mozart before I read Amadeus: 1. He wrote Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when he was five. He also wrote Sonata in C, which I used to know how to play on the piano but I don't anymore. He wrote a lot of other things too, I'm sure. 2. He wrote the opera Le Nozze di Figaro which I once saw at The Met and I absolutely LOVED it. It is the only opera I have ever enjoyed. #sorrynotsorry. 3. From Nozze we received the GIFT of an aria "Non so piu cosa son faccio" which was masterfully reinterpreted 225 years later in the video below. Please watch it now. Music has always been one of my cultural knowledge gaps that I'm pretty embarrassed about (see also: I have never seen Star Wars or a single movie from the Marvel franchise). I love music. There are certain artists who I know their full discography. I used to love to sing and play piano, even though I never excelled at either art form. But I can't talk about music the way I talk about theatre. I can talk about musical theatre the way I talk about theatre but that gets us to a very deeply obsessive place that is not the point of this blog. So reading Amadeus taught me lots of things that may or may not be true about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his, for lack of a better word, frenemie, Antonio Salieri, whose name has been lost to history outside of this play and it's film adaptation. One of the things I learned is that Mozart LOVED to curse and had a very immature sense of humor, which I find delightful. The edition of the script I read was based on the 1999 Broadway revival (which has since been returned to the library so this whole blog post is just from my brain), which I didn't choose for a specific reason, it was just the copy I found. This edition had lots of notes from important people that I didn't read, but I did learn that Margaret Thatcher (who you may vaguely remember from AP Euro and more strongly remember from her negative portrayal in the musical Billy Elliot) absolutely hated Amadeus when it was originally produced at the National Theatre. She told Peter Hall (acclaimed British director/director of Amadeus/artistic director of the National Theatre) that there was no way someone like Mozart was so crude and immature. He told her that his portrayal was based on actual letters that he wrote, and sent her copies of Peter Shaffer's (the playwright) source materials. She still refused to believe him and never went back to the National Theatre during Hall's tenure there. Hmm. A politician being presented with factual evidence by an expert and refusing to believe it because it doesn't suit their view of the world. Glad nothing like that happens before! All in all, I would say I enjoyed the play (especially the ridiculousness that is Mozart, who I can only imagine was brought to life brilliantly by Tim Curry in the OBC), but this does fall into the category of, "I really wish I could SEE it instead of read it." Alas, plays are meant to be seen! If I was feeling ambitious today (AKA if I hadn't procrastinated on reading this play until the day it was due back at the library), I would have followed along with the sound cues in the back of the script and played the appropriate music along with their moments in the script. But that would have taken a level of effort I was not prepared for today! I think listening to the music along with the play would have really helped me understand it more. That being said, it was so hard for me to put myself in the shoes of Salieri, the narrator and complicated protagonist/antagonist/antihero? of the play. Salieri was a man who devoted his life to music, even becoming the Court Composer for the Hapsburg Empire (which you may be vaguely remember from AP Euro but more strongly remember from that episode of 30 Rock where Jenna tries to marry the last living Hapsburg prince), but when confronted with the genius of Mozart was simultaneously forced to confront his own mediocrity. Can you imagine hearing Mozart for the first time? Not like for the first time in your life because you probably can't remember that but for the first time EVER. I'm trying to think if I've ever had an experience where I saw something or heard something and was like, "This is gonna change EVERYTHING." Two examples come to mind but neither of them are probably on par with Mozart. 1. When I was 14, I saw In the Heights at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles during their first national tour. Of course at this point they had already won the Tony Award for Best Musical but I didn't really know much about the show aside from that. To this day, it is still the only show I've ever seen that got a standing ovation at intermission. After the show we met Lin-Manuel Miranda at the stage door and actually had a conversation with him because no one in Los Angeles knows anything about stage door-ing and my dad got to connect with him about living in Washington Heights and after we walked away my dad was like, "He is going to be the Rodgers and Hammerstein of your generation," to which I was like, "okay Dad, whatever." 2. When Beyonce dropped her surprise self-titled album and the accompanying visual album. Everyone remembers where they were the moment this music-industry-altering event occurred. I was sitting on my aunt's couch procrastinating writing an essay for my freshman English class that I'm still mad I had to take (I had plenty of AP credit! [I have now referenced the fact that I took AP classes three times in this blog post {did I peak in high school?}]). See also: this map of twitter mentions of Beyonce the night of the release. All this is to say, I could not imagine being in the room where it happened (lol) when Lin played "Champagne" for the first time or literally any room that Beyonce has ever graced with her presence. But that must have been how Salieri felt all the time. That being said, I do firmly believe I am friends with people who will be really famous some day. Are they geniuses? Yet to be seen, but probably not (sorry to all my friends reading this, I love and value you as people and artists!). However, Salieri was a total dick about it. The play is literally his guilt stricken confession that he sabotaged Mozart's career and inadvertently his entire life. Normally I don't like a lot of narration and direct address in a play because it is a #cheap narrative devise but I thought it worked in this play because Salieri is in a conversation with the audience. He addresses them as Ghosts of the Future and invites them to hear his story, mimicking the invocation at the beginning of an opera. It reminded me of the closing monologue in The Tempest, in which Prospero implores the audience to clap and set him free. By the way, you might be hearing about The Tempest a lot in the coming months because I'm now a teaching artist with The Public Theater and I'm working on a production of The Tempest with a bunch of awesome 4th-6th graders at the Hunts Point Alliance for Children. Yay theatre and social outreach and me having a career! Back to the play. So Salieri is about to die and feels like an asshole so he asks the audience if he can show them everything that transpired between Mozart and himself. The rest of the play is Salieri destroying this poor guy's life, which includes financial and artistic sabotage as well as sexually harassing his wife. There are actually multiple scenes in this play where women are treated horribly and there are no female characters that aren't objects of desire for either Mozart, Salieri, or both. Only one female character even speaks in the whole play, and that's Mozart's wife, Constanze, who is pretty dumb and also is the victim of Salieri's sexual harassment and a lot of really manipulative behavior from Mozart. I did not enjoy the female representation in the play. Not one bit. I did like the narrator, Mozart's silliness and dirty humor, and the general concept. It's a play that asks a lot of big questions about art and genius and why some people work so hard their whole life for something that comes naturally to another. I also generally like Peter Shaffer plays (#Equus #DanielRadcliffe) so I'm not really surprised! I was talking to my roommates recently about how if for whatever reason I became important enough that someone wanted to portray me fictionally, it would probably really freak me out. Well, Mozart's dead so he's probably not freaking out about it. Also, he was a narcissist, so he'd probably be fine with it anyway. This has been another wild, all over the place, blog post about a play I should have read a long time ago. Thanks for making it to the end. Next up: Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein!! Yay!!! Currently playing on Broadway but I have not seen or read it so it counts!
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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