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Guest review by Tara Yonder

Sky’s Amadeus miniseries sets out to revive one of the most deliciously operatic stories ever told about artistic genius – the supposed rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri – for 21st-century viewers. This latest portrayal of the feud that never was, and the persistent myth that Salieri attempted to poison Mozart, comes from Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play ‘Amadeus’ (which itself was inspired by Pushkin’s 1830 play ‘Mozart and Salieri’), and subsequent acclaimed 1984 film of the same name, adapted from the stage play (Shaffer wrote the screenplay) and directed by Milos Forman.

I’m old enough to remember the debut of both the play and the film, and the hoo-har surrounding the film in particular, especially the casting of Tom Hulce as a punky, pink haired, potty-mouthed Mozart with an irritating high, cackling giggle. Critics were largely won over by the inspired casting, its rich emotional landscape and of course Mozart’s magnificent music. Music historians still criticse the film’s historical inaccuracies, but Shaffer never claimed it was intended as an authentic biography of Mozart, describing his play as a “fantasia on [a real-life] theme”.

Tom Hulce as Mozart in the 1984 film ‘Amadeus’

I loved the film ‘Amadeus’, and repeated viewings reveal greater depths. It’s a brilliant, beautifully-crafted film. Visually and aurally arresting, it combines humour and wit, absurdity and poignancy, tenderness and tragedy, and celebrates both Mozart’s genius and the exigencies of his life in late 18th-century Vienna.

The play was revived by the National Theatre in 2016 (to mark the death of Peter Shaffer that year). I saw it twice, and loved it, in particular the way the music and musicians came to the fore in a thrilling piece of complete ‘music-theatre’.

Adam Gillen at Mozart (National Theatre,
London, 2016)
Lucian Msamati as Salieri (National Theatre, London, 2016)

Sky’s five-part miniseries ‘Amadeus’, which dropped on 21 December, mostly proves that some legends are perhaps better left echoing in memory. The creators of this latest incarnation of the Mozart-Salieri myth clearly adore Shaffer’s play and Forman’s film, but admiration is perhaps not the same thing as inspiration. It doesn’t feel like the tribute it might have intended to be.

The problem isn’t that ‘Amadeus’ takes liberties with history; that controversy was there from the start – Shaffer was openly unapologetic about turning Salieri into a mediocrity driven mad by his proximity to genius, and Forman doubled down on this with visual extravagance and black humour. It’s rather than Sky’s version, stretching the narrative into 5 hour-long episodes, somehow finds less to say, padding out familiar scenes with ‘prestige-TV’ glamour and gloom, interlaced with dreary banality, especially in the script, rather than genuine dramatic tension.

True, it’s lavish and visually stunning – the costumes, the wigs, the grand settings (it was filmed in Hungary) – with that uber-high-res, hyper-real format which is now the norm in film and tv drama (see also ‘Black Doves and Giri/Haji’ – both directed by Joe Barton, co-creator of Sky’s ‘Amadeus’, – and ‘Rivals’).

Credit: Adrienn Szabo/Sky

Mozart’s genius is repeatedly asserted but hardly truly felt: we are told he is transcendent, but rarely allowed to actually experience that transcendence because there are so few examples (instead we have music by, amongst others, Jonny Greenwood, and Max Richter). What was shocking in the original play and film – the gleeful vulgarity, the blasphemous rage at God, the audacity of portraying divine talent as a cruel joke – here feels pedestrian, superficial or simply contrived. There are the obligatory gratuitously lewd scenes, and plenty of zeitgeisty swearing (though far less scatological than in the original play or Mozart’s own letters), but this adds little to the overall narrative. If it’s intended to shock, it never really lands.

Paul Bettany is well cast as Salieri, emotions simmering beneath an austere, thin-lipped surface, while Will Sharpe plays Mozart as childish and brilliant. The scenes between the two do have a crackle of real tension, and overall the series is confidently acted and staged, and undeniably ‘modern’.

But other aspects of the casting simply grate. There’s the ‘diverse casting’ we’ve come to expect from 21st-century tv/film drama, and while that may not matter in fiction, it feels clunky and inaccurate in the portrayal of real historical figures at a particular period in history (for example, women did not play in orchestras in the 18th century). And overall, it’s hard to feel empathy or connection with any of the characters (except perhaps Mozart’s long-suffering wife Constanze) so one never truly cares about their fortunes.

