Word: mozarts
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Wolfgang Amadcus Mozart began his musical career at age three. By five, he was famous for his performances on the harpsichord and violin. At 26 he arrived at the court of Emperor Joseph II where he would write his greatest music, and forever change the life of court composer Antonio Salieri. For the decade that Mozart lived in Vienna prior to his death at 36, the two musicians were locked in an unspoken rivalry for the favor of both the monarch and the Viennese public...
...story unravels in the confessional of the aged Salieri, an infirmed, half-mad man confined to a mental institute. In the opening scenes, Salieri, who has both attempted suicide and confessed to murdering Mozart, scorns the attentions of the young priest who is sent to absolve him. But perverse pride overcomes derision, and the musician cannot resist recounting the role he played in Mozart's demise...
Hulce's Mozart bears the familiar Forman trademark. The director always seems to be telling his actors: Go bigger, dare more, fill the biggest moviehouse with your passion and technique. Abraham's challenge as Salieri was more daunting. He must be all smoldering menace, a dandy in smirking repose-until, one day, he scans some scribbled Mozart sheet music, and tears of astonishment and fury course down his cheeks. Says Abraham, who has played in everything from Shakespeare to Scarface to a leotarded leaf in the Fruit of the Loom TV spots: "Salieri is a figure tragic...
...wonders: Can this galloping metaphysical thriller find an audience? For the vast majority of today's moviegoers, the 18th century is far more remote than the sci-fi 25th; Salieri is a loser from Loserville; and Mozart, he's the guy who wrote Elvira Madigan, and his first name is Mostly, isn't it? The film's $18 million budget may be less than is spent on many a teenpic flop, but it still makes Amadeus a ricochet roll of the dice; the film will have to bring in more than $40 million...
...commercial risks, though, is to take a Hapsburg Emperor's narrow view of art's bottom line. Amadeus may be a popular film for the same reason it is a good one: it paints, in vibrant strokes, an image of the artist as romantic hero. The textbook Mozart, embalmed in immortality, comes raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment, confuting his chief rival, working himself to death in an effort to put on paper songs no one else can hear. Who among us cannot sympathize, even identify, with such an icon of iconoclasm? In real...