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Inside the Classics

After Hours: Thursday EditionNovember 20

Your turn, Thursday crowd. Let us hear your thoughts on the show, the series, the orchestra, and anything else that's on your mind in the comments, and don't forget to check out the Cutting Room Floor for more on Mozart, the other Mozart, and prodigies in general. Also, keep on coming back to the blog throughout the year - Sarah and I are pretty much always writing...

Our next Inside the Classics shows come up at the end of January, and I can tell you without hesitation that this is a program I've been looking forward to writing and performing for well over a year now. Felix Mendelssohn have been the greatest musical prodigy of all time, and his music, whether written at age 15 or 30, is full of childlike energy and the kind of inner drive that you can't help but get caught up in. It certainly ought to be enough to make you forget momentarily about the long, dark winter we'll undoubtedly be slogging through at that point. I hope you'll be with us, and as always, bring a friend along!

Cutting Room Floor: Mozart On WheelsNovember 20

On the heels of our Mozart extravaganza, here's one last piece of related brilliance for you to enjoy. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for finding it...

(That's Mozart's Symphony No. 40, by the way. Dude has excellent rhythm.)

After Hours: Wednesday EditionNovember 19

If you were with us tonight at Orchestra Hall, here's your chance to let us know what you thought of the show! We really do pay attention to what you tell us when we plan these concerts, so be as specific as you care to be about what parts you thought worked, what you think could use some tweaking, and any big ideas you might have for the future of Inside the Classics.

Also, if you're reading the blog for the first time, click on the Cutting Room Floor tag to see a whole bunch of stuff we didn't have time for in the show. Thanks to everyone for showing up tonight, and I hope we'll see you all again in January!

Last pushNovember 19

Wednesday afternoon before the first show on "Inside the Classics" weeks is always a bit of a mad rush to the finish line. The hardest part of it for me is to get a feel for the flow of the show before we actually perform it once - when we rehearse these concerts, we rehearse the musical excerpts and the featured piece, but we never get a chance to do it with the script and whatever shenanigans we're up to. So, my afternoon pre-concert is spent running and re-running the show in my apartment - and if there's no-one else home, I'll do the script out loud.

When my brain gets weary of repeating the same complicated paragraph for the umpteenth time, I entertain myself with random YouTube searches; here's my current obsession:



I know, I know, I've got an odd sense of humor...

Cutting Room Floor: Mozartian MythsNovember 18

One of the things we're going to be getting into briefly in this week's concerts is the wealth of misinformation that's been floating around about our featured composer ever since a movie called Amadeus came out back in 1984. I was 8 years old at the time, and good little violin-playing nerd that I was, I went to see the film on its first weekend in the theaters. (It should also be noted that I nearly left in tears after the opening scene, in which a decrepit and evil-looking Antonio Salieri attempts a grisly suicide. I didn't know who Salieri was, I only knew that this was a helluva lot more intense than the next-most-intense movie I'd seen at that point, The Fox & The Hound.)

Like a lot of other moviegoers, I erroneously assumed that, in writing and adapting Amadeus, playwright Peter Shaffer's motivation had been to tell Mozart's fascinating life story to a modern audience. This was not remotely the case: Shaffer, who also wrote the disturbing psycho-drama Equus, in which a naked Harry Potter blinds six horses on Broadway, had seen in Mozart the bare bones of a fascinating character, and created a world around him that, while based on a thin layer of history, was mainly fictional. Mozart's excesses, while legendary, probably never approached the garish and off-putting level of Shaffer's character. And despite the guilt-racked protestations of Shaffer's Salieri, there's little to no evidence that the composer had a hand in the real Mozart's premature death at age 35.

While Salieri was certainly a professional rival of Mozart's, there's not much evidence that he even harbored much resentment toward the young phenom, which is only natural, since the two composers achieved roughly equal success in their lifetimes. (Salieri has since faded from historical view, but he was as much a presence in 18th-century musical society as was Mozart, and the free conservatory he founded in Vienna counted Beethoven and Schubert among its alumni.)

Interestingly, the idea that Salieri was responsible for Mozart's death (most scholars guess that rheumatic fever was the real culprit) did not begin with Shaffer, and like so many conspiracy theories, it includes a grain of true history. Rumors that Mozart had been poisoned actually began shortly after the wunderkind's death in 1791, sparked by witness accounts that the body was swollen and bloated. And only five years after Salieri's death in 1825, the Russian literary giant Alexander Pushkin published a longform poem accusing the Italian of having killed off his Austrian rival, and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later used the poem as the libretto for an opera. Shaffer was playing off Pushkin as well when he wrote Amadeus, although he never went as far with the murder plot as did the original.

Mozart has always seemed to be a figure ripe for the taking of dramatic license, and plenty of authors have used the outlines of his biography as fodder for their own melodramatic ideas. One such novel, Dark Melody, imagines a heroine who time-travels back to Mozart's final year of life, and has a whirlwind affair with the dying genius. Another recasts Mozart as the leader of a coven of vampires. And no less an august author than Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, among many, many others) penned a hilarious and touching tribute to Mozart, set in Heaven, in which such notables as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner argue about Wolfgang's life, legacy, and music.

With all this Mozartian fantasy floating around, it's no wonder that we sometimes want to believe more than was true of such an outsized personality. Truth be told, there were a couple of points in my preparations for this week's show when I wrote something I believed to be true into the script, only to find out later that it was part of the myth. If only truth really were stranger than fiction...