But the greatest heresy is against the music, which is strangely absent when it should be centre stage. Sure, there are excerpts, but while the music was omnipresent in the original play and film, providing a powerful narrative and character all of its own (in particular, the quotes from Mozart’s Requiem), there is simply not enough in this series. It becomes footnote to the main characters, and their egos and jealousy; thus, Mozart’s sublime pieces serve as background, rather than argument. ‘Amadeus’ is, first and foremost, about the music – music which should overwhelm the narrative, interrupt and challenge it, and impel the audience into the same state of awe that overwhelms Salieri.

Sky’s ‘Amadeus’ is technically accomplished, visually stunning, and intermittently entertaining. Watch it as one might ‘Rivals’ and it’s fun and unserious, the ideal drama for our narcissistic, unserious times, but in no way does this feel like a worthy tribute to the original play and film. And that’s a shame because it could have been a great opportunity to create fine drama on an obviously very large budget.

This remake is not that bad. It’s clearly well-intentioned, often intelligent, and occasionally arresting. But it forgets the crucial thing that made the story immortal and universally compelling: Mozart was not great because others envied him. He was great – and others envied him – because he made contact with something eternal and gave it voice.

Tara Yonder is a music lover, amateur pianist, and unashamed dilettante

Header image credit: Sky

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Opus 109 – Vikingur Olafsson

A late masterpiece by Beethoven lies at the heart of this new release by Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson to create a dialogue across the centuries.

The works of Beethoven’s third creative period feel both intimate and cosmic. It is the music of the future, yet it is fuelled by the music of the past – the music of Bach.

Vikingur Olafsson

Olafsson eschews the usual custom of presenting Beethoven’s final three sonatas together and instead places the transcendent Opus 109 alongside pieces by J S Bach and Franz Schubert as well as Beethoven’s Sonata Ppus 90 to create a ‘concept album’ where pieces connect and reflect.

For Olafsson, it was Bach’s Goldberg Variations (which he recorded in 2023) that drew him to Beethoven’s last three sonatas. He “felt the presence” of Bach in these late masterpieces, works where Bach’s influence is most strongly felt in their “wild polyphony”. The Sonata Opus 90, meanwhile, offers a prelude to the Opus 109 with its intimate, fleeting first movement and warm second movement, while also looking forward to Schubert’s early period sonata in E minor, D566, also scored in two movements. The other works on the album are Bach’s prelude in E major from the Well-Tempered Clavier and the imposing E minor Partita, perhaps the greatest of his keyboard suites.

Another unifying thread through the album is that all the pieces are in the key of E (major and minor modes) which for Ólafsson, who has a form of synaesthesia, represents lush and vibrant shades of green.

The album opens with the Prelude No. 9 in E from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, played with Olafsson’s trademark luminous tone. It’s an intimate opener and contrasts with the drama of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 27, the first movement of which is imposing yet carries with it, especially in the second movement, the same airy elegance of the Bach Prelude.

The E minor Partita is serious, majestic, articulated with clean Baroque detachment and sensitive voicing. Olafsson finds the same intimacy in the middle movements of the Partita, in particular in the Allemande, which is almost tender in its counterpoint. The Sarabande, prayer-like and sombre, has an improvisatory quality. The closing Gigue, meanwhile, is energetic and crisply articulated.

We stay with E minor in Schubert’s two-movement Sonata D566. Olfasson’s transparent sound and subtle phrasing suit Schubert and he brings a warm cantabile to the music, in particular in the second movement.

With his characteristic clarity, poetic imagination and instinct for colour, Ólafsson approaches Beethoven’s late-period masterwork as a living, breathing meditation – fragile, searching, ultimately transcendent. The opening movement is natural, almost spontaneous, with a conversational quality in its phrasing.

The middle movement bursts forth with a controlled ferocity. Here, Ólafsson’s articulation is exceptionally clean, almost crystalline, but never merely virtuosic.

The emotional heart of this sonata is the third movement, with its tender, prayerful theme. Each variation has its own emotional landscape, shaped with meticulous attention to detail and rich in genuine feeling, yet Olafsson never loses sight of the overall narrative arc of this movement. His voicing allows inner lines to glow while the delicate filigree in the upper registers shimmers delicately. The music seems to unfold in a single, unbroken breath, time almost suspended in the later variations. Here is the music’s spiritual core and Olfasson invites us to bask in its radiance.

The album closes with the Sarabande from the E major French Suite, as Olafssons takes us back to the beginning, as it were, with J S Bach, the daddy of them all.

As with his previous releases, notably his recordings ‘Rameau and Debussy’ and ‘From Afar’, Olfasson brings a fresh perspective to well-known repertoire through thoughtful programming, finding intriguing connections and shining a new light on the familiar. And it’s all beautifully presented too.

