This past weekend's concert in which I played
the organ part for the Mozart Requiem got me
thinking about the movie "Amadeus" and that
wonderful line where Mozart meets Salieri for
the first time and mentions that he has written
a set of variations on one of his melodies.
"It's a quirky little tune" he blurts, "but it
yielded some good things!" The thing is, Mozart
actually did write a set of variations on a tune
by Salieri, even if the script writer/dramatist
took a bit of license in other ways. I recorded
this a few years ago, on a piano in Illinois (to
which I return next weekend), although I haven't
posted this recording until now. And yes,
despite Tom Hulce/Mozart's thoroughly
undiplomatic brashness, it really is a
quirky little tune! Enjoy.
p.s. We've just gotten news that director Milos
Forman has passed, so let's consider this a
memorial to him, too.
You can't get your history from Hollywood.
Everybody knows that.
But we do anyway.
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.
We've been discussing G major chords and the
first movement of Robert Schumann's "Scenes from
Childhood" for the last two weeks on Mondays
here on Pianonoise: the blog. It's more
intriguing than it sounds.
I'm not a big fan of unmitigated hero worship,
so I should warn you Mr. Schumann will be on the
hot seat today. We've already seen him avoid the
obvious by pulling a diminished chord out of his
pocket in our first blog, and then find a way to
affirm it in a way that made it more than just a
musical nicety in part two. Today, we have to
answer the question, "when is a chord not a
chord?" Or worse...
There have been those times when after merely
typing the title of a blog entry I am called
away by some unexpected obligation. Does this
happen to you? You have just settled in to make
use of some stolen bit of time to go on a
creative jag when some other member of the
animal kingdom, on two legs or four (such as the
one currently out to steal the milk from my bowl
of breakfast cereal) makes a demand on your time
which may only take a few minutes, a few hours,
or perhaps change the character of the entire
day. This poses a difficulty for creative
artists trying to concentrate on something they
are trying to produce, compose, write, bring
forth, et cetera.
There are known obligations aplenty as it is,
and it is often hard to negotiate productivity
around these. Sure, I'll think crossly, Dmitri
Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies, but did he
have to mow his lawn?
If you are in the mood for something with the
consistency of paste, the taste of recycled poster board, and an appearance that
will make you marvel about what they can do with plastics these days, the
hotdogs at Jacobs Field are your item. If you are not so inclined, not to worry.
You can always wash it down afterward with something like the hottest, flattest
soda ("pop" in the Midwest, "coke" in the South) I have ever had the inverse
privilege to consume.
