Playing Mozart: Biopics and the musical (re)invention of a

composer

Guido Heldt

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2009,
pp. 21-46 (Article)

Published by Liverpool University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/315788

[ Access provided at 10 Oct 2022 11:33 GMT from UniversitÃÂ degli studi di Pavia ]
MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 21

Playing Mozart
Biopics and the musical (re)invention of a
composer

GUIDO HELDT

Composer biopics have received scant attention both from musical

reception history and from film musicology, though they clearly are
key sources for the popular reception of composers, and often are also
laboratories for the use of pre-existing music in film. Composer biopics
re-invent their subjects in the stories they tell; but they also re-invent
them through their music – music which in such films is usually both
part of the story told and of its telling. This article takes seven Mozart
biopics from between 1940 and 2006 as examples of such musical
(re)inventions, and studies typical techniques and effects of using
Mozart’s music to score stories of his life. The use of pre-existing pieces
both as diegetic and nondiegetic music, and crucially in the transition
from one to the other, is shown as a central aspect of the way the films
capitalise on existing Mozart myths and feed them back into their own
(re)constructions of Mozart, in the process becoming drivers in a
(vicious or virtuous) circle.

Biopics or Biopics?
Composer biopics sit uncomfortably between musicology and film
studies. For film scholars they are located somewhere on the fringes of
the biopic – itself hardly the most reputable of genres, suspected of
middle-brow hero-worship and formal conventionality – whereas musi-
cologists tend to treat them as curiosities, distortions of the truth, capable
of undoing decades of scholarly work in two hours of screen time.
But however doubtful their aesthetic or historical credentials,
composer biopics can still be rewarding objects of study. They are a rich
source for reception history, one that scholarship has only just begun to
exploit, but they also pose film-music problems. They are a stage for the
performance of their composers’ music – or rather, a stage for the filmic
performance of musical performances, providing opportunities for
22 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

historical contextualisation as well as for narrative playfulness. And if

they want to show composers composing, they have to externalise an
often invisible, mental process, producing manifold attempts to
represent composition as a performative act. And of course they
transform their composers’ music into film music, which adds layers of
meaning to both films and music, and leads to intricate experiments with
the place of music in the narrative structure of a film.
The focal point of this article lies at the intersection of these perspec-
tives: how do films (re)invent a composer through the use of his music?
The biopics discussed are not just a small sample of the genre, they are
also just a small sample of Mozart films. As a topic, Mozart has appeared
in film history at least since La mort de Mozart (Étienne Arnaud and Louis
Feuillade, France 1909) and Simfoniya lyubvi i smerti (Symphony of Love and
Death, Viktor Tourjansky and S. Yurev, Russia 1914, after Pushkin’s
Mozart and Salieri), and up to Bernd Fischerauer’s German TV film
Mozart – Ich hätte München Ehre gemacht from 2006, and beyond to Carlos
Saura’s forthcoming Da Ponte biopic, Io, Don Giovanni. This long history
allows us to compare musical choices, strategies, and their development
better than films about any other composer.
Re-invention occurs in these films on two levels. All of them necessarily
re-invent Mozart and his music, but they also re-invent their predeces-
sors – their Mozart images and musical strategies. The purpose of this
study is to show how this double re-invention works across seven
examples and more than 60 years of biopic history. The main films
discussed here are (in chronological order):

Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Leopold Hainisch, Germany, 1940)

The first of the two Mozart biopics made during the Third Reich, loosely
based on Eduard Mörike’s novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart
on the Journey to Prague, 1855).

Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love) (Karl Hartl, Germany, 1942)
The second Nazi Mozart biopic, more lavishly produced and heavily
marketed, focusing on Mozart’s relationhip with Constanze and Aloysia
Weber.

Mozart (Karl Hartl, Austria, 1955)

Karl Hartl’s third Mozart biopic (after Wen die Götter lieben and The Mozart
Story, 1948) focuses on the last year of Mozart’s life, constructing a love
triangle between Mozart, Constanze and the original Pamina, Anna
Gottlieb.
MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 23
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

Amadeus (Milos Forman, USA, 1984)

The best-known and commercially most successful of all composer films,
based on Peter Shaffer’s play from 1979.

Noi tre (We Three) (Pupi Avati, Italy, 1984)

Uses the stay of Mozart and his father at the house of Count Pallavicini
near Bologna in 1770 to imagine the teenage Mozart’s private life,
between the lines of the history books.

Vergesst Mozart (Forget Mozart) (Miloslav Luther,

Germany/Czechoslovakia, 1985)
Uses a fictitious secret police investigation after Mozart’s death to show
his relationships with colleagues, friends, and enemies, constructing a
more political Mozart image than other films.

Mozart – Ich hätte München Ehre gemacht (Mozart – I Would Have Done
Munich Proud) (Bernd Fischerauer, Germany, 2006)
TV film produced by the Bavarian Broadcasting Service, focusing on
Mozart’s relationship to Munich.

This study is not much interested in assessing the aesthetic or biograph-

ical success of the Mozart films. Value judgements are rarely far from the
surface of the composer biopic literature, and are often not used to good
effect. Jeongwon Joe has addressed the problem with regard to Amadeus,
which she defends against Joseph Horowitz’s allegations of pretensions of
grandeur and of sloppiness in its use of Mozart’s music by showing that it
is well made in (filmic) ways the musicologist Horowitz fails to consider
(Joe 2006), while Robert L. Marshall sees inaccuracies in the film justified
by its artistic purpose (1997). But though I agree with Marshall’s and Joe’s
arguments, I also think their strategies are problematic: in trying to show
that Amadeus is ‘good’ or at least ‘well made’, they have already accepted
the validity of a judgemental perspective. The problem is not that scholars
may find composer biopics factually wrong or artistically deficient, but
that some, faced with the culture industry trespassing on their field of
expertise, become gardeners in the cultural ecosystem, weeding out what
they deem unsuitable for their filmic or musical biotopes, instead of
trying to understand how what they see and hear works.
Music historians are by virtue of their profession inclined to under-
stand composer biopics primarily as accounts of composers distorted by
popular myths and the demands of entertainment. That is a legitimate
perspective – biopics can deeply influence the popular perception of
composers (as Amadeus attests). But while that is relevant for the place of
24 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

biopics in the wider reception history of a composer, it is not helpful for

an understanding of biopics as films. So for my purposes, I shall view
them primarily as stories, closer to fiction than to biography – stories that
make use of famous figures and are decked out with a certain amount of
facts. These facts cannot be toyed with at will, but liberties can and have
been taken; one interesting aspect of the genre is how it tries (or fails) to
balance the historical record and the demands of effective fiction.
A similar distinction can be made with regard to the use of a
composer’s music. Critics of the mutilations and forced pairings of pieces
and biographical events tend to ask what is done to the music, to its
integrity and sense – whilst one may also ask what is done with the music,
in order to serve the telling of a story. Again it is a matter of perspective,
and again my focus is on the second point: how pre-existing music
becomes a functional element of new structures. Those structures have
their place in a wider reception history, but to understand how they do
what they do, it makes sense to focus on their internal machinery more
than their historical implications.

