Transcription
Your Majesty. Her Mozart.
>> Yes. What about it?
>> He's here.
>> What separates a genius from an average talent?
Good.
>> Your Majesty, I hope you won't find it improper, but I've written a little march of welcome in his honor.
>> About a half hour into the 1984 film Amadeus, we find Mozart being escorted through the emperor's palace to attend a business meeting, unaware that he'll be challenged to play from memory a piece of music he's just now hearing for the first time.
>> Keep it, Majesty, if you want. It's already here in my head.
Show us.
>> While he couldn't pull off a party trick like this without having perfect pitch, there's much more at play in Mozart's mind that enables him to pass a royal pop quiz with such ease and flare. And unwittingly humiliate a fellow composer in the process. Hey, it's Ben Lahy and I'm here analyzing this iconic scene from one of the greatest movies ever made. The brainchild of playwright Peter Schaffer and director Milos Foreman. Now, I hasten to point out that this is a work of historical fiction. Antonio Solieri was an influential musician who led a successful career and wasn't prone to jealous rage, let alone homicide. But more on him later. While the scene may be fictional, it can help us better understand the reality of Mozart's musical abilities. What tacit knowledge would the historical Mozart have had to possess to pull off a stunt like this? For some, this very question may seem nonsensical, even sacrilegious, like asking, "What were the physics behind Jesus's miracles?"
>> Here again was the very voice of God.
>> But I think we can explain it. And I contend that what we refer to as Mozart's genius is in fact an exceptional case of what was otherwise quite ordinary at the time. Musical fluency akin to knowing a language. Let me elaborate. The scene is known for its lopsided showdown between mediocrity and genius where Mozart embarrasses Solieri by transforming his mundane little march into a masterpiece on the spot in front of the emperor.
>> The rest is just the same, isn't it?
Mozart's genius is depicted in three stages. First as a feat of memory.
>> It's already here in my head.
>> Then as a brief act of composition or this this
>> which he continues in the form of an improvisation. I'll break down each one in turn.
>> What do you think?
>> This is yours.
>> Keep it, majesty, if you want. It's already here in my head.
>> What? On one hearing only.
>> I think so, sire. Yes.
>> What appears as a feat of short-term memory in this scene is in fact the culmination of a process of long-term memory that began when Mozart was a child. In the early 1760s, little Wolfie was gaining fluency in German, Italian, French, as well as a courtly style of music he heard played on a regular basis, first and foremost by his dad and older sister. In his groundbreaking 2007 study, Music in the Galant style, music theorist Robert Yearan argues that Mozart's kindergarten compositions, as transcribed by his father, are most likely a record of his early musical babblings at 5 years old. At this phase in his life, Mozart was rapidly acquiring a vocabulary of stock phrases or schemata he'd heard spoken by Galant musicians at court. But what is this musical vocabulary made of?
>> Show us.
I mentioned earlier that having perfect pitch is useful to Mozart since when he sits down at the keyboard, he already knows that Solieri's March is in C major. But you could have perfect pitch and not remember how this music goes. Mozart's brain isn't a punch card. He's not just recording a series of absolute pitches in his head one by one anymore than you're listening to me talk one letter at a time. So before even learning the name of the piece, Mozart already understands he's listening to some kind of ceremonial march. A bit of pomp meant to appeal to the emperor's sense of status.
>> Delightful core composer. May I play it when he comes in?
>> The oompa in the left hand sends the clear signal of four beats to a bar, laying out in Mozart's mind a metrical grid over which the music is unfolding.
>> Time, common time. Mozart even tries to march along with the music a bit when he first hears it. Noticing how rhythmically square it all is with basically one chord per step. Okay.
