The Ubiquitous Mozart

This September marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Amadeus, the 1984 American biographical drama directed by Miloš Forman, which further cemented the composer’s place in popular culture. The choice of plot for the film and its success is a nod to our inherent love for melodrama and also perhaps to what it takes to make classical arts popular. This, coupled with the quest to fathom the genius of a prodigy who composed prolifically in his all-too-short life, has compelled writers, playwrights, librettists and directors to turn to Mozart, his life and times, friends and foes, to create enduring works. 

It started with Russian playwright, poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin, who, not unlike Mozart, died in his thirties. His 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, written nearly 40 years after Mozart’s death, became the fountainhead of English playwright Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus, which Shaffer then adapted for Forman’s film. 

The whole premise of the Pushkin play (and therefore also Shaffer’s play and the Forman film) is based on scurrilous and baseless rumours that the Italian composer, conductor and teacher Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) was so envious of his younger colleague, the tremendously gifted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), that he even resorted to cold-blooded murder. The truth is that although professional rivalry did sizzle between the two composers, there is supporting evidence that they also actually saw each other as friends and colleagues, and even supported each other’s work.

Nevertheless, the 1984 film put the spotlight on Mozart’s vast oeuvre in an unprecedented way and continues to be a gateway not only to the compositions of Mozart, but to classical music in general. Salieri’s description in the film of the third movement (Adagio) of Mozart’s Serenade No. 10, also known as the Gran Partita, is perhaps the most vivid word-picture of a work of music ever.

Fame has never eluded Mozart. His music gripped popular imagination soon after his premature death, as has been depicted in the Pushkin play. The text of the play was used almost verbatim as the Russian libretto to an eponymous one-act opera in two scenes by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1897. 

Amadeus, though, was the beginning of a craze, the likes of which the classical world had not seen before and perhaps has not since. The film won eight Academy Awards, including best picture. The soundtrack, composed by John Strauss, recorded by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and conducted by Neville Marriner, won a Grammy and, having sold millions of albums, is one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. It also served as inspiration for other artistes. Songwriter Rob Bolland watched it and the very next day, wrote down the lyrics of ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ which was then recorded by Johann “Hans” Hölzel (better known by his stage name Falco). The song topped the singles charts on both sides of the Atlantic after it was released in May 1985.

Mozart’s music has been used to sell everything from sneakers to wristwatches to airline choices. One Nike advertisement video uses, of all things, the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem. In 2011, Air France used an excerpt from the second movement (Adagio) of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 for its advertising campaign ‘L’Envol’ (the flight). Choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj and starring the ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied and actor Virginie Caussin in a poetic metaphor for flight, the minute-long commercial was shot in the Moroccan desert on a 400-square metre mirror floor. In the first half, Caussin walks towards Millepied to the music of the piano solo. The swell of the orchestral response begins just as she spreads her arms like a bird and achieves lift-off from the ground as Millepied spins her ever faster to match the heightened emotion of the music.  

Closer to home, Titan watches, which launched in 1984, the same year as the release of Amadeus, was influenced by it to use Mozart’s music in its advertising campaign. It cleverly took the bright interlude in the otherwise turbulent first movement of Mozart’s ‘Sturm und Drang’ (Storm and Stress) Symphony No. 25 in G minor. It was a smart choice, as the excerpt is succinct, has bubbling joie de vivre and its clockwork precision makes it perfect for an advertisement for a timepiece. Vinay Kamath writes in his book, Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand, about the duo that made it happen—Xerxes Desai, founding managing director of Titan and Suresh Mullick, creative head of Ogilvy & Mather. “Xerxes and Suresh were well placed to make the right choice, given their knowledge of and affinity for Western classical music. Suresh zoomed in on Mozart’s 25th Symphony, and picked the track from the 1984 award-winning movie, Amadeus, on Mozart’s life. Jaideep Samarth had picked up the CD for him while holidaying in London. So confident was Suresh that he had a scratch television ad prepared and presented it to the Titan team as an almost finished product. Xerxes immediately liked what he heard of Mozart and decided this was it … It was unheard of in the mid-1980s to use Western classical music for an Indian brand aimed at an audience little exposed to that genre of music. But it struck a chord. Xerxes felt the music gave the brand a world-class feel… Titan’s signature tune would go on to entrench itself so deeply in the public mind that television audiences knew it was a Titan ad the moment the music came on even if they weren’t watching.” As the ad campaign progressed, the excerpt took on many avatars, from being played in its original form, or at the piano, to getting ‘jazzed up’ or Indianised, yet still recognisable to the listener

But this was not the first time a melody from a Mozart symphony had entered the Indian consciousness on such a large scale. The 1961 Hindi film Chhaya used the opening melody of the other G minor symphony, the famous Symphony No. 40, in the song ‘Itna Na Mujhse Tu Pyaar Badha’, sung by playback singers Talat Mahmood and Lata Mangeshkar. The song was composed by Salil Chowdhury, who was famously fond of Western classical music. In one particularly memorable scene in the 1994 classic film The Shawshank Redemption, the protagonist Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) defiantly plays ‘Sull’aria’ (‘On the breeze’), a duettino (short duet) from the third act of Mozart’s comic opera Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) on the prison’s public address system and is punished with two weeks of solitary confinement for his stunt.

Dufresne’s friend Red, played magnificently by Morgan Freeman, is the narrator through the film, and describes the episode: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dare to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” The scene captures the essence of the film, its message of inner freedom regardless of external circumstances. 

A 1993 scientific study indicated that listening to Mozart resulted in a short-term (lasting about 15 minutes) improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks. This was soon exaggerated in the media and ‘The Mozart Effect’ became a fad. However, several subsequent meta-analyses found little evidence to support the hypothesis. 

Mozart by prescription, though, is not new. In his Dr. Jamshed Bhabha Memorial Lecture in August 2021 at the NCPA, eminent physician Dr. Farokh Udwadia recalled recommending Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto to a patient who hadn’t slept a wink in a long time. She returned in two weeks calling it a miracle.

Mozart also turns up in some of the unlikeliest of places, as for instance when he became an action-hero on a mission to save the world in a video game called Mozart: The Conspirators of Prague (2009, re-issued as Mozart Requiemin 2021). Set in 1788, he is depicted as a Freemason who stumbles on a sinister plot to overthrow the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, while in Prague for the debut of his opera Don Giovanni.

In 2017, Mozart attained rock star status in the French-language two hour-long musical Mozart, l’opéra rock which used both original pop-rock compositions as well as pre-existing music composed by Mozart and other composers, including Antonio Salieri. It received mixed reviews. 

Last year, Mozart became the inspiration for Mozart Immersive - The Soul of a Genius at The Lighthouse Artspacein Chicago. It combined the use of AI (artificial intelligence), the legendary dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov’s “tortured portrayal” of Leopold, Mozart’s father, and a re-arrangement of 17 selected works from the composer’s repertoire recorded by a 45-piece symphonic orchestra conducted by four-time Grammy-nominated Constantine Orbelian to “explore the mind of one of history’s most legendary composers.”

The power of Mozart’s music in the popular imagination across the world remains undiminished.

By Luis Dias. This piece was originally published by the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, in the November 2024 issue of ON Stage – their monthly arts magazine.