The Loop of Myth

The most basic genre feature of composer biopics is that they tend to use
their composers’ music not just as an element of the diegesis, of the story
world, but also as ‘film music’, as nondiegetic music. This is so evidently
what we expect that deviations from the rule stand out. It is the case even
if a composer’s music is significantly altered on the nondiegetic sound-
track and does not provide a clear trademark sound. When the opening
credits of Vergesst Mozart are accompanied not by Mozart pure and
simple, but by Peter Breiner’s portentous take on the Dies irae from the
Requiem – the sopranos’ falling fourths played by kettledrums
surrounded by bells and electronic effects – the film stakes its claim to
being different by refusing to give us a musical logo of its composer.
Most composer films prefer to advertise their topic as unambiguously
as possible by showcasing well-known pieces which, even if they do not
appear unadulterated, are immediately recognisable. The credits of Wen
die Götter lieben combine the main soprano motif from the Requiem’s
Lacrimosa (set for solo violin) with the Andante theme from the Piano
Sonata K331 (with orchestral accompaniment), and are followed for
some establishing shots of Salzburg by an instrumental version of Ein
Mädchen oder Weibchen from The Magic Flute. The credits quickly travel
through different Mozart moods, but also through a sequence of
favourite Mozart tunes that seem to emphasise his enduring popularity,
justifying the excursion of this popular medium into ‘high’ art.
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 25
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

The double role of the music as object of the diegesis and a means of
presenting it is so common in composer films that it is easy to forget that
it is not necessary. Operas about composers, for example, tend to use
some musical material from their heroes, but usually find ways to
integrate it into original music; composer operas such as Albert
Lortzing’s Szenen aus Mozarts Leben (Scenes from Mozart’s Life, 1833) or
Giacomo Orefice’s Chopin (1901), built exclusively on Mozart and Chopin
1 Discussed further in quotations, are exceptions that prove the rule.1 Original music is the
Betzwieser 1995. raison d’être of opera, so the scarcity of such examples is not surprising,
but they remind us that other solutions could be imagined: why not a
film that uses its composer’s music only diegetically, and an original score
for the nondiegetic music?
But that is not what normally happens, and the consequence is clear:
the double role of a composer’s music as object and means of narration
links the life and work in a myth-making (or more often myth-rein-
forcing) feedback loop. The music may become a window into the
composer’s inner life, implying a ‘romantic’ aesthetic of expression.
Alternatively, the narration may use the music to comment on the signif-
icance of biographical events, resulting in a slightly weaker biographical
reading. But in each case, works and life charge each other with signifi-
cance. This becomes particularly obvious if the same pieces are used in
both functions, if outer and inner life blend – and such a strategy is
particularly suitable for the identification of a composer with aspects of
his works or the stories around them. So (as will be shown) in some films
Mozart becomes Don Giovanni, not just through actions, but through the
music; in some films, the Requiem indeed presages his own death,
fulfilling the biographical myth, but fulfilling it because of the way the
medium works. The films use what has become attached to the music in
reception history, and feed it back into their re-inventions of his life,
continuing the cycle.
One must not, however, overstate the case. Not every underscoring
with pre-existing music performs deep interpretation, especially in those
films from the 1930s and 1940s that follow contemporary practice and
underscore a substantial amount of screen time. Here it is often rather a
question of finding music that ‘fits’ a scene without necessarily providing
interpretative surplus value. When Mozart and Constanze set out on their
journey to Prague in Eine kleine Nachtmusik, shots of the coach are accom-
panied by the Romance from the Horn Concerto K447; when Mozart and
his mother travel to Paris in Wen die Götter lieben, they do it to the same
music (written in 1787, but used here for a journey taking place ten years
earlier – Eine kleine Nachtmusik is chronologically correct). Wen die Götter
lieben, on the other hand, has introduced the horn/travel motif already
26 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

and in slightly more imaginative fashion: as mentioned, its credits are

followed by shots of Salzburg underscored by Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,
but when the film then shows the arrival of the coach that will take Mozart
and his mother to Paris, the music just reaches the Allegro section (bar
21), with the oboes’ 6/8 motifs re-orchestrated for French horns:

This music illustrates the shots of the coach through an arrangement of

suitable music introducing the theme of travelling, but also a crucial plot
element. The next scene shows Mozart picking up a watch from a watch-
maker. A picture of a young lady – Aloysia (or, as she is called here, Luisa)
Weber – has been put onto the lid of the watch: the girl whom he will visit
on the journey, and who in Wen die Götter lieben is, far more than
Constanze, Mozart’s ‘Mädchen oder Weibchen’, the love of his life.
One step up from such examples are cases of nondiegetic music that,
while not making much of an interpretative point, go beyond the status
of background filler. Purely chronological fit, as with K447 in Eine kleine
Nachtmusik, is neither the rule nor the point: the use of Mozart’s music to
tell stories about Mozart’s life makes clear – more clear than original
dramatic scoring might – that these stories are told with hindsight, that
we see Mozart’s life filtered through the history of Mozart reception. So
when in Mozart – Ich hätte München Ehre gemacht Countess Paumgarten
tries to talk Mozart out of his infatuation with Aloysia, the music is the
Andante from the G minor Symphony K550: canonic, late, ‘dark’ Mozart
that tells us that his love for Aloysia is doomed (though the film curiously
reserves the darkest moment, the sequence of suspensions at bar 30, to
underline the Countess’s disappointment that Mozart thinks of Aloysia
rather than of herself). In Amadeus the use of the beginning of the Adagio
and Rondo for glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and violoncello K617
works differently: in the preceding scene, Constanze had offered her body
to Salieri to win his support for her husband, only to be sent away; now
Mozart finds her in bed, crying, but unable to tell him why. The unex-
pected, eerie sound of the glass harmonica, probably hard to identify for
most listeners, is a good match for the queasily tense scene; the film
cunningly leaves out the first bar, a tutti C minor chord, and instead starts
with the solo glass harmonica to achieve maximum surprise.
While these two examples exploit aspects of the music more or less
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 27
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

