Amadeus

At a glance...

• Directed by Miloš Forman
• Released in 1984 (Director's Cut in 2002)
• Runtime 180 minutes
• Watched at home
• Final feelings: To be determined because of recuts and post-release edits!

This is not going to actually be a full review of the contents of the film, Amadeus, because I have learned that every digital version of the film you can see is a director's cut with 20 extra minutes added on from the theatrical release. Before I can understand what parts of the movie are what, I want to watch the theatrical release since that is the way the film was originally distributed and celebrated, though it is bananas learning that the theatrical cut was PG rated while the version everyone else watches has full-on tits and a nice, salacious R rating. Truly, the movie ratings system in America is functioning perfectly¹. So, in a few days my VHS tape will hopefully arrive and I will watch this movie in all its PG glory on a CRT in my bedroom as God intended.

Here's what I am going to rant about: classical music is silly! It's silly and it's so strange and I'm not saying that it needs to die, but maybe we need to let it live at its means and maybe we need to re-evaluate some things. Is this just going to be my Tár review all over again? Maybe so!

I want to be very specific which is that I am actually pretty divorced from the "art music"² world, and I was never that involved in it beyond being conscripted at childhood to learn piano and then cello, which exposed me to the messed up world of hierarchy that is classical music culture as it has been applied for children. I developed a full-on inferiority complex through this stuff that probably persists in messed-up ways to this day. Am I therefore exactly like Tony Salieri? I'll let you be the judge.

Maybe this is just my adult resentment talking but I think it's funny that for all the uptightness art music people have about other forms of music³, they functionally do the same false mythologizing about the composers that this movie is doing. My girlfriend called Amaedus "real-people fiction written about people sufficiently distant that we think it's true", (in comparison to real-people fiction about current day NHL hockey players which is apparently a big thing). And we do think it's true! This movie is based on an 1830 drama by Alexander Pushkin, which composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a favorite of mine, actually adapted as a one-act opera. Amadeus is in a geneology of real-people fiction that has a genuine historical through-line. Antonio Salieri was a well-respected composer and teacher who, because of this hundreds-year-old tradition of making shit up about old guys, has a tiny bio in Britannica.com of which about 1/3 of it simply denies the long-standing rumors of his evil misdeeds.

The music world is obsessed with this entrenched narrative of great composers that goes far beyond these pseudo-pulp stories. When I was a kid, I was told to buy expensive editions of all these pieces that were the "original" text, as opposed to the cheaper versions of the books that sometimes had additional editorial marks from a music editor at the publishing company. I think the idea was that, as a student, I should learn Mozart and Beethoven and Bach through the raw source material, unblemished by modern eyes and brains. By sticking to the original markings, I would, I guess, absorb through osmosis a more authentic and pure understanding of the music of these great men. Someday maybe I would become a piano performance major at a small arts college and only then could I start to learn the process of interpretation of these pieces.

This is a critical form of gatekeeping in art music in general. Who does the interpretation? There's a reason this is Lydia Tár's catchphrase when she does her work. As a student I was taught to follow the urtext markings as a best practice and I followed those rules uncritically. And when those assumptions were broken, it was kind of mind-blowing. I remember my senior year at the local piano competition, I met a guy who was a trained jazz pianist who was fucking around in the more formal western european musical tradition. I have no idea what he played, but I remember being dazzled with how free he was with his interpretation of music he was playing. I remember it was so evocative and strange to me that I asked him afterwards how he learned to play this piece like that, and he gave me a confused look and said, "I don't know. This is just how I play music." Maybe he was bullshitting me, but I felt embarassed; embarassed that I asked the question, embarassed that I assumed he would have this heady response, and ultimately embarassed at my own parroting of these editorial marks that the original composers probably modified, changed, and improvised on all the time.

