Forty years ago, Amadeus won eight Oscars, four Baftas and four Golden Globes – and introduced a new generation to 18th-century music. Millions bought the film’s Mozart soundtrack and it remains one of the bestselling classical music albums of all time, shifting more than 6.5m copies globally, and earning 13 gold discs.
It even inspired a novelty hit when Falco mixed Europop with rap in Rock Me Amadeus – the first German-language song to top the US Billboard chart (Nena’s 99 Luftballons only reached No 2 in the US, pop-pickers).
On 21 December, Sky will release a miniseries based on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, which was the basis of Miloš Forman’s 1984 film. In an age of streaming, short-form content and even shorter attention spans, will it bring new listeners to Mozart’s music? Its team hopes so.
“The music is like a character in the show,” said its musical director, Benjamin Holder. “One version of Mozart’s voice is delivered in Will Sharpe’s performance as Amadeus, another version of that voice is delivered through the music.”
There are about 115 works by Mozart scattered throughout the five episodes. Although the musical passages are invariably short, they are unadulterated Mozart, recorded on instruments as authentic as possible to the late 18th century.
“There are shows where it’s set in period but the music is modern, but that was never the idea here,” said Chantelle Woodnutt, the music supervisor. “There are other classical composers in there – Salieri, of course, but also bits of Haydn and Bach, as well as contemporary folk music from Turkey and Hungary, to show how Vienna was a melting pot of cultures and people were being influenced by all these different things.”
Holder said: “Everybody making the series understood that the music was already really cool. What becomes clear is that Mozart was a rock star.”
As Mozart, Sharpe learned to play everything himself. Holder said: “We started the piano stuff months ahead. Will spent weeks and weeks just playing scales.”
Sharpe came fresh to Mozart’s music. “I had never had my opera epiphany but, making this, I started to understand it,” he said.
“The music is extraordinary. Some of it is so playful and light and kind of mischievous and dainty. And then in other places, it’s really dark and grand.”
Meanwhile, Rory Kinnear, as the music-loving Joseph II, had problems. “Rory is extremely musical and a brilliant pianist,” said Holder. “The difficulty was in making it look plausible that he keeps missing the notes when he plays Salieri’s piece in the first episode.”
Simon Callow, who played Mozart in Shaffer’s original play at the National Theatre in 1979, said: “Peter Shaffer broke the image of Mozart as this perfect little porcelain figure which survived nearly 200 years, and he helped to define the image of Mozart that we have today. He opened the ears of a lot of people who didn’t care for Mozart or had no real concept of what his music was like.”
Martin Cullingford, the editor of Gramophone magazine, welcomes the new show. “Anything in the wider media that makes classical music a compelling part of the story is a really good thing,” he said.
“It might simply be that a lot of people haven’t encountered Mozart and if they watch this and think, wow, that’s extraordinary, then it will make a difference.”
Does he see generation Z embracing Mozart the way generation X did? “Borders between genres feel more porous than they ever have done – partly as it’s so easy to range far and wide with streaming,” Cullingford said. “I’m hopeful that if people want to respond to this they no longer have to go into a specialist record shop – which might feel intimidating – and spend £15 on a CD. Instead they can just explore the music via streaming services.”
Holder agrees. “A short-form version of the Queen of the Night’s jaw-dropping aria from The Magic Flute features in episode five,” he said. “I’d like to think that watching that will make people go: ‘Wow, that’s pretty epic.’”
The two are echoing a point made by the late conductor Sir Neville Marriner, who with his Academy of St Martin in the Fields orchestra recorded the 1984 film’s music and welcomed how it introduced Mozart to such a large audience.
On an ASMF podcast in 2015 he shared his memories of working with Forman (he arrived in Devon to discuss the music ‘with a very big Hungarian sausage for them to spend the weekend eating’, and played tennis – ‘he was quite good but didn’t win’) and actor Tom Hulce (who spent a happy Christmas with the Marriners learning to look as if he could play the piano), and spoke of the importance of the film.
“Young people sometimes feel a little ill at ease [with classical music’s] grand occasions – symphonic concerts and operas, say. The film was like going in the back door,” Marriner said at the time.
“Going around the world still now, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in China or America, one of the first things people want to talk about is Amadeus and how much it influenced their life.”
The one group who won’t be cheering the return of Amadeus is team Salieri. Poor maligned Salieri, who surely deserves a better epithet than Shaffer’s “patron saint of mediocrities”.
“There’s been valiant attempts to rehabilitate his reputation over the years,” said Cullingford. “This will undo all the good work.”