inherent in it (though the effect of the first relies on the ‘late-work’ status
of K550, and that of the second on the fact that K617 is difficult to place),
Mozart – Ich hätte München Ehre gemacht also uses a more circuitous way of
importing musical meaning into a scene. Here, when Mozart confesses his
love to Aloysia, he does so to the nondiegetic accompaniment of the
Andante from the C major Piano Concerto K467, which the audience
probably connects less with Mozart than with another amour fou – that of
Hedvig Jensen and Lieutenant Sixten Sparre in Bo Widerberg’s 1967
Elvira Madigan. The music returns to Mozart via connotations acquired in
a previous appropriation. While this is just a moment in the film’s score, it
illustrates the cultural work that composer biopics do: re-cycling their
subject matter, affirming the status of the composers by airbrushing them
time and again, re-painting them with their own reception history.
However, since the use of the composer’s music as ‘film music’ is
almost ubiquitous, alternatives automatically become meaningful. The
prime Mozart example is Noi tre, a film that fills the biographically
‘empty’ space of Mozart’s and his father’s stay at the estate of Count
Pallavicini near Bologna in the summer of 1770 with a little story about
friendship and first love that pointedly pushes Mozart away from his
status as a prodigy and future musical giant, with the music following suit
and avoiding Mozart’s own music almost completely. Instead, the film
uses original music by Riz Ortolani, an eighteenth-century pastiche that
does not jar stylistically, but, being not by Mozart, cannot enter into the
myth-making feedback loop. Only once is Mozart’s music called into
service, when he plays the Adagio from the piano sonata K332 for his
friends, overheard by the other people in the house.
Anachronistic uses of music are par for the course in composer biopics;
but there is a difference between this instance and the anachronistic use
of K550 in Mozart – Ich hätte München Ehre gemacht, where the music
serves in the narration as just a knowing comment on the hopelessness of
Mozart’s love for Aloysia. In Noi tre, the use of a piece probably written a
dozen years after Mozart’s visit to Pallavicini’s house as diegetic music
gives the scene an ominous tinge, as if for a moment something out of
Mozart’s future as genius composer had broken into a story notably
concerned with ignoring that side of him. The film further exploits this
ominous effect when the music is increasingly overlaid by electronic noise
and then disrupted by the pained cries of Pallavicini’s ‘mad’ cousin. At
the point when Mozart’s genius seems to enter the story and begins to
enrapture his audience, diegesis and narration work together to choke
2 More about this film, off the music and return to the private matters in which the film is
though not about the primarily interested.2
music, can be found in
Secci 1991.
28 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

Retrospection and the Lacrimosa in Wen die

Götter lieben
So far, the examples of ‘meaningful’ nondiegetic uses of Mozart works
have been isolated instances, sometimes exploiting a resonance in Mozart
reception (as with the K550 Andante or with Elvira Madigan), but not
part of an overarching film-musical strategy. The myth-making circle
comes into its own when historical resonance and musical strategy
combine. None of these films does that more blatantly than Wen die Götter
lieben. The entire film is framed by the beginning of the soprano part of
the Lacrimosa; after the opening chords, its yearning rising sixth motif
scores an image of lyre and laurel, pictorially proclaiming the triumph of
artistic genius while the music insists on the tragedy of a life cut short
(figure 1).

Figure 1 Wen die Götter lieben, beginning of first Lacrimosa cue

The film sets itself up as a monument to Mozart, and the use of the
broken-off Lacrimosa foregrounds the retrospective nature of such monu-
mentalisation: not only do we look back on Mozart, but the awe of this
retrospective gaze structures the whole enterprise. At the end the film
comes full circle. On Mozart’s deathbed, the Lacrimosa motif is accompa-
nied (or is it the other way round?) by a static shot of his body, centred
on the head. In a pre-filmic age this would have been the face from which
a death mask might have been taken – a memorial function now taken
over by the moving image, one that for this purpose freezes, denying
itself movement to demonstrate the enormity of the moment. The return
MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 29
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

of lyre and laurel seals the retrospective circle, though now to the sooth-
ingly tender Andante theme from K331, another key musical ingredient
of the film, adding a silver lining to the unhappy end (figures 2–3).

Figure 2 Wen die Götter lieben, beginning of final Lacrimosa cue

Figure 3 Wen die Götter lieben, end

To add to the impact of the Requiem, the end of the film is preceded by
an elaborate scene involving the Confutatis (about which more later). But
interestingly it shies away from milking the Requiem for even more
fateful effect: when the mysterious messenger appears and commissions
30 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

the work, we do not hear a premonition of the Requiem, as we might

expect (and as happens, for example, in Amadeus), but the C minor piano
Fantasia K475. This link is subsequently reinforced: we hear the Fantasia
again when Mozart tells Schikaneder that he is writing the Requiem for
himself, and again when he is already sick and in bed, working on the
Requiem together with Süssmayr. The omission is even more puzzling
since the film does use musical ‘foreshadowing’ elsewhere (see Chatman
1978: 59–62): when Mozart tells Constanze that he has been commis-
sioned to write Don Giovanni for Prague, we hear the opening chords of
the overture, foreshadowing not just the unwritten opera, but also the
relationship crisis it has not yet triggered.
One can only speculate why Wen die Götter lieben foregoes that kind of
premonition with regard to the Requiem. Perhaps the filmmakers were
wary of too much foreboding, since the Lacrimosa is already used as a
heavy-handed framing device. Perhaps they were looking for an oppor-
tunity to introduce yet another well-known piece, and the Requiem
context was one that made sense of the Fantasia’s brooding opening.
Perhaps they wanted to reserve the musical foreshadowing for Don
Giovanni, far more relevant to the film’s portrayal of Mozart. Whatever
the reason, the question at least shows how multi-faceted an endeavour
scoring a film with pre-existing music is, involving a balancing act that,
as Adorno said about composing, often just means a decision between
bad alternatives.

The Requiem in Amadeus and Vergesst Mozart

For most Mozart films, the irony of a Requiem being one of his last works
is too good to be passed over. In Amadeus, too, the Lacrimosa accompanies
Mozart’s funeral, though Amadeus has a disclaimer: since we witness the
story through memories of the old, half-crazed Antonio Salieri, what we
get is not the story of Mozart’s life, but the story of Salieri’s obsession with
Mozart’s genius. This not only frees the film from having to claim to
present the Mozart truth, but also makes ‘responsibility’ for the means of
narration ambiguous: we can hear the Lacrimosa, especially together with
the overblown (and historically inaccurate) images of a downpour that
make the burial seem so sad and rushed, as a cheap choice of the
narration; but we can also hear it as Salieri’s retrospectively distorting
imagination – the Lacrimosa as a lament not just for the genius he believes
he has driven to his death, but also for the failure of his plan to claim
ownership of the Requiem when Constanze surprisingly returns home
and locks away the score on which Salieri had helped Mozart work.
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 31
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

In Vergesst Mozart the Lacrimosa becomes a backbone of the musical

structure, ‘the musical leitmotif of the film’ (Szabó-Knotik 1999: 144), in
half a dozen cues across about an hour of screen time. The first time we
hear it, it links three scenes. Secret police chief Count Pergen, conducting
an investigation into Mozart’s death, tells Constanze that he will have
Mozart’s body prepared for the funeral. She is shown in close-up, and
the music starts while we are already hearing the dialogue of the next
scene, a flashback showing Mozart making love to her and trying to
3 Raimund Leopold convince her to try for another child after two had died.3 That scene
and Johann Thomas leads to another showing Mozart drunkenly stumbling around in the
Leopold, born in 1783
and 1786 respectively. street, deeply disappointed that Don Giovanni had only five performances
in Vienna. What we are hearing is not the Lacrimosa opening as written
by Mozart, but again Peter Breiner’s montage of elements of Mozart’s
music – the first bar of the two-bar instrumental introduction, repeated
once, followed by the rising scale of bars 5–6, before the distinctive rising
sixth soprano motif is heard. The close-up of Constanze’s face when the
music begins marks it as potentially metadiegetic, the term Claudia
Gorbman imported from Gérard Genette for music on a second level of
narration, usually as a character’s ‘inner voice’, and like other
metadiegetic elements – dreams, flashbacks, etc. – often introduced by a
facial close-up (1987: 22–3). It is as if we are hearing Mozart’s music from
Constanze’s perspective, which also makes sense of the jumble of
Lacrimosa elements. These scenes are linked both through Constanze as
the putative narrative source of the music, and through realisations of
loss: Constanze’s loss of her husband; the loss of their two children;
Constanze’s loss of hope that the next child might survive (which it did);
Mozart’s loss of hope in his ability to achieve success in Vienna.
When we return to the present, Pergen says that ‘with one hand
[Mozart] built his monument, with the other he dug his grave’, and again
the Lacrimosa accompanies shots of a despairing Constanze. It is next
heard accompanying an image of Mozart’s body being moved from his
bed, and again when Constanze tells Pergen about Mozart’s syphilis. A
further death is brought into play: we hear the Lacrimosa after wax
sculptor Franz Demel is murdered by his wife (he had admitted to her
that he was the mysterious commissioner of the Requiem, which she
believes to have driven Mozart to his early death). The Lacrimosa also
bridges the transition back to the framing narrative of Pergen’s investi-
gation, where all discuss the idea that Pergen himself may have had a
hand in Mozart’s death. Finally, as in Amadeus the Lacrimosa becomes the
music for Mozart’s funeral, now for the first time as written by Mozart
(and completed by Süssmayr).
Vergesst Mozart re-invents Mozart’s story as one of sex and crime and
32 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