So this is what I mean about Amadeus and western european art music afficionados being related to each other oppositionally. Obviously we have lots of evidence to know some of the finer details of Mozart's life, but music before the invention of recording as a technology is a vast space of possibility.⁴ As the years went on, the habits of western european musicians did get looser. We know Lizst was a furious improviser, just like we know Mozart was too. But we don't have recordings of Bach or Handel or Haydn or Mozart or Beethoven actually performing or conducting their music. We actually have recordings of Brahms, which are so noisy that a musicologist referred to them as requiring a "pathological imagination" to glean any musical value from them. Here you can even read an article where they denoised the horribly noisy sound clip into something barely less noisy, and then through thorough and painstaking aural archeology, parse and attempt to understand the sound that was captured on this cylinder. This is what it takes to get even a sliver of an objective measure of how any of these great 17th-19th century composers actually performed their craft, and the results are, to me, unconvincing. My point is that actually, it feels to me like modern classical music lovers are making an awful lot of assumptions about these dead white guys and their music that have not been justified, or if they are justified, have not been disseminated to the public in a convincing way.

I refuse to believe that the striving for "accurate" interpretations of these pieces out of some deference to the composer's greatness is anything but self-serving mythologizing. I'm not saying they are exactly the same thing, but so much Baroque and Classical era music was commissioned to uplift and serve these huge institutions of power and wealth, which this movie faithfully depicts. Maybe our closest modern analog today is the musician conscripted to writing an ad jingle. While obviously not the same, is it not possible that maybe for some people at the time, classical music was as frivolous, shallow, or blatantly trend-chasing as an insurance company theme song? Perhaps even to the composers or musicians themselves? While some works are amazing and stand the test of time, some are formulaic and hard to distinguish. Is the fact that music was longer, more "complicated", and less accessible back then enough to really separate the past from the present? Can we truly assume universality to music commissioned by extremely wealthy patrons, who got their wealth not from honest labor but from mass exploitation throughout the whole world?

And what of our own music today? As long as you have functional hardware, you probably won't have the same noisy cylinder experience as Brahms. But will they have CD players in 200 years? Will they still be using Spotify? Will the archived music files on the hard drives of digital pirates the world over still be accessible, readable, playable? In 200 years will they look back on our obsession with money and capital and advertising and think the words, "Nationwide is on your side" was a religious theme, which they will make variations on with reverence for our bygone age? We are not in control of how the future will look at our labors, our productivity, our work.

Furthermore, the selection of which works get to become the pinnacle and representative art for an era deserves interrogation. I did a whole project in my junior year of high school on women composers because it was a specialty of my piano teacher.⁵ I have one theory on why lil' Amadeus was such a prodigious child pianist: he had an older sister who herself was also a child prodigy in piano! Little Wolfgang Amadeus got his start from imitating Maria Anna during her piano lessons! But the difference between the two is that while Wolfie continued to be showcased and uplifted for the rest of his life in music, ol' Nannerl was actually forced to stop being a part of those tours because she had reached a marriagable age. While Wolfgang's works have been kept, preserved, and catalogued for future generations of Chinese children to be compelled to play (I am not bitter), Maria Anna's works, which she continued to write even after her marriage and subsequent historical relegation, which were praised by Wolfgang himself, do not exist anymore and are forever lost. They are simply unimportant to us. The music we don't know about is as fleeting as the music we do, and we would do well to humble our expectations of the fragments we have in their ability to achieve some higher class of meaning or merit.

Who are we to claim any control or expertise in the exact desires and expectations of some random men in 1770 of their work for their jobs? I basically learned most of my classical music as a secular experience, but the music itself was often made to be explicitly Christian, so where's my Lutheran church service to start my Bach piano recital? Some of these musicians have more in common with those rock bands at the non-denomination church concert every Sunday than we want to admit, and if we did admit it, maybe it would be more obvious that the musical value was not as universal or noble as we believe.

I guess my conclusion from all these questions is this: it may serve a particular kind of interest to separate a specific tradition of art so much from the uncomfortable truths and unknowns surrounding it. And doing so may mean the peddling, at best, of a kind of modern liberal bourgeois class signifier that is far more hollow than its stated artistic principles. At worst, it becomes a tool for pure reaction, to point at this made up thing and say, "look at how noble our society and our people used to be!" This obsession with this made-up version of "art" music expresses itself not only in the music, but in the audience and atmosphere it cultivates when it eventually makes its way outside of the world of "music" and into the general public.