>> But these are all features of the music everyone in the room can hear. What begins to separate Mozart from the emperor, or the average viewer of the film for that matter, is that he's just as easily deciphering the march's tonal design. The way the notes of a scale are used to generate tension and resolution around a certain key center, in this case, C. The hallmark of musical fluency in the 18th century was the ability to recognize harmonic and melodic patterns that emerge out of tonal relationships latent in major and minor scales. While Mozart stood head and shoulders above his peers as a prodigious musical wordsmith and poet, his own acts of improvisation and composition still depended on stock phrases, musical figures of speech learned during childhood that were common currency among his fellow composers. According to Ericson, these stock phrases were so pervasive as to constitute a dominant mode of thought, influencing how musicians learned, wrote, and taught, and therefore also how they listened. As Mozart listens to Salieri's march, his mind is modeling the eight bars of the piece, one figure of speech at a time. It's the musical equivalent of a ritual exchange, like, "Hi, how are you?" "I'm just fine, thank you." And for Mozart, just as easy to remember. Each gesture in the dialogue is built from a stock bass motion, which Mozart would process in terms of each bass note's position in the major scale. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, back to one. These scale degrees allow Mozart to process notes relationally, each one playing a different role in orbit around the first note of the scale, the key center, also called the tonic. Now, the baseline alone would have been enough for Mozart to automatically infer all the harmonies above it through which the surface details of the melodic line can then come into focus. The opening gambit is built on 5-5-1, followed by an elaboration in falling thirds, 3-1-6, before a cadence that closes the phrase, 1-5-1. These musical lines are also referred to by musicians appropriately as voices. And the phrase uttered here is one Mozart would have spoken countless thousands of times. In fact, Solieri's fictional march actually bears some resemblance to the historical Mozart's first composition. Although differing in style and meter, both pieces feature a voice leading pattern related to the sa schema where the upper voice steps down 5-4-3, sung as
>> And the bass voice moves from 1 to 5 and back to one.
Together they sound like this. And that schema lurks behind both pieces. So when Mozart heard Salieri's march, it was like hearing his own first words. And when he sat down to recite them, it was literally child's play. At this point, it's worth checking in with Salieri. On a humiliation scale from 1 to 10, he's currently at
>> Salieri is threatened by Mozart to be sure, but so far has the upper hand. His facial expression seems to say, "Okay, so the kid's a talented parrot, but I composed the music." But now it's Mozart's turn. As Salieri's march begins to repeat itself, Mozart quickly grows bored. He starts paraphrasing the music on fast forward.
>> The rest is just the same, isn't it?
>> Then Mozart puts on the brakes as he approaches a roadblock in the march. And he says the quiet part out loud.
>> It doesn't really work, does it?
>> Mozart, the composer, has just entered the room.
>> It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God. Excuse me. But why, why would God choose an obscene child to be his instrument?
Records show that the young Mozart quickly advanced from imitating musical phrases to incorporating them into his own original music making. In Yingan's words, Mozart became a fluent speaker of Galant musical prose by perhaps age 8 and a minor artist of Galant musical poetry by perhaps age 10. Continuing at that pace, by his mid-20s, Mozart was a veritable Shakespeare of musical composition. So, at this point in the scene, his mind is already flooded with possibilities for how to turn Salieri's clumsy prose into clever poetry. But what exactly is the problem with Salieri's march? Well, Mozart identifies two overlapping flaws, one in style, the other in grammar. Whereas Salieri's march is otherwise square and stylistically indistinct, he does employ one characteristic military motif, a so-called dotted rhythm that goes long, short, long. This gives the music a little kick in its step. But at the same time, Salieri drags down the tune with thick block chords moving in opposite directions, grinding that newfound momentum to a halt.
>> It doesn't really work, does it?
Like trying to march in heavy boots while your feet spread apart.
>> Did you try? Shouldn't it be a bit more?
Mozart's first stab at improving the phrase is already very clever. He takes the one catchy element in the music, the dotted rhythm, and spreads it across an arpeggiated figure that climbs up the keyboard, simulating a fanfare played by a trumpet. This makes the march much more nimble on its feet and gives it some forward momentum. But then Mozart runs into the same wall again.
>> Shouldn't it be a bit more
>> arising from a weakness in the harmonic progression Salieri chose for this phrase?
>> The march is much.
