The Theatre Times: The premiere of the musical Mozart!, based on the life story of the famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, took place in 1999 at the Theater an der Wien.
The main idea of the dramatist and lyricist Michael Kunze and composer Sylvester Levay was to showcase the obvious contradiction between Mozart’s dissolute life and his divine music. They wanted to try and explain the apparent paradox.
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Michael Kunze approaches Mozart! The Musical from a very unique perspective. He splits the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart into Wolfgang and Amadé (a shortening of his middle name). Wolfgang, played by a young man, is meant to represent Mozart’s desire for freedom and his physical self. Amadé, played by a little boy, is meant to represent Mozart’s genius itself and the “devil on his shoulder” that leads him towards madness and eventually death. Other characters in the show are only able to interact with Wolfgang, while Amadé only exists inside his head and moves through the story unnoticed by others. Originally, I thought Mozart! Was an exciting new work, so I was shocked to see that it is over two decades old and is extremely well-known in Europe. It’s interesting how, in America, it’s easy to forget how expansive theatre is across the globe. Reducing theatre to Broadway and massive touring houses means you lose out on a lot of experimental theatre like Mozart! This article was a great reminder of that.
“Such gifted people are all slaves of their talent. They owe everything they have to their talent. The talent makes them into stars of course, but it is also a burden”. What a crazy crazy statement. I have never really looked at it this way and honestly, I think, to an extent, it is true. I feel like the saying hard work beats talent doesn’t work hard also applies here because people who are crazy talented will always rely on their talent and the moment that something doesn’t work out for them, they find something else that is more comfortable for them to do because all they know is how to succeed. People who are so gifted to the point that they never have to overcome any challenges will always have the furthest to fall because they don’t know how to fail and so when they inevitably do, they struggle the most with accepting it and figuring out how to get past the failure and get back to work.
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