Fiction

[mainwaring]

Hi madupont - I have the film Amadeus - a good film in terms of presenting the music, the costumes, even the characters all seemingly well enough cast, except the lead, the guy playing W.A. Mozart, F. Murray Abraham. I just didn't get him when I watched it back in time and when I watch clips of it now, I still don't understand where he was pulling that performance from. I will watch it again at some point but the lead performance underwhelms the film as a whole I think.

I've never heard of that other guy - was he the lead in the theatre production then?

From reading Einstein's book the impression is that Mozart was given a real hard time throughout most of his adult life and struggled but I watched a documentary on Mozart (Charles Hazlewood for the BBC, The Genius of Mozart) and I don't know whether it's the change of medium, or looking from a different angle, but Mozart's life seems less of a struggle than that presented in the book.

Barton - that moon talk makes me think the moon was probably an early candidate as the object that may have inspired that theory and the fact that it disappears from view as well maybe inspiring a few other theories like those quoted by Borges (who puts the formulation of that theory 'esse et percipi' at the door of Bishop George Berkeley) for example only what happens every fourth post is real: the rest is purely imaginary (let's reverse that when spam is around) but you get the gist. 

         

[Lhoffman]

I've thought that Abraham's performance in Amadeus relied on the assumption that genius is akin to insanity.   If Abraham had studied Mozart's letters, he may have taken away an idea of Mozart as a manic with a scatological bent.   

There could have been some degree of insanity....hard to get past a childhood where you're trotted around and shown like a trained monkey.   

[mainwaring]

I wonder where the actor got the cackle from - it so dominates his persona. This scene for example seems flummoxed by it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ciFTP_KRy4

I've only read the snippets from the letters in the Einstein book but insanity seems a fair distance away.

Back to the previous speculations and the washing machine theory. But I posted on this before - I was reading The Gift by Nabokov I think and the book mentioned Agamemnonstrasse in Berlin and then that same week I'm driving somewhere on the other side of the city where I live, a place I rarely find myself, and on stopping at a set of traffic lights I look up and the nameplate of the street says Agamemnon Street. It's that kind of weird coincidence that always takes my interest.

This poem by Larkin with its fine cause and effect finale, seems to capture the infinitude of such meanderings:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poem/178047   

[Lhoffman]

The Einstein book is from the 40's I think?   He could have gotten it right.  I haven't really kept up on the current thinking on Mozart, I know when Amadeus came out there was a lot of speculation. 

The trained monkey comment was my own take.   Hard to think that having that sort of childhood wouldn't lead to problems.   Of course, times were different then.  And there were far different expectations on the children of Mozart's age than on the children of our age.

Last year, I played all the Mozart sonatas.  I thought at the outset that I would toss some post-Grout research into the mix, but it turned out that prep time was shorter than expected.   

 

[harrie]

I know Oskar Werner from Fahrenheit 451 (and Jules et Jim, duh), but he also played Mozart - The Life and Loves of Mozart.
That is all.

[barton2]

Sent a note to "Admin" and "Liquidsilver" regarding this morning's spam attack on the Books thread.  If anyone else wants to write and support a removal of the "Add New Topic" function, go for it.  I think we can live without it....seems to be a gateway for spammers.

And I worry about Bosox's bp.

[bosox18d]

I sent a note also.It's way out of control.

[barton2]

Reading "Startide Rising," by SF master David Brin....a bit too scattered for my taste, constant shifts of POV, huge cast, almost a glut of ideas that slow down the natural flow of action....but, that said,  the concept of "uplift," helping other species to achieve intelligence and civilization, is a fascinating one.  I found the concept more plausible with the "Neo-chimp" species, exemplified by a fellow named Charles Dart...but sort of wondered if dolphins, so different in their perspective, would really want to receive mechanical hands and technology and human language, so as to be more like us.  There's an awkward fit to the whole idea of the Neo-Dolphin that, in a way, makes me admire Brin more for his sheer audacity.  Other Brin books I've liked unreservedly, "Earth" and "Kiln People."  

    
OH, AND THANKS, LIQUIDSILVER! 

[madupont]

mainwaring

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086879/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0921459/

This second link, Thanks harrie! I can not believe that he is dead because here in my present location I have friends who are that old; thus proving that perhaps it is harder on one to be a movie actor than to be a farm-wife in a German-American community.

Can you remember in which of his films, Oskar Werner was shown in a framed photograph up on the wall  somehow purposefully placed there by the set decorator? I am hunching on Jules et Jim; and that it may have been  on display in their foursome chalet with one small daughter.

I didn't mean to couch this  like the forum for Film Trivia; but there you are. When I did eventually meet someone who was somewhere between Oskar Werner and Truman Capote in his famous lethargic pose, he couldn't act; nor write for that matter.

so, now that we know F.Murray Abraham was Salieri and that Tom Hulse was that rascally child getting back at his old man for trotting him out before all of Europe, I was nonetheless grief-stricken by the finale when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was dumped  into a common grave where the bodies were covered with lime. I was raised to revere Mozart; although not quite as much as Bach.

Ps. the farmwife, widow now, whose ancestors arrived here three, going on four, centuries ago, like her peers to this day, wears what I know as the "Amadeus" bonnet when she goes out dressed up in black. It is worn over the "kapp" of lace-trimmed chiffon,that is pressed with an iron but with the tie-ribbons left loose in a flirtatious way because that is merely a chignon-cover.  The "Amadeus" is worn for Winter "church"- going Sundays every other weekend  for the gemeine on somebody else's farm on the circuit.