Mozart at the Movies

No, I'm not delusional, I know Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart never went to Hollywood. His music has been there many times, though. Most moviegoers have seen or heard of Amadeus, the 1984 Miloš Forman movie made of the maestro's life. There are some errors in those 160 minutes of cinematic storytelling, starting with the poor guy's name. He preferred 'Amadé' and who knows if that brat of a wife of his actually called him 'Wolfie.' He and Salieri knew each other and competed for the best composer gigs, but they weren't arch-enemies as the movie portrays. It's a fun movie even if the facts are not all just right.

Do you have a friend who likes to talk about things? Smart ideas in real conversations? I do, and lately we've been talking about Mozart's music appearing in surprising places. The character Teddy (John Alexander) plays a piece of a Mozart Piano Sonata in the first scene of Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944). With a little bit of research [I used IMDb.com and The Compleat Mozart, edited by Neal Zaslaw and William Cowdery (W.W. Norton, 1990) for this], we were able to find out that this is the third movement of the Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331. This movement is commonly known as the "Turkish March" and was composed when Mozart was in Paris in 1783. Besides its job as the third movement of the Sonata No. 11, it is a popular standalone piece. It got its name because Mozart created it to mimic the sound of Janissary music, percussion-heavy marching music of Turkey. Imagine drums and cymbals of all sizes crashing and jangling--cymbals still mostly come from Turkey, by the way. Why did Capra choose this movement for that scene is still a mystery to me, but I would guess because it is popular and exotic-sounding. Listen for yourself:

Remember the 1952 book Charlotte's Web and the 1973 movie? I was recently amazed to learn that the book's author, E.B. White, had been listening to Mozart's Oboe Concerto , K. 370, as he wrote. Particularly, he heard the slow ('Adagio') movement while writing the spider's death scene, and the third movement ('Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo') for the birth of the baby spiders in spring. He thought these would be the perfect accompaniments for those movements, and I agree, but the creators of the animated film (Hanna-Barbera) felt differently and used more popular-sounding vocal music. It might be fun to read Peter F. Neumeyer's book, The Annotated Charlotte's Web (1994), but unless we find it in a library somewhere, Amazon sellers want at least $50 for a used copy. In the meantime, there's this NPR story and Michael Sims' The Story of Charlotte's Web (2011).

Back to Mozart, though, he composed the Oboe Quartet, K. 370, for the celebrated oboist Friedrich Ramm. Ramm had joined the famous and innovative Mannheim orchestra when he was just fourteen, and moved to Munich when its patron, Karl Theodor became Elector of Bavaria in 1778. Mozart was thrilled with Ramm's oboe tone, and Ramm was delighted with Mozart's oboe writing, so the two became friends. This quartet features the oboe and demands consummate technique from it. Mozart doesn't blend the distinctive sound of the oboe with the mellower strings, but instead allows the oboe to dominate. What do you think?

And then there's Out of Africa, which would have been one of my favorite movies of all time even if it did not feature one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. Remember when

Robert Redford (Denys) brought Meryl Streep (Karen) that grand old record player and proceeded to serenade her and the lions of Kenya with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto? It was magical. This was Mozart's last concerto of any kind, and he composed it just a few months before he died. His clarinet pieces were composed with his friend Anton Stadler in mind, and Mozart knew Stadler's abilities very well. Anton Stadler and his brother Johann both played the clarinet, and Anton S. loved the low register of the clarinet so much he put sibling rivalry aside and played second to Johann so that he could have the lower notes! Mozart understood this and let the clarinet parts of the concerto sing in the lower register against a pillow of strings, flutes, and bassoons. Mozart was a man of musical taste and didn't go in much for flashy technique, although there are some tricky passages in his clarinet pieces. I'll leave you to savor the sublime second movement of mature Mozart as performed by Martin Fröst.