Marketing Mozart: Wolfy at 255

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – or “Wolfy,” as his facebook friends call him, no doubt taking their cue from the Peter Shaffer play and subsequent Milos Forman film Amadeus – was born in Salzburg, Austria, on this day 255 years ago. Mozart is the immortal master of melody who brought what we now call “the Classical Style” to what many of those who believe in absolutes would consider to be “absolute perfection.” But it’s also a well-worn paradox that, the more celebrated the person, the more unreliable are the commonly-repeated “facts” about him.

The circumstances surrounding Mozart’s early death form a prime example. Was he a victim of chronic kidney disease or of poisoning at the hand of a jealous colleague? Given the scant available evidence, both are possibilities, but the “Salieri poisoned Mozart” thesis is the one that captures the imagination. While ultimately unprovable, the idea that Mozart was murdered simply makes for better drama. The prolific Russian writer Alexander Pushkin and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who based his opera Mozart and Salieri on Pushkin’s play, recognized the dramatic potential of the story. So did Shaffer and Forman, who re-packaged it for modern consumption in Amadeus [watch trailer here]. 

Horsing Around: Tom Hulce as Mozart in Amadeus

J. Peter Brown, one of my esteemed music history professors at IU Bloomington, points out in an online essay that "the film translated what could be accepted as compelling drama into what for many viewers became the time, place, and characters of history. The caveats published with the stage play were never imprinted on celluloid; [in the film,] fiction was never segregated from truth…" But he also cautions that Mozart’s letters and other primary sources “cannot be taken as "just the facts," for nearly every writer of letters and memoirs, as well as the purveyors of rumors, had his own agendas and beliefs. It is from the documents themselves and their interpretation that the Mozartean mythologies flourished.” Brown concludes that the Shaffer/Forman character of Salieri, though drawn with a generous supply of “fictional ornament,” was correct in his summation that “the phenomenon of Mozart transcends explanation.”

F. Murray Abraham as Salieri

Nowhere is the Mozart Phenomenon more ubiquitously present – and exploited – than in his native Salzburg. Plaques and statues in his honor can be seen throughout the city, and the priciest concerts at the prestigious Salzburg Festival (held each August) are the Mozart opera performances at the Haus fur Mozart. Competing firms use his image and mystique to sell their amaretto confections. In Salzburg everyone can get a piece of Mozart – or hear a piece by Mozart, live or recorded, practically 24/7.

One of the Mozart works you are likely to hear in Salzburg – or anywhere that Mozart is performed – is his enigmatic Symphony No. 40 in g minor. [Listen to the first movement here.] About it Brown writes, “Although Mozart's music is often recognized as universal, [this symphony] has received varying interpretations of its essential meaning.” Mozart’s 40^th was the reason that Nicholas Harnoncourt, now recognized as one of the world’s great conductors, picked up the baton in the first place. As a young cellist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, he was dissatisfied with light-hearted interpretations of the G minor symphony. “I was sure that we were doing everything wrong.” After one such performance he decided that “I don’t want to ever play it again in that way, and the next morning I went to the director of the orchestra and said I quit the orchestra…Mozart changed my life.”

"Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it — that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed." - Albert Einstein

"If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song." - Vanessa Carlton

More quotations on Mozart here.