politics, and it is in the context of that attempt to distance the film from
its predecessors that Peter Breiner’s musical distortions have to be under-
stood. Yet, contrary to that distancing act, the extensive use of the
Lacrimosa firmly places the film in the biopic tradition of projecting the
composer’s music back onto his life. However, the biographical projec-
tion spills out beyond the core anecdote of Mozart’s believing he is
writing the Requiem for himself – encompassing his wife, his children,
his professional disappointments, even the misfortune of people around
him: a universal music of death and loss and mourning, the myth-
making loop in full swing.

Biographical Projection and Don Giovanni in

Amadeus
Amadeus, too, uses recurrent biographical projection, here involving Don
Giovanni and the (different) chords that open its overture and announce
the final appearance of the Commendatore.4 To leave no doubt about the 4 For a brief overview of

crucial role of this music, the film opens with the overture chords, Don Giovanni in Amadeus
see Szabó-Knotik 1999:
borrowing a well-known operatic gesture and immediately setting up the 40–1.
loop between Mozart’s work and life. The film takes time to capitalise on
that opening, for we do not hear the chords again for more than an hour.
At the house of a potential patron, Mozart plays the finale of the Piano
Concerto K450; when he leaves the house, enraged by the lack of interest
in his music, the music smoothly shifts position and accompanies him
nondiegetically on his way home, where it is rudely interrupted by the
first two chords of the Don Giovanni overture at the moment when Mozart
sees a black-cloaked figure at the top of the stairs – his father, who has
come to Vienna to check up on his wayward son. We still have no idea
why these chords are used, apart from the fact that they make an impres-
sive shock effect.5 5 Though not too rude

The next instance brings us closer to an explanation. Constanze’s a shock, as the D minor
of the overture inter-
announcement that Mozart’s father has died is followed by a shot of rupts a B flat major
Leopold’s portrait on the wall, accompanied by the opening chords of chord from bar 42 of
the concerto, sharing
the final entry of the Commendatore (‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco’). The two pitch classes with
chords are different – a diminished seventh chord on B as a dominant to the Don Giovanni chord.
the following V7 instead of the I-V of the overture – but the echo is clear The shock is further
tempered by the fact
(as, of course, it is in the opera). Again the music shifts narrative position that Mozart’s anxious
and changes from a nondiegetic shock effect to the diegetic music of the face on the D minor
chord quickly becomes
Don Giovanni premiere (which actually took place about a year after joy at seeing his father.
Leopold’s death), intercut with Salieri’s voice-over explanation that the
Commendatore for Mozart represented his father, which in turn identi-
fies Mozart with Don Giovanni, an identification reinforced by editing
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 33
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

that points to a similarity of gestures by Mozart as conductor and Don

Giovanni, who is gesturing at the looming figure of the Commendatore.
This sceno-musical progression reaches its goal when in the following
scene the first movement of the D minor Piano Concerto K466 connects
shots of a black mask being brought to Salieri, of an ill Mozart at his desk,
and of Salieri on his way through Vienna. As with K450, the piano
concerto is cut short by Don Giovanni when Mozart opens the door and
sees the black mask, which reminds him of his disapproving father at the
ball. Now Don Giovanni is reduced to the initial D minor chord of the
overture – the pattern is sufficiently established to allow this abbreviation.
Again the shock is softened by the mediation between the A7 chord in bar
52 of the concerto movement and the Don Giovanni D minor – here the
chord becomes a fitting continuation of the concerto.
The shock/transition is one of the key examples of Jeongwon Joe’s
defence of the Amadeus soundtrack as musically well made; but if one
goes beyond the moment and sees it in the context of the overall use of
the Don Giovanni chords, one can go considerably further. Not only are
the chords slotted into the soundtrack in musically reasonable ways, and
not only are they a ‘sonic signifier of Leopold Mozart, Commendatore,
and the double-faced mask’ (Joe 2006: 66), they are also part of a trajec-
tory reaching from the opening of the film to the moment when Salieri’s
6 The Don Giovanni plan to frighten Mozart into writing the Requiem becomes apparent.6
chords go even beyond
that, when they are
The chords start their film life, much as their operatic one, as a non-
used for yet another specific opening gesture, become associated with Leopold’s strained rela-
scene in which Salieri tionship with his son, are reinforced in this association through
plays the messenger,
now interrupting the connection to Leopold’s death, then enter the diegesis in Don Giovanni
Magic Flute overture (in the form they have at the beginning of scene XV of the opera), and
(B flat major giving
way to D minor as in the eventually become an accompaniment to (and in a way an element of) the
case of K450), which plan Salieri concocts on the basis of Mozart’s father complex.
plays in Mozart’s head
as metadiegetic accom- There is also a musical sub-structure to this progression. Twice the
paniment to his crazed chords interrupt Mozart piano concertos – pieces he usually wrote for
dance in front of his
father’s portrait.
himself as performer, and in that sense his own music. The chords, and
by implication Mozart’s psychological hang-up about his father, interrupt
his unfettered music-making, prefiguring the Requiem he lets himself be
bullied into writing. But the film does not just borrow the chords from
Don Giovanni, it borrows the narrative trick they contain: in the opera,
the I–V progression at the start of the overture is a conventional opening
bang, and only when an echo of the chords reappears at the beginning
7 For another example
of the final reckoning does the implication they carried from the start
of such a ‘retrospective become clear. The film borrows the same dramatic structure and elabo-
prolepsis’ in a different rates it: the chords foreshadow developments, but only as the film
genre context see
Heldt 2007. proceeds do we realise this.7 The combination of interruption and
34 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

connection in the musical joints between the concertos and the Magic
Flute on the one hand, and the Don Giovanni chords on the other, are not
just good craftsmanship, they also guarantee the ambivalence of these
moments. The chords are shocks, but below the surface they are quite
closely linked to what precedes them.
The Don Giovanni chords in Amadeus are an illustration of the differ-
ence between doing something to the music and doing something with it.
The cut-and-paste procedures that transform pre-existing music into
film music break up the integrity of the music; but if done with skill and
purpose, slotting the fragments into a new structure, the process can
contribute musically and dramatically to the film as a whole.