Opus 109 is released on Deutsche Grammophon on CD and streaming

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by Michael Johnson

Of all the musical jewels Olivier Messiaen left us, his Turangalîla-symphonie is most commonly associated with him. It is not a symphony in any traditional sense but rather a mosaic of ten movements that unfolds over an hour and twenty minutes. One critic jocularly characterized it as replete with “dancing rhythms, tantric sex and laughing gas”. Messiaen called it “superhuman, overflowing, dazzling and an exercise in abandonment”.

In this complete version, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with Yuja Wang at the piano, the drama and the abandonment are among the best of many recordings.

Next year marks the 80th anniversary of Messiaen’s two-year struggle to hold all the disparate elements of this masterpiece together.

His prolific output seems sure to survive in the volcanic world of contemporary composition. His balance of originality and accessibility makes him popular with concert-goers and objects of interest to the wider music world. His controversies have faded with time, but his theology, birdsong and synesthesia serve his memory well. He has left a strong imprint on the world of modern music.

His mysteries and controversies continue to attract music sleuths. Did Pierre Boulez really say Messiaen’s music made him want to vomit? Scholars have been trying to track down that unkind cut for decades but details remain clouded. Boulez has denied that he ever used the word. Others say he did. His objection to Messiaen was his use of the ondes Martinot in some of his works, most spectacularly in Turangalîla.

Pianist Peter Hill, an English scholar and Messiaen specialist, tells me in an email exchange that he “skirted the (Boulez) issue cautiously” in his 2007 book Messiaen because he was not satisfied he had nailed it. The wording he came up with was that Boulez could be “almost offensively derogatory” about Messiaen although he could also be an admirer. How Boulez was so conflicted continues to intrigue musicologists. Messiaen’s widow and primary performer of his piano works, Yvonne Loriod, told Hill a few years ago that Boulez was “very hot-headed” and recalled that he made some deeply wounding remarks backstage to Messiaen after a rehearsal of Turangalîla in 1948.

Seiji Ozawa’s marked score of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, with inscription from the composer

Messiaen acknowledged that the music establishment found the twittering of birdsong in his compositions to be misplaced. “It makes them (his critics) laugh, and they don’t hold back,” he acknowleged in an interview. His widow later recalled that his music always faced a mixed reception during his lifetime. “He would sometimes win the admiration of the public but the critics could be very, very spiteful,” she said. And he was pilloried by the atonal elite for not being far enough avant the garde.

Even today, I keep running into Messiaen-lovers. One French woman who as a child heard Messiaen play the Sainte Trinité (Holy Trinity) organ in Paris. She tells me his playing could be “grandiose, almost frightening”. Messiaen took a liking to her and invited her one day to sit at the organ. She still remembers touching a few keys. “He smiled when I put a shy finger on the keyboard, then he struck the first majestic chords of the Bach Toccata and Fugue. The church was flooded with waves of that gigantic sound. I carry it with me these many years later.”

Controversy aside, Messiaen’s place in music history is assured today, with some music scholars ranking him alongside Stravinsky as one of the most innovative voices of his time. Major works were commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and he was in demand worldwide for teaching harmony and composition.

He became a virtual rock star in Japan, where he discovered Japanese traditional music and borrowed from the harmonics he was hearing there for the first time. A mountain peak near Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, was named “Mount Messiaen” in 1976 in homage to his orchestral suite Des canyons aux étoiles. A handful of his works remain in the standard repertoire but there is much more Messiaen that is rarely played. A closer investigation reveals a unique sound world, much of it inspired by birdsong. He left a legacy of more than a hundred works for piano, orchestra, chamber groups, solo instruments, many enhanced by electronic instrumentation and a gathering of exotic bells, gongs and cymbals and Balinese gamelans he collected from around the world.

Messiaen’s friendly manner also left good memories among those who studied with him. He laughed easily and had a taste for loud shirts toward the end of his life. His relaxed attitude toward students was to let them grow naturally, not to force them into traditions or trends. Loriod recalls her long marriage to him as passing “with never a cross word.” She has also said that she was kept at arm’s-length from his creative process. She was never informed of his works in progress, she said, and was only allowed to study and play the works when completed.