To that idea, one thing I can say about Amadeus, even without watching the theatrical cut, is that I'm glad it is doing its part to break down the pedestal of not just these musicians, but the narrative surround the art form in general. My dad respects classical art music because he knows it's great, even though he doesn't know anything to justify that belief. The mythology is enough to convince him of their greatness. It's enough for most people, I assume, which is why seeing Mozart's great operas as being embroiled in frivolous and petty ethnic squabbles and base financial despondence is so refreshing for me, let alone his awkward and cringe-worthy personal character. Sure, Salieri's main angst comes from the perceived greatness of Mozart's music, but also, he's the most annoying religious person in the world! That's what it takes to appreciate this stuff, you have to believe in god so deeply you will take it personally when he makes a boy who is both good at one thing and is also a twat. It's good that Mozart is a twat in this film, it's good that Salieri is the most annoying Christian man you know. Fabiano Caruana is too highly ranked to be a perfect analog for Salieri but if he accidentally hit send on a draft tweet that was like, "I am going to physically torment and destroy Magnus Carlsen because he's proof that god hates me", we might see chess as a little more deranged and a little less like a game that proves you are a genius. I don't know who needs to have their mind changed about classical music in the same way but damn it all I am here to change your mind!

By the way, I don't want 18th century western european music to die completely. I don't want to never be able to listen to Beethoven again. I like listening to classical music. As I get older, I feel less willing to experiment with music and I just go for stuff I know and like and feel comfortable with. A lot of that stuff for me is classical music, even if it wasn't something I chose for myself as a kid. I just don't think we should culturally elevate it as the pinnacle of the universal human expression of music. I don't think you are higher class for listening to classical music now, and I don't think this specific art should be propped up for high class pandering. We should think you are a little silly if you still listen to classical music, and we should give the musicians the same luxury. Maybe if we were a little less clingy to this false idol of greatness, we could try out some new things in our concert halls. Brahms felt the long shadow of Beethoven being cast down on him, which is why his first symphony wasn't made until he was in his 40s. Today we are pushing up the corpses of these two dead men back onto their thrones so that their bones may yet again overshadow our own possibility. At Carnegie Hall, the most performed orchestral works are by Beethoven and Brahms. And when I looked at the next 2 months of symphony concerts in my home town, I see Beethoven and Brahms (and Handel's Messiah which is a Christmas staple).

I know it's a question of economics. I know the conversion of art music into a tax deduction expo for wealthy elites is just the art form staying close to its historical roots. The difference is that while the patrons of old paid for compositions to be dedicated in their name and glory, today's patrons pay for convincing role-play. Make sure not to clap between movements, and in return the conductor will direct the performance to be as close to our collective hallucination of period-accurate as he can, with his own tasteful sprinkling of personality. Meanwhile, every millionaire donor who's name is printed on the back of the program at the symphony is a chump, and they are directly represented on screen in Amadeus as the Emperor Joseph II, of the terrible sight reading and even worse musical taste.

If doing something new means letting the old die, then I say shoot the zombie in the head. It's valiant that in those Beethoven and Brahms concerts on the local symphony calendar, they've got some lesser known guys to pad the runtime. Poulenc for one, and look! Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is in one of these, and he's a mixed-race British guy! But then again, why does the diversity effort in my symphony program feel like those trainings I do at my big corporate job? Is it maybe because big corporate suits buy all the box suites at Benaroya? I know if they put Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as the headline instead of Johannes Brahms, ticket sales will drop 50%. And if none of the concerts in the next 6 months had Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or whatever other household name they are spiritually obligated to tithe to, the donors would make a fuss and ultimately the show would be closed. But how can we say that this scraping by on imitation powdered wig is a real, living art form? How can we say this performance, which only serves to give class credibility to the people in attendance, is even art? Does art come from the transaction between patron and employee, or does it come from the generating of new work? Is art meaningful when it is disembodied? Is it great if we cannot articulate the context from which it was created?

This entire screed is for my dad and boomers like him who think of old white things as inherently good, for the small-town classical music communities I grew up with that insulated themselves from the material conditions of the rest of the world in part through their own in-group of 18th-century european music performance, for the big-money donors and the arts commissions who fund these art LARPers, and for parents who carry the myth that classical music training is uniquely good for your kids. I'm yelling at a cultural myth I was embroiled in as a child but have no idea if it's still present today, though I have a suspicion that it does, if you ask the right people and go to the right places. My final thought is this: art should not be self-satisfied by its own longevity.

/1984/ /refacing/ /it's about your dad/