Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Maybe I made a mistake in my career years ago," says Prey, 53, reflectively. "I should probably have switched to more dramatic roles earlier." Outstanding as the guileless Papageno in Mozart's The Magic Flute, the rakish Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus and the clever Figaro in both Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Prey has unwillingly become typecast as an operatic nice guy. It is understandable. Who can see him as a villain...
...fatal fever to complete his last composition. The D Minor Requiem is written for Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach, who wormed a place in history by secretly commissioning the work in order to pass it off as his own. Several bars of the Lacrymosa are probably the last notes Mozart ever wrote. The requiem was completed by his student Franz Süssmayr...
...Mozart's death has been variously ascribed to rheumatic fever, uremia and even murder by poisoning. Alexander Pushkin wrote a play that pinned the guilt on Mozart's musical rival Antonio Salieri, and Rimski-Korsakov turned the literary libel into a miniopera. Playwright Peter Shaffer recently gave the Salieri legend a new stage life with Amadeus, in which Mozart has the sex habits of a randy poodle and the court manners of John McEnroe...
Such greasepaint and graven images are verboten in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's temple of the pure genius: "However much we search the reservoir of our imagination for an image whereby Mozart became real to us, we find it, strangely enough, only in the reports of his eccentricities. It is easier to visualize him making faces than walking in the door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author...
Chasing the ineffable can make gymnastic philosophy and entertaining drama, but Hildesheimer's pursuit is a didactic lust for lifelessness. Having cleansed Mozart of the cliches of romanticism and Victorian propriety, he spills the cliches of existentialism and psychoanalysis. There are speculations on the speculative and a dozen ways to say perhaps. In one breath the man and his art are separated; in another, "we always experience Mozart's music ... as the catharsis resulting from one man's sublimation of his personal crisis." Mozart is certainly elusive, as Hildesheimer claims, but here he is hidden twice: once...