Messiaen’s circle as a popular Paris Conservatoire professor included students Boulez, Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Harrison Birtwhistle, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, among others who went on to push the avant-garde boundaries. Boulez, writing in The Messiaen Companion, credited Messiaen with “the great merit of having freed French music from that narrow and nervous ‘good taste’ inherited from illustrious forebears …”

Internment and forced isolation from the rambunctious Paris creative scene during World War II may well have enabled the birth of one of the most original chamber works of the 20th century. Messiaen produced his famous quartet virtually under German orders. “You are a composer. Then compose,” the main guard told him shortly after he was settled in. He was given private quarters, manuscript paper, pencils and erasers, and he set to work. After months of concentration on his ideas, the intensive rehearsal time snatched between work details, Quartet for the End of Time was premiered in January 1941 in the prison camp before a packed barracks. “The first difficulty was to read the piece,” recalled violinist Jean Le Boulaire. “The second was to play it together. That wasn’t easy … We had run across something we had never seen before.”

The smartly uniformed German officers of the camp occupied the front row, probably perplexed by the other-worldly sounds of the composition. Most of the audience was no better equipped to appreciate it but as a relief from camp routine it was warmly welcomed. Even today, parts of the Quartet can be hard going. Messiaen tended to think, compose and speak in synesthesia colors. He once described the sound he sought as “orange veined with violet”. Birds chirp throughout, some on the piano, some on the violin. In the fifth movement, “The Ethereal Sounds of Dreams.” an ostinato of orange-blue is superimposed on cascades of violet-purple. And the climactic eighth movement ends in a melodic second theme of orange-green.

One of my musician friends in Bordeaux says it took him ten years to grasp the piece. Now it is one of his favorites. Typically, Messiaen was less than forthcoming on some details. He often told interviewers that 3,000 prisoners attended the premiere. Some writers put the number at 4,000, or 5,000 and even 30,000. One researcher posits 350-400, sensibly basing her estimate on the capacity of the room in which it was performed. The title of the Quartet refers to the biblical passages in Revelation 10.1-7 in which an angel descends from heaven and declares that “there shall be no more time” – meaning eternity will arrive, with no past and no future to distract us from God.

A large proportion of scholarly study has gone into Messiaen’s romance with birdsong. He once said he believed birds are “the best musicians on the planet,” and credits them with inventing the chromatic and diatonic scales, and engaging in the first group improvisation in their “dawn chorus”. He would spend nights in haystacks or barns to hear it. “I simply write what I hear, then adapt it for our modern instruments,” he once said.

Birds chirp two or three octaves above piano range and some sing in quarter-tones, he said. These qualities cannot be reproduced on a standard piano but Messiaen does a fair imitation with high-register piano writing. In teaching his classes, he liked to whistle bird calls before demonstrating his piano variations.

I spent the summer listening to 16 CDs in one of Messiaen’s boxed sets and never quite fell into a trance but can now fully appreciate his extraordinary richness. One of many interesting pieces I discovered, his 1963 Colours of the Celestial City, combines all of his principal musical motifs – Christian symbolism, plainsong, birdsong, rhythm and his colour associations with musical chords. It stakes a claim to colour composition, a style he clung to for the rest of his life. Messiaen was distressed when sceptics refused to accept his mental colorations as basic to his compositions despite his precise descriptions of the vivid orange, greens and purples he saw in his mind. “I see colours whenever I hear music, and they see nothing, nothing at all. That’s terrible. And they don’t even believe me,” he said to German interviewer

The concept of orchestral use of keyboard instruments extended to his piano writing as well in which he exploited the instrument’s timbre to the full, writes Robert Sherlaw Johnson in his 1975 book Messiaen. The composer’s piano output is voluminous, with Catalogue of Birds generally noted as his most important piece. Peter Hill, in an essay on the piano music, called Messiaen’s piano writing “the equal of any twentieth-century composer in scale and scope, and arguably without parallel in the originality of its technique”. Hill, who has recorded the complete piano works, remarked to Loriod in a private interview that he considered two piano compositions, Four Studies of Rhythm and Cantéyodjaya (a name borrowed from southern India), “very important works”. She replied that the study was in reaction to serial composition which Messiaen believed was too concerned with pitch and not enough to rhythm. He didn’t like Cantéyodjaya much, she added, “but it’s certainly fun to play”. A recent recording by respected German pianist Stefan Schleiermacher brings bounce to the writing and displays Messiaen at his playful, whimsical peak, at least in piano composition. But “fun to play”? Only for the most accomplished players.

Messiaen died after surgery at the Beaujon Hospital in Paris April 29, 1992. After his funeral, Yvonne Loriod ordered a special gravestone topped with the sculpture of a bird.

Michael Johnson is a music critic and writer with a particular interest in piano. He has worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He has been a regular contributor to International Piano magazine, and is the author of five books. He also writes for this sites sister site ArtMuseLondon.com. Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux, France. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.