>> It's a kind of grammatical error. And to better understand it, let's look at a homework assignment. The real historical Mozart gave to his student Thomas Atwood. Atwood studied with Mozart for more than a year, leaving behind hundreds of pages of exercises in harmony, counterpoint, and free composition with his teacher's corrections written in red ink. Although Atwood was very capable, he sometimes made careless mistakes, once even prompting Mozart to write in the margins, "You are an ass."
>> I'm a vulgar man.
At the very top of Atwood's first assignment, Mozart writes a demonstration utilizing the same three chords Salieri uses in his march. The chords built on scale degrees 1, five, and six in C major. Then in the very first exercise, Mozart notates a baseline for Atwood to harmonize that features some of the same bass motions found in Salieri's March, including 3-1-6. In the Atwood assignment, the move from 3 to 1 to six is part of a longer chain of falling thirds that signal a modulation from C major to G major. Falling thirds function best as a transitional gesture, taking you from one moment of tonal stability to another. But in Salieri's march, they're used as a culminating gesture. It's a lateral move, a step sideways that Salieri treats as a step forward, as the apex of tension in the larger phrase before a dramatic pause. And the result just sounds confused, like the music lost its train of thought.
>> It doesn't really work, does it?
This weakness is evident to Mozart during his first attempt to correct the phrase, where he once again gets stalled by scale degree 6. Mozart's solution is simpler and better.
>> Better? What do you think?
>> He arranges his new brass fanfare for both hands, two octaves apart, and extends it into the next bar, avoiding six altogether. Salieri's pregnant pause has been erased, and Mozart keeps the pep in his step by adding energetic eighth notes to the closing gesture. In musicologist Leonard Ratner's terms, the music now has a topic.
>> A jubilant military parade, one filled with character and life that makes you want to march along with it.
>> What do you think?
>> Mozart schools Salieri, effectively grading his work in front of the class. Yet Mozart is happily oblivious to this master class he's giving and seems to think that Salieri will share in the joy of his discovery. But to Salieri, the message from Mozart is loud and clear. You are an ass. The humiliation scale is maxing out.
>> Then to add insult to injury, Mozart launches into a freewheeling improvisation on Salieri's March of Welcome. Essentially composing a finished masterpiece in real time. How is this possible? Now, I'm no Mozart, but I do put a lot of time and effort into composing YouTube videos. And like Mozart, I depend on patrons. Except you don't have to be an archbishop or an emperor to support my work. Just join my Patreon community, and you'll be helping me continue to make videos like this one. Well, then it is.
>> Mozart's uncanny improvisational abilities were recognized from a young age. It was incredible to see him play off the top of his head for a full hour. In the words of a German diplomat who witnessed the 8-year-old Mozart perform in Paris, "The most consummate music director could not be more profound than him in the science of harmony and of modulations, which he knows how to lead down paths lesser known but always precise." What made Mozart's pathfinding so pathbreaking was the novelty and orderliness of his ideas. He could navigate a harmonic fork in the road and take the less beaten paths with confidence, like he'd been there before. But these street smarts were honed in part through book smarts Mozart picked up while learning to read and write music under his father's watchful eye. Papa.
>> Papa.
>> Leopold would later write to his son, "Good writing and the ordering of things, the thread. This distinguishes the master from the bungler, even in trifles."
>> Just a trifle, of course.
Thus, when Mozart takes Salieri's march down a very unwelcome path, the result is spontaneous yet follows a logical plan. To achieve this, Mozart employs specific techniques less associated with today's classical music practice than they are with popular music.
