Classical Music

The natives have the grace to be the first to repeat the best-known joke about themselves: what’s the greatest achievement of modern Austria? To make the world believe that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Austrian. An awareness of post-war Austria’s straining for a bright new image emerges in the oddest places. The apotheosis of Mozart in modern times has provided an ideal chance for Austria to assert its allegedly real identity – and Mozart was unimpeachably Austrian, never mind that his birthplace Salzburg was strictly speaking an independent prince-bishopric. Feature continues

The climax of the Riverside Studios’ ‘Morphing Mozart’ film season, celebrating Amadé’s 250th anniversary, is Karl Hartl’s ‘Mozart’ (screening this Sunday), dating from 1955: the occupiers left Vienna, Austria was a state again, and Oskar Werner in a poodle perm is an irresistibly melting-eyed Mozart composing, loving and picturesquely dying against scrumptious decor and exteriors that must have warmed the cockles of the Austrian tourist board’s heart. All is as refurbished and spick and span as a brand new reputation.

‘Mozart’ is part of a double bill with ‘The Mozart Story’, a bizarre mix of chocolate-box and Expressionist darkness that lurches from mopping and mowing to the shadowy murk of film noir. This is a 1948 American cannibalisation of Hartl’s 1942 ‘Wen die Götter lieben’ (showing on Saturday), its core crudely dubbed into mind-numbingly banal American dialogue, but in a sombre new framework where the saturnine Salieri reveals his feelings of jealousy towards the recently dead composer. The sinister and the disturbing unexpectedly take over the novelettish story, cutting between Don Giovanni’s descent to hell, Constanze Mozart’s attempt to leave her husband, dark romanticism in Prague’s nocturnal streets, a meeting with a gloweringly intense young stranger (‘He wrote his name down… Beethoven, I think it is’) – which should be absurd but has a fatalistic intensity – and Mozart’s sickbed scenes. These darkling sequences form such a tantalising contrast with the central tushery that it comes as no surprise to find that Hartl was to work on ‘The Third Man’.

‘Amadeus’ (Friday) is the best-known film about the bibulous little dog-loving snooker-player whose genius still baffles us; Milos Forman’s film of Peter Shaffer’s play is great fun, some of it beautifully acted, some grating – less for the college-kid voices of the Mozart couple than for Shaffer’s implicit assumption of Mozart’s anti-social oafishness, something of a modern middle-class misapprehension. For a superb survey of what the composer means to a wide range of articulate people, Phil Grabsky’s ‘In Search of Mozart’ can’t be bettered. Famous bands play and the great and the good are interviewed, including Thomas Allen, Renée Fleming, Imogen Cooper, Angelika Kirchschlager, Magdalena Kozena… Gush-free, serious, but with an exciting sense of occasion.

‘In Search of Mozart’ is one of the Barbican’s offerings in the film strand accompanying its ‘Mostly Mozart’ season. So is Ingmar Bergman’s version of ‘The Magic Flute’, the most sheerly loveable production imaginable of this eternal puzzle of an opera. Corny populist musical, children’s panto, masonic allegory, fable of humanity and compassion, or a bit of everything? Onstage, the productions that take the work at its most childlike tend to work best; they laugh at the birdman, scream at the snake, hiss at the wicked queen – and the deeper messages emerge by themselves. Bergman’s cast is young and pretty, the sets and stage mechanics of the baroque theatre at Drottningholm are fascinating, the audience shots of enraptured children reveal another generation falling under the spell of the mixture of the silly and wise, the clownish and profound, the slapstick and heart-touching – like the foul-mouthed, rude little show-off who created it. We still love you, Amadé.

Mozart on Film shows at the Barbican, July 8-29; Morphing Mozart runs at the Riverside, July 7-9.