Self-Dramatisations and Ironies of Musical Fate

There is nevertheless something a bit odd about the use Amadeus makes
of Don Giovanni. The most obvious ‘message’ of the film is the difference
between Mozart-the-man and Mozart-the-composer, between the
giggling ‘creature’ of Salieri’s disdain and the composer of (for Salieri)
music of supernatural perfection. ‘I’m a vulgar man – but I assure you
my music is not’, as Mozart tells the emperor. It is a strangely dialectic
project: in its fable about genius and mediocrity, the film undertakes to
de-mythify Mozart-the-man, to reconstruct him as a flawed human being.
But the counterweight is an unprecedented elevation of the music. Of
course the film has its get-out-of-jail-free card – we see and hear Salieri’s
projection, Mozart distorted through Salieri’s envy and guilt.
But in its treatment of Don Giovanni, Amadeus re-connects man and
music, ‘explains’ the work in biographical terms; and the biographical
contagion spreads to transform the Requiem into Mozart’s fear of his
father’s judgement of his dissolute lifestyle.8 In this, the film seems to fall 8 Peripherally, the film

back behind its programme, back to a traditional identification of Mozart also explains Der Hölle
Rache kocht in meinem
with Don Giovanni. Amadeus re-defines that identification, and is not Herzen from the Magic
interested in Mozart as womaniser or apologist of carpe diem, as Eine kleine Flute as an echo of a
harangue of Mozart’s
Nachtmusik, Wen die Götter lieben or the same director’s Mozart are, where mother-in-law.
moral transgressiveness seems to be the price for Mozart’s artistic tran-
scendence. Amadeus instead looks to Don Giovanni to reconstruct the rela-
tionship between Mozart and his father, fitting for a film set in a Sergio
Leone-ish world of male rivalry and admiration (and of their theatrical
display, both in characters’ actions and in the style of filmic narration), a
world where women only play marginal roles.
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 35
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

Mozart as Don Giovanni

The Mozart/Don Giovanni identification is already suggested in Eduard
Mörike’s novella Mozart on the Journey to Prague (1855), in Countess
Eugenie’s fear that Mozart, like his operatic anti-hero, will consume
himself in his own blaze, a fear that transforms the journey to Prague and
Don Giovanni into a premonition of his death. Eine kleine Nachtmusik,
ostensibly based on Mörike’s text, spells this out in Mozart’s love affair
with Eugenie, underlined by Mozart’s claim to her that he places
madness over reason and beauty over justice. But the Don Giovanni music
plays no role apart from the fact that Mozart is trying to finish it on the
journey. That he gets the idea for the Commendatore chords at the
Schinzberg estate could be seen as a covert connection, but it is too covert
to have much impact.
The film that brings this identification to (musical) fruition is Wen die
Götter lieben. Despite the monumentalising frame around the story
discussed above, the film’s overall Mozart construction is surprising for
Nazi Germany in 1942, and follows the more common tendency to
present him as a cultural gem to be defended against foreign barbarism
(see Heldt 2003: 125–8). In keeping with many biopics of the time,
German or not, the film uses the melodrama template of a love triangle,
9 While the love triangle the parties involved being Mozart and the Weber sisters.9 But though the
is common to several
Mozart films, the
film makes the appropriate excuses for Mozart’s infidelity – Luise was his
identity of its third first love, against which he is powerless – its translation into music results
vertex besides Wolfgang in a less apologetic picture. Mozart and Luise act out their love affair in
and Constanze changes;
see Freitag 1991: 182. a series of musical performances. When he visits her in Mannheim he
writes a song for her, which they sing together. When they meet again, he
learns that she will sing Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. He plays Voi
che sapete che cosa è amor – in which Cherubino asks the women about love
– and tells her that she will sing it beautifully. This she does (and
Constanze’s maid has clearly got the message when she complains to her
mistress that Mozart writes songs for Luise), while Constanze, about to
cry, watches her bewitched husband conduct.
But the climax is reserved for Don Giovanni. Firstly, as mentioned,
Mozart tells Constanze of Luise’s role in the new opera, and the music
accompanies her shocked face with the opening chords of the overture,
transferring their foreshadowing of doom to the marriage. Here it is not
the protagonists acting out their story in music, but the narration
implying a parallel between life and music, music not yet written, but
already throwing its shadow – a classic example of the myth-making
circle.
36 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

However, Don Giovanni is then also drawn into the musical perform-
ance of the affair. Mozart spends time at Josefina und František Xaver
Dušek’s ‘Villa Bertramka’ in Prague, in order to finish Don Giovanni. The
establishing shots of the house are accompanied by an instrumental
version of Don Giovanni’s canzonetta Deh vieni alla finestra, in which he
tries to seduce Donna Elvira’s maid – a simple, pastoral melody for the
villa’s Arcadian setting, but also an indication of what is to come. Then,
at a party before the premiere, Mozart sings the first bars of Fin ch’han dal
vino as a toast to the good life (in the opera, this is the Don’s preparation
for the upcoming ball). He thanks Josefina Dušek for her hospitality that
has saved him from hassle with bakers, shoemakers and other assorted
‘prosaic everyday people’, implying that he is something different – the
creative artist, but also like Don Giovanni the ever-searching free spirit,
not bound by everyday (marital) morality. When the guests ask Luise to
sing something from the opera, Mozart rejects her proposal of ‘the aria
to Masetto’ (Batti, batti), and suggests La ci darem la mano, used in Don
Giovanni’s seduction of Zerlina. Luise asks how she can sing it without a
partner, and Mozart says he will sing the Don Juan – ‘at least I will try to
be one’. And they sing and hug and kiss, and Constanze watches with
tears in her eyes; the cutting back and forth between the couple recklessly
performing their love on the lawn and Constanze’s pained face leaves no
doubt about the moral shipwreck we are witnessing.

Diegetic Ironies and Implied Authorial Narration

In Wen die Götter lieben, Mozart himself becomes the driving force of the
myth-making loop by casting himself in the role of his (anti)hero. But
there are other ways of making diegetic music dramatically effective. The
most drastic is the construction of unlikely diegetic chance. In Eine kleine
Nachtmusik, Countess Eugenie plays the theme of the Andante from
K331, dreaming of an escape from her provincial surroundings, an
escape represented by Mozart’s music. After a cut we see and hear
Mozart play his piano in Vienna, before he and Constanze set off for
Prague via Eugenie’s home. He gives a rough rendition of Leporello’s
Madamina, il catalogo è questo, but almost imperceptibly slips into the K331
Andante – from the recklessness of Don Giovanni to the tenderness the
Andante stands for in this film (and in others). Later, the tune is repeat-
edly used as nondiegetic music to signify Eugenie’s love of Mozart’s
music and their love affair; but the starting point is the diegetic coinci-
dence that joins the two scenes across the cut and implies a connection
between Eugenie and Mozart – a connection the irony of fate makes
MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 37
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