>> Well, not that, but more specifically jazz improvisation and freestyle rap. At the core of jazz training is learning to play old standards in a new way. Putting your own personal stamp on someone else's tune by freely embellishing it. This practice relates to a corresponding tradition in classical music known as theme and variation. One of the elementary techniques in composition and improvisation dating back centuries. Mozart had been composing variations since he was a boy. Usually on other composer's themes, including one by Salieri. Do you know I I actually composed some variations on a melody of yours? Funny little tune, but it yielded some good things. The more experienced Mozart gained composing theme and variations, the more fluent he became improvising in this style, as witnessed in this scene. With the voice-leading scheme of Salieri's March already in mind, Mozart can just swing around the bars of that jungle gym. Like a modern-day jazz artist, he starts riffing on its chord changes, throwing in a so-called Alberti bass to increase energy and forward movement, using the dotted figure as a recurring motif, and inserting catchy 16th note hooks that invoke wind and percussion instruments of a military band. He then circles back to deliver a complete variation on Salieri's original eight-bar theme, utilizing all these elements and more. Mozart is on a roll and like a rapper inventing a verse on the spot, he starts to freestyle. First, DJ Wolf Gang lays down a kind of harmonic loop track, basically sampling a three-chord pop progression that alternates between the three major chords in the major scale built on 1, four, and five. By manipulating the harmonic rhythm from his turntable, he can control the rhetorical emphasis of the beat and play with our expectations. First this, then that, then this. Say what? Yeah, this. So that Mozart's feeling it. And with the beat laid down, he starts to draw from his robust mental bank of tropes and ready-made rhymes, and uses them to effortlessly flow on the military topic at hand.
>> He employs rhythmic imitation, the musician's equivalent of a rhyme scheme, repeating the dotted motif and a new turnaround figure in short succession on different harmonies. As the music draws to a close, Mozart adds rhythmic variation using a technique called diminution, filling in beats with smaller rhythmic values like zigzagging triplet arpeggios and 16th note runs. The effect is pure pyrotechnics. Mozart really pulls out all the stops. The trumpets are popping off, the drums are rolling, and we've reached the grand finale of a fireworks show. It's a truly glorious culmination, but also one that couldn't be more inappropriate to the occasion. Mozart got carried away in his flow state and can't help but add a cheeky little punctuation mark to the end, calling back that military motif once more in the low bass this time for comedic effect. For Mozart, the last notes are a punchline. To Salieri, they're the final knockout punch in what for him was a one-sided musical beatdown. If you open this old Penguin edition of Peter Schaffer's Amadeus, you'll find Mozart's upgraded version of Salieri's March adorning the title page. This speaks to the significance this scene has long held in relation to the play's larger plot. According to Simon Callow, who played Mozart in the original staged production of Amadeus, this scene is what convinced him to take the part. He realized the script contained the essence of the play in a single perfect theatrical gesture and longed to play the scene. And just as Mozart took creative liberties with Salieri's March, so too did Peter Schaffer take liberties with history in writing Amadeus.
>> It is of course melodrama. It obviously never happened. Couldn't have happened. I like it for the it couldn't have happened. and it became pure theater.
>> So to wrap up this video, let's dispel a few myths propped up by the film. Number one, the March of Welcome is a real composition composed by Antonio Salieri. The March of Welcome is in fact a simplified version of the Aria Non più andrai from Mozart's opera, The Marriage of Figaro. Listen closely to the orchestra part in this aria. It's none other than the music Mozart appeared to have made up on the spot in Amadeus. So if fictional Mozart improvisation seemed like a finished composition, that's because it is. Peter Schaffer staged an unfair fight, but for dramatic purposes, it was the perfect choice. Ratner even mentions nonpandry as an example of the humor often conveyed by 18th century marches. Here the music adds to Mozart's virile nonchalance and implicitly mocks Salieri's embittered chastity. Myth number two, Salieri was a mediocre musician.
>> Go on, signori. Laugh. Laugh. Show my mediocrity for all to see.
Antonio Salieri was one of the most accomplished musicians of his time. His operas influenced a generation of composers, including Mozart. He conducted major premieres and was a sought-after teacher. Beethoven even studied composition with Salieri for a period of time, as did Schubert and Liszt. In Alex Ross' words, "Mozart was a greater composer, but not immeasurably greater." To call Salieri the patron saint of mediocrities, as Schaffer does in his play, sets the bar for mediocrity too high.
>> I am their patron saint.
>> Interestingly, the March of Welcome in the original play is far more charming and dignified than its cinematic counterpart. Just listen.
>> The rest is just the same, isn't it?
>> You have a remarkable memory.
