Indeed, according to Shaffer’s original scheme, this element would have been demonstrated even more forcefully than it was by having not a note of Mozart’s music played as he actually wrote it it too would have been filtered through Salieri’s poisoned memory. Shaffer’s masterstroke, from a theatrical point of view, was to have the story narrated by the villain: everything we saw of Mozart was told to us by Antonio Salieri, who has fair claims to being considered the unreliable narrator to end all unreliable narrators.
The play created a new myth of the artist failed by his own character (or lack of it), the artist who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) play the game but the audible evidence of his sublime genius made the story unbearably poignant. All of this was somewhat at the expense of musicology but greatly to the advantage of drama the effect of Shaffer’s outrageous theatrical audacity was, paradoxically, profound, even for those who came to sneer. Shaffer framed his story within a theatrical framework of dazzling flamboyance, cunningly using the music with unerring instinct to heighten the drama. It was the drama of the artist’s struggle against the forces of philistinism, in this case attached toĪ parable about the injustice of the unequal distribution of genius. As soon as I was offered the part of Mozart in the original London stage production of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, I immediately recognized my favorite boyhood genre: the story was not sanitized (in fact, it was rather conspicuously the opposite), but it was still romanticized. Their lives and their works were inextricably intertwined: when they were sad, their music was sad when they were happy, their music overflowed with joy. For me this has been a perfectly logical development: From childhood, biography has been my favorite form of literature, and the key works of my youth were the Lives of the Great Composers, suitably romanticized (and duly sanitized) accounts of the canonic masters from Bach to Tchaikovsky, which showed their heroic struggle to make great art in the face of an indifferent or hostile world. Quite often the Great Dead in question have been artists of one sort or another twice I have played composers (three times, if you count Emanuel Schikaneder in the film version of Amadeus, who-as well as being the first Viennese Hamlet, an original clown, and an impresario of genius- was a prolific songwriter). I’ve been involved in it for most of my career, playing the Great Dead in a surprising number of plays, documentaries, and films I’ve even written two spectacularly bad biographical plays myself. Revisionist Portraits: A Medley of Recent Composer Biopics 263 Notes 297 Bibliography 347 Index 355īiographical dramatization is a tricky business. ‘‘A Long, Dark Coda into the Night’’: The Composer Films of Tony Palmer 217 ‘‘Just an Innocent Bystander’’: The Composer Films of Ken Russell 155 The New Tin Pan Alley: Hollywood Looks at American Popular Songwriters 102 The Classical Style: Composers in the Studio Era 18Ī Song Remembered: Frédéric Chopin Goes to War 81 Will the cinema be that new lyre with strings of light? -Abel Gance, Prism, 1930įoreword by Simon Callow ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: The Lyre of Light 1 1 Reich, biographer of Clara Wieck-Schumann, who has unselfishly and unstintingly opened to me many doors to the world of music and musicians, and to Kevin Brownlow, whose endeavors in the service of film history have shown us all the wayįor new songs a new lyre is needed. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Includes bibliographical references and index. Composers in the movies : studies in musical biography / John C. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tibbetts, John C. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books. Set in Sabon type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. TIBBETTS Foreword by Simon CallowĬomposers in the Movies STUDIES IN MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY
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