audible in the music they are both drawn to (implicitly, at the same
moment). But the diegetic ‘coincidence’ around K331 in Eine kleine
Nachtmusik needs a different narratological explanation.
Nondiegetic music is a narrational pointer: hinting, underlining,
commenting. This commentative effect can be stronger with pre-
existing music, because our foreknowledge makes us wonder why it was
chosen. Nondiegetic music is located on the level of a film’s narration –
a narration that takes a given story and controls its presentation
(framing, camera angles and movement, cuts, voiceovers, nondiegetic
music, etc.). The fiction of an autonomous pre-filmic reality as the origin
of the story (the film’s fabula, in David Bordwell’s term) remains intact:
the narration ‘decides’ how to present this fabula in the syuzhet (the
sequence of events on screen) by the means available to the medium
(Bordwell 1985: 49–53). Yet a narrative agency that is capable of placing
the right music at the right point in the diegesis has control not only
over the means of presenting a given story, but over the story itself – an
implied author instead of a narrator (see Chatman 1990: 74–108). An
implied author comes to the fore when the irony of fate strikes, when
events accidentally (or not so accidentally) seem to fall into place to make
a certain point.
In a fully fictional story, an implied author is an unproblematic
construct because fictionality is part of the game – the willing suspension
of disbelief is only half the fun, awareness of the constructedness of
narration and story is the other. The back-and-forth between story
immersion and enjoyment of the artifice of its construction and presen-
tation is crucial for most fiction. Most stories, in whatever medium, retain
a degree of diegetic plausibility to allow the willing suspension of
disbelief; but most also toy with letting the construction peek through.
But to uphold the fiction of the pre-filmic autonomy – the ‘givenness’
of the story – would seem to be of special importance in a biopic.
Moments that show the workings of the implied author break the illusion
of that autonomy; the film lets us see that the filmed life of the composer
is as invented as everything else in cinema. To make such moments work
for the audience, we have to assume that its willingness to accept either
the irony of fate or the fictionality of ‘real-life’ stories (or both) is suffi-
ciently strong. Appearances of the implied author as clear as that in Eine
kleine Nachtmusik are rare. But less unlikely diegetic coincidences are a
staple, especially of older composer biopics. The 1955 film Mozart
provides examples as part of an overall focus on diegetic music, not least
because the film was a showcase for the voices of the Vienna State Opera
ensemble, who are presented in a series of diegetic set pieces.
38 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

When the Tamino of Schikaneder’s troupe presents himself to Mozart

and sings Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön, the face of Anni, Mozart’s love
interest in this film, shows her inner movement, movement that can be
ascribed to her reaction to the music as well as to Mozart, with whom she
is falling in love: the music is its diegetic self, but also comments on the
situation. The same happens when the troupe sings Bei Männern, welche
Liebe fühlen at a picnic, and Mozart uses the opportunity to muse about
his love life; it is also prefigured in Anni’s audition piece for Mozart, Das
Veilchen, a song foretelling the unhappy end of her love story. A clearer
instance occurs when Anni is about to say goodbye to Mozart’s physician
before she leaves Vienna for a concert tour. When she tells him about a
premonition that Mozart might be dead by her return, we hear an organ
arrangement of the Ave verum, which we assume to be nondiegetic fore-
boding (as a piece written shortly before Mozart’s death) until she runs
into a nearby church which gives the music a diegetic anchor – a
balancing act between meaningful implication and diegetic plausibility
typical of the genre.
One of the oddest cases of diegetic musical commentary may be
detectable in Vergesst Mozart, though it is so fleeting and imprecise that
one is not quite sure if it is really intentional. Baron Van Swieten refuses
to betray a sentence from a Masonic ceremonial to police chief Pergen,
who threatens consequences for Van Swieten’s standing at court. When
Van Swieten says that belonging to the court is not worth his honour,
Pergen answers that to serve the court is the highest honour. Van Swieten
demurs: ‘No! Far more important than any worldly power are human
achievement, are free thought and the ideals of equality and fraternity’.
The last words are accompanied by a motif from the Andante of Mozart’s
Piano Quartet K478 as the bridge to the next scene, which shows the
piece being played at the archbishop’s house:
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 39
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

In keeping with most composer biopics, Vergesst Mozart favours the

composer’s better-known pieces, both as diegetic and as nondiegetic
music. But K478 is hardly that – so why this passage from this piece at
this point? An explanation could be its similarity to the beginning of the
chorus of the German national anthem:

If this is meant as an allusion, it shows one of the problems of Vergesst

Mozart: it pursues its injection of politics into its Mozart re-invention in
so scattershot a manner that not much is achieved. A German audience
would probably associate the motif with the first words of the national
anthem, ‘Unity and justice and freedom/For the German fatherland’,
which is close enough to Van Swieten’s enlightened sentiments, and
perhaps also with the ‘Flourish in this fortune’s blessing/Flourish,
German fatherland’ of the chorus. But Hoffmann von Fallersleben would
not write this text for another fifty years, and aimed it at the political
conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Germany, utterly different from
those of eighteenth-century imperial Austria. Historically closer was
Haydn’s composition of the melody for the Emperor’s birthday in 1797,
but that does not provide any meaningful interpretation for the scene
(apart from the potential insinuation that the motif may have influenced
Haydn’s composition).

Displaced Diegetic Music

The last set of examples concerns those that cross the borderline between
diegetic and nondiegetic music – not necessarily a very noticeable, but
almost always a meaningful breach of the boundaries of seemingly
10 See Stilwell 2007 natural categories.10 Such transitions can effect a particularly strong
for an example for a entrance into the feedback loop; but again there are more innocuous
renewed interest in the
diegetic/nondiegetic examples as well. These tend to use a technique typical for (but not
distinction in recent exclusive to) musician biopics: displaced diegetic music (see Bordwell
film musicology.
and Thompson 1997: 336–9).
Displacement of diegetic music can help to integrate extended
excerpts of pre-existing music into a scene without resorting to purely
diegetic set-pieces. Pre-existing pieces can be tampered with only to a
limited degree if the editing is not to be too noticeable. One solution is to
give the music a diegetic anchoring point, but to use the same cue before
40 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