>> The dumbed-down version found in the film and Salieri's reliance on divine intervention just to compose its bland melody.
>> Graci
>> serves to widen the talent gap between him and Mozart. It's an effective dramatic choice for a broader moviegoing audience, but also really throws Salieri under the bus.
>> He's a total mediocrity.
>> Myth number three, Salieri killed Mozart. Let me be clear, there's no evidence that Salieri killed Mozart. Historians have long ago exonerated our poor court composer. But this nasty little rumor inspired two centuries of dramatic art from Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov to Peter Schaffer and even Christopher Nolan. You can find out more about this fascinating history and dive deeper into both stage and film versions of Amadeus in bonus videos I've posted to my Patreon. There I even take a moment to react to the equivalent scene from the new Amadeus TV series. It stinks. Just follow the link in the description to join. But don't get me wrong, I'm not faulting Amadeus for its creative liberties. I believe in artistic license, especially when it's used to create great cinema. But I also believe it's worth setting the record straight, especially when the movie has contributed so much to the popular mythology about Mozart and the nature of musical genius, which brings me to the fourth and final myth. Mozart's genius is inexplicable. According to musicologist William Kenderman, Peter Schaffer's Amadeus is seriously misleading for suggesting that Mozart's compositions sprung into existence fully formed as the miraculous products of genius.
>> But they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one.
This myth is as old as the one about Salieri killing Mozart, originating fittingly with a playwright Friedrich Rocklitz, who published anecdotes and articles spreading the legend that Mozart finished his pieces in his head before writing them down. In fact, Mozart invested much labor in the compositional process, leaving behind countless sketches and incomplete ideas. Composition for Mozart involved a degree of trial and error.
>> Did you try?
Of weighing different viable options for how musical material might be formed and developed. And improvisation for Mozart relied on formulas, mental models that were well known to his peers, including Salieri. The fact is the historical Salieri was probably capable of an extemporaneous performance similar to that of the fictional Mozart, although maybe not as clever or refined. Back then, the grammar and vocabulary of musical improvisation were taught to orphan boys all around Italy through a technique called partimento. So improvising on common baselines wasn't just child's play for Mozart. It was a mark of basic fluency shared by countless other children forgotten by history. The decline of training methods like these that taught music as a language coincided with the rise of the romantic myth of divinely inspired composers. People so lofty they sound as if they're marble.
>> As Maynard Solomon writes, "Legends of the Christ child readily attached themselves to Mozart." But I don't want to throw the Christ baby out with the holy bathwater here. When Leopold Mozart referred to his son as a "miracle which God had allowed to see the light in Salzburg," he was reacting to something real. Even if the 14-year-old Wolfgang didn't memorize and transcribe Allegri's Miserere after a single hearing in the Sistine Chapel as his father claimed, the boy had the capacity to do it. Mozart's talent was off the charts. But an outlier still falls on the same spectrum as the median, not on some supernatural plane of existence. So explaining Mozart's rare abilities in terms of common fluency shouldn't diminish his genius. It helps us understand it as something a human being is capable of. If our society had a higher level of general musical fluency where music education was promoted as a participation sport rather than a spectator sport, we could relate better to what a Mozart or any other great musician is actually doing. So rather than topple the statues of great geniuses like Mozart, we could just take a more playful stance to busts like these. And in that spirit, check out these sculptures of F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce in all their glory as Salieri and Mozart. They're part of a whole collection of Amadeus themed products handmade by my childhood friend and creative partner Will Story. A fellow Amadeus fanboy, Will's feedback and support were indispensable at every step in making this video. I've always held a kind of Solarian envy of Will as a visual artist, although less murderous. I mean, how could I kill a man who actually made a sculpture of me when we were in the eighth grade? So, especially if you're a fan of kitschy art and retro pop culture, you'll be sure to find something you love or a great gift in his online shop, Story Made. I myself couldn't resist ordering this bust of Kate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, an homage to another film-related music breakdown video he and I worked on a few years ago. To explore Will's full catalog of figurines, magnets, ornaments, and more, just follow the link in the description.
>> Well, there it is.