and/or after that point as underscoring for images in relation to which it

cannot be understood as diegetic. When Countess Paumgarten, in Mozart
– Ich hätte München Ehre gemacht, commissions Mozart to write a mass, his
joyful face is underscored with the C major jubilation of the Dona nobis
pacem from the Missa brevis K220 – music that, after a cut, becomes the
diegetic music of the performance. The musical conventions of religious
gratitude are projected back onto Mozart’s gratitude to his benefactress,
and the music smoothly connects the two scenes across a spatial and
temporal leap.
Displaced diegetic music is ubiquitous in composer biopics, and several
interesting examples here show its dramatic potential. In Wen die Götter
lieben, Mozart visits the Weber family for tea and wants to use the oppor-
tunity to further his relationship with Constanze. At the same time,
musicians in the palace prepare a string quartet rehearsal in which the
emperor will participate. Mozart is out of favour with the court, and his
friends’ idea is to sneak in one of his pieces without telling the emperor
what it is, in the hope that he will like it and take Mozart back into the
fold. Things go according to plan: the emperor sweeps in imperiously,
takes his violin, accepts the music placed before him without asking too
many questions, and they start to play the first movement of K575
(written for the cello-playing Prussian king, not the Austrian emperor),
starting at bar 32 and with other cuts later. In bar 61, the syuzhet shifts to
the Weber household, and the music aptly accompanies mild domestic
upheaval: something has burned in the oven, and the disorienting
opening of the development in bar 78 fits the moment. At bar 86 with its
clear G major, Mozart arrives, and there is further lighthearted confusion
about an ash streak on Constanze’s cheek, also appropriately under-
scored by the quartet, before we return to the palace, where the same
piece is still being played (although the performance closes with a
passage from the finale of string quartet K465).
The implication is clear: the two sequences of events happen at the
same time, and with parallel import for Mozart: at the Webers’ his private
fate will be decided, because the visit establishes his relationship with
Constanze, while his professional fate is being decided at the palace (the
mollified emperor will let Mozart write The Abduction from the Seraglio).
Though there is no particularly meaningful connection between K575
and the events in the Weber house apart from its suitability as under-
scoring, the scenes achieve yet another link between life and work in a
musico-dramatic stretto under the umbrella of the music. And there is
more at work here: the ostentatious constructedness of the displacement
and the parallel sequences is a classic case of ‘self-conscious narration’
(Bordwell 1985: 57–61), foregrounding the artifice of film, an artifice
MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 41
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

that produces a genuinely filmic performance of the music – a perform-

ance using the means of the medium to move the music centre stage.

Supradiegetic Music
A different way of meaningfully crossing the diegetic/nondiegetic divide
is used in Eine kleine Nachtmusik: the simultaneous presence of diegetic
and nondiegetic elements in the music. Rick Altman has described this as
a genre-defining technique of film musicals: ‘supradiegetic music’, the
fusion of diegetic singing and dancing with nondiegetic accompaniment
(1987: 62–74). In musicals this fusion leads the music into the performa-
tive transcendence of the production numbers that are the genre’s raison
d’être. Outside of that genre context, not every simultaneous combination
of diegetic and nondiegetic music can be described as supradiegetic, but
in Eine kleine Nachtmusik it makes sense. Again Countess Eugenie, alone
in her room, is dreaming of escaping the confinement of her country
home and her impending marriage to a country squire. The orchestra
begins to play (apparently) nondiegetic music. But then Eugenie starts to
sing Deh, vieni, non tardar from The Marriage of Figaro, adding her diegetic
song of love-longing to the nondiegetic accompaniment. The layering of
elements continues when the music (the melody now in the violin)
reaches across the cut to Mozart and Constanze at the inn in the neigh-
bouring village: Mozart admires the landscape, including the sun beyond
the palace park visible through the window, where Eugenie is looking out
of her own window at (implicitly) the same time.
The transcendence of a narrative boundary in the supradiegetic fusion
echoes Eugenie’s yearning to transcend the confines of her prescribed,
predictable, narrow provincial life – a yearning she acts out in singing
Mozart’s music. The link with Mozart across the cut also has a double
dimension: it can be seen as another pointer to the connection between
Eugenie and Mozart, as with the Andante from K331. But it is also bit of
magic realism: through the text of the aria, Eugenie calls out to a
‘beloved soul’ to come to her, and Mozart duly comes. Once more the
work is projected onto the life, though here onto Eugenie’s rather than
Mozart’s, in another kind of feedback between the spheres.

Music, Narration and Climactic Crises

Three final examples demonstrate another feature of many composer
biopics: climaxes achieved by a dense ‘knotting up’ of such narrative
transitions. It is the alternative to the focus in Mozart or Eine kleine
42 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

Nachtmusik on extended diegetic performances, an alternative that

weaves the music deeply into the narrative structure instead of setting it
apart to allow it to speak for itself.
The most elaborate of these scenes occurs in Wen die Götter lieben,
coming about five minutes after the scandalous La ci darem la mano duet
between Mozart and Luise and bringing the conflict to a head and a
solution. Mozart conducts the Don Giovanni premiere, while Constanze
decides to take the plunge and leave him.

• The sequence begins with a cross between musical continuity editing

and displaced diegetic music, when the diminished seventh chord of
the final entry of the Commendatore on stage coincides with
Constanze’s decision. The chord underscores her facial expression as
well as Mozart’s own turbulent thoughts, triggered by her farewell
letter which lies open on the score. The Don Giovanni music runs
through the whole scene from here on.
• While the music continues, the image switches back to Constanze, rein-
forcing the structural motif of musical displacement. But with regard
to Constanze, the music can also be understood as metadiegetic – we
can easily imagine her thinking of her very own dissoluto punito in the
terms of his music. As in the comparable montage of Mozart’s private
and professional fate centred on K575, the music matches the images
onto which it is displaced, as in the high string chords that function as
a stinger when Constanze closes her eyes in pain.
• Metadiegetic images are added to the mix: an insert window shows
Constanze leave the house, and Mozart’s facial expression makes clear
that what we see is what he is imagining.
• Things come to a head when Constanze, from within this insert
window, seems to look back at Mozart, before averting her eyes in
despair – Mozart’s mental image of her comes to independent life, like
the Commendatore in the opera.
• The ambiguity shifts register when Mozart decides to run home to
catch Constanze: now the music seems to combine displaced diegetic
and nondiegetic status – we remain aware of the fact that it is being
performed at the opera, while it also underscores Mozart’s desperate
pursuit, especially with the reverb added when we see Mozart run
through the streets, chased by his shadow, an effect so theatrical that it
seems to proclaim that film has superseded the theatre we see in action
in the Don Giovanni performance. And of course we can still under-
stand the music as metadiegetic, as music in Mozart’s mind, aware of
the parallels between Don Giovanni and himself. Mozart catches
 MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 43
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

Constanze just in time, and they make up; but when she calls him ‘You
Don Juan’, she reinforces the projection of the opera onto his life.

Even more than in the K575 sequence, the very artificiality of the
narration is the point. The climax is not just one of plot, but even more
one of filmic construction, which becomes the focus of interest and fore-
grounds its own capacity for effectively using and showcasing music at
the same time. A narrative transition is also used, if less extravagantly,
when Mozart is on his deathbed: musicians play the Confutatis maledictis
passages from the Requiem to him, while the intervening Voca me only
sounds in Mozart’s mind. But when he dies, the metadiegetic Voca me
does not stop, but continues, becoming nondiegetic: Mozart has passed
11 To have the into his own reception history, which remembers him in his music.11
Requiem sung to the
dying Mozart is an idea
I do not know if the makers of Amadeus knew Wen die Götter lieben, but
dating back to the seeing the deathbed scenes in these films back to back makes one wonder.
beginning of Mozart’s In Amadeus it is more elaborate, built on the fact that the film is pervaded
film career in La mort
de Mozart in 1909; see by metadiegetic music. We twice hear the melodic line with which the
Freitag 1991: 173–6. Count asks his wife for forgiveness in the last scene of The Marriage of
Figaro (‘Contessa, perdono!’, bars 421ff. of the finale) while Mozart
12 See also Joe 2006: composes at his billiard table;12 we hear a montage of Mozart music when
64. Salieri leafs through his manuscripts; and when Salieri spies in Mozart’s
flat and comes into his study, in a moment that seems to transcend the
metadiegetic into the realm of magic, we hear the ‘Contessa, perdono!’
motif again, as if the music were in the air. The theme of metadiegetic
music continues to the last scene of the film, where Salieri tells the priest
that no one plays his music anymore. Thinking of Mozart, he then says
‘But his …’, and we hear the Romance from K466. Salieri’s imagination
places the music he is remembering before our ears; that we recognise it
immediately demonstrates his point.
All of this makes sense in a film that is centred on Salieri’s desire to get
in on the secret of Mozart’s gift. And this is just what happens in the
deathbed scene, in a virtuosic crescendo of narrative transitions that leads
Salieri, in his attempt to help Mozart and kill him at the same time, to the
insight he so craves:

• Mozarts croaks the Confutatis (diegetic music).

• Mozart checks the score, and we hear the music he hears in his mind
(metadiegetic music). Interestingly, though, the music continues when
he has already returned the paper and started to speak again.
• He goes on to sing the music to Salieri, but now we hear both his
croaking and the result simultaneously (layering of diegetic and
metadiegetic music).
44 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

• He describes the orchestral accompaniment, but the music (in his

mind) starts even before he explains and sings it (metadiegetic music
outrunning his conscious thought).
• Mozart explains the trumpet and timpani parts, and we hear the
instruments simultaneously with the sounds he produces (layering
of diegetic and metadiegetic music). Salieri gets the idea and says
‘Yes! Yes!’ – are we to assume that he now hears the same inner music
as Mozart, having been guided by him into the necessary musical
imagination?
• Mozart explains the string parts: ‘Strings in unison, ostinato on A, like
this’. Again we hear his feeble voice and the imagined musical result at
the same time, though his croaking has now become almost inaudible.
Salieri immediately starts to write and, when after a while Mozart
stops, he continues to write and even begins to sing the music himself,
because he understands it – Mozart’s metadiegetic voice has become
his own. Only with the help of his nemesis, Mozart, has Salieri finally
managed to find that almost magical kind of understanding of music
that so far had eluded him – the ultimate irony of the film.
• When Mozart checks the whole passage and conducts his own inner
voice, the music leaves metadiegetic space and becomes the
nondiegetic (or displaced metadiegetic?) accompaniment for
Constanze’s coach on its hurried way back to Vienna, the alternation
of the Confutatis and Voca me reflecting images of the coach against the
dark sky and of its interior.

The deathbed scene in Amadeus continues the tradition of the myth-

making loop. Here, too, the Requiem sings of Mozart’s own death, but
the loop is more tightly curved than in other films: this work does not
explain the life – instead it is the instrument of Salieri’s musical enlight-
enment and humiliation. The film uses Mozart’s mythic status for its
unkind discourse on mediocrity. For that purpose it furthers the myth of
the inexplicable genius, but here Mozart is but a function of a different
purpose rather than its focal point. However, this may be true of other
Mozart biopics, and of reception history in general.

Conclusion
There is no simple way to summarise results. The point of this article has
been to explore a few of the perspectives offered by biopic re-inventions
of Mozart and his music. A different selection of films or a different
methodological focus, for example on the way older films arrange and
MSMI 3:1 Spring 09 45
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

re-compose music, or on the connections between music and biographic

events, would have produced different results.
But there is no harm in the fact that much remains to be done.
Though Amadeus has received a fair amount of academic attention, close
analysis of musico-dramatic structures is rare even with regard to that
film, and practically nonexistent for other Mozart biopics. Without a
better understanding of how these films work, not only will our under-
standing of composer biopics as a sub-genre remain sketchy, but the
assessment of their success, as biography or as creative structures in their
own right, will remain limited.
Another lesson, one that goes beyond Mozart biopics and can be
applied to the genre at large, is that the filmic and musical re-invention
of a composer involves a re-invention of film music techniques. Film
musicology has not dealt in depth or detail with what such films have to
offer as a laboratory for weaving music into a film. Here, too, much
remains to be done.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

References
Altman, Rick (1987) The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press
Betzwieser, Thomas (1995) ‘Komponisten als Opernfiguren: Musikalische
Werkgenese auf der Bühne’, in Annegrit Laubenthal (ed.) Studien zur
Musikgeschichte: Eine Festschrift für Ludwig Finscher, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 511–22
Bordwell, David (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (1997) Film Art: An Introduction,
5th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill
Chatman, Seymour (1978) Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
— (1990) Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY
and London: Cornell University Press
Freitag, Wolfgang (1991) Amadeus & Co: Mozart im Film, Mödling: Edition
Umbruch
Gorbman, Claudia (1987) Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press
Heldt, Guido (2003) ‘Hardly Heroes: Composers as a Subject in National
Socialist Cinema’, in Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (eds.) Music
and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 114–35
46 3:1 Spring 09 MSMI
Guido Heldt ♦ Playing Mozart

— (2007) ‘Die Lieder von gestern: Filmmusik und das implizite Imperfekt’,
Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 1 (1), 10–25
Horowitz, Joseph (1992) ‘Mozart as Midcult: Mass Snob Appeal’, The Musical
Quarterly, 76 (1), spring, 1–16
Joe, Jeongwon (2006) ‘Reconsidering Amadeus: Mozart as Film Music’, in Phil
Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (eds.) Changing Tunes: the use of pre-existing music
in film. Aldershot: Ashgate, 57–73
Marshall, Robert L. (1997) ‘Film as Musicology: Amadeus’, The Musical Quarterly,
81 (2), summer, 173–9
Secci, Lia (1991) ‘Noi tre (Wir drei): Zum Mozart-Film von Pupi Avati’, in Peter
Csobádi, Gernot Gruber, Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller and Oswald Panagl
(eds.) Das Phänomen Mozart im 20. Jahrhundert: Wirkung, Verarbeitung und
Vermarktung in Literatur, Bildender Kunst und in den Medien. Anif: Matthaes
Verlag, 439–54
Stilwell, Robynn J. (2007) ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’
in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (eds.) Beyond
the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 186–202
Szabó-Knotik, Cornelia (1999) Amadeus: Milos Formans Film als musikhistorisches
Phänomen. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlags-Anstalt, (Grazer
musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten 11)

Additional Bibliography
Caron, Alfred, Labrande, Christian and Salmona, Paul (eds.) (1996) Figures du
compositeur: Musiciens à l’écran de Gesualdo à Pierre Schaeffer, le compositeur vu
par le cinéma et la télévision (1905–1995). Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux
Lang, Paul Henry (1997) ‘The Film Amadeus’ in Alfred Mann and George J.
Buelow (eds.) Musicology and Performance. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 155–62
Szabó-Knotik, Cornelia (1991) ‘Mozart und seine Musik im Amadeus-Film:
Musikeinsatz und Präsentation’ in Peter Csobádi, Gernot Gruber, Jürgen
Kühnel, Ulrich Müller and Oswald Panagl (eds.) Das Phänomen Mozart im 20.
Jahrhundert: Wirkung, Verarbeitung und Vermarktung in Literatur, Bildender Kunst
und in den Medien. Anif: Matthaes Verlag, 455–74
Tibbets, John C. (2005) Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press