Amadeus returns: Can Sky’s miniseries attract a new generation to Mozart? | classical music

FForty years ago, Amadeus won eight Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards and four Golden Globe Awards – and introduced a new generation to eighteenth-century music. Millions bought the soundtrack to the film Mozart, and it remains one of the best-selling classical music albums of all time, with over 6.5 million copies sold worldwide, and achieving 13 gold discs.

It even inspired a new hit when Falco mixed Europop with rap in Rock Me Amadeus – the first German-language song to top the US Billboard chart (Nena’s 99 Luftballons reached only No. 2 in the US, Pop Selector).

On 21 December, Sky will release a miniseries based on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, which was the basis for Miloš Forman’s 1984 film. In an age of streaming, short-form content and even shorter attention spans, will this attract new listeners to Mozart’s music? Her team hopes so.

“The music is like a character in the show,” said his musical director, Benjamin Holder. “One version of Mozart’s voice is delivered in Will Sharp’s performance as Amadeus, and another version of that voice is delivered through the music.”

There are approximately 115 works by Mozart spread throughout the five episodes. Although the pieces are always short, they are unadulterated by Mozart, and recorded on instruments as authentic as possible until the late 18th century.

“There are shows that are set in a certain period but the music is modern, but that was never the idea here,” said Chantelle Woodnutt, music supervisor. “There are other classical composers in there – Salieri of course, but also parts of Haydn and Bach, as well as contemporary folk music from Turkey and Hungary, to show how Vienna was a melting pot of cultures and how people were influenced by all these different things.”

“Everyone who made the series understood that the music was really great. What became clear was that Mozart was a rock star,” Holder said.

As Mozart, Sharpe learned to play everything himself. “We started playing piano months ago. We spent weeks and weeks just playing scales,” Holder said.

Sharpe came new to Mozart’s music. “I never had my opera epiphany, but after doing it, I started to understand it,” he said.

“The music is extraordinary. Some of it is very fun and light and kind of mischievous and wonderful. And then in other places, it’s really dark and great.”

Meanwhile, Rory Kinnear, as the music-loving Joseph II, was having problems. “Rory is very musical and a brilliant pianist,” Holder said. “The difficulty was making it seem believable that he was missing the notes when he played Salieri’s piece in the first episode.”

Simon Callow, who played Mozart in Shaffer’s original play at the National Theater in 1979, said: “Peter Shaffer broke the image of Mozart as this perfect little porcelain figurine that had survived for almost 200 years, and helped define the image of Mozart that we have today. He opened the ears of a lot of people who didn’t care about Mozart or had no real concept of what his music was like.”

Martin Collingford, editor of Gramophone magazine, welcomes the new offering. “Anything in the broader media that makes classical music a compelling part of the story is a really good thing,” he said.

“Maybe it’s simply that a lot of people haven’t met Mozart, and if they see this and think, ‘Wow, this is extraordinary,’ it will make a difference.”

Does he see Generation Z embracing Mozart as Generation X did? “The boundaries between musical genres seem more porous than ever – partly because it’s so easy to range far and wide through live streaming,” Collingford said. “I hope that if people want to respond to this, they will no longer have to go to a specialist record store – which can feel intimidating – and spend £15 on a CD. Instead, they can just explore music via streaming services.”

Holder agrees. “A short version of the Queen of the Night’s stunning song from The Magic Flute appears in episode five,” he said. “I’d like to think that watching that will make people say, ‘Wow, this is pretty epic.’”

The two echo a point made by the late conductor Sir Neville Marriner, who with the St Martin’s Academy on the Fields Orchestra recorded the film’s music in 1984 and welcomed how it introduced Mozart to such a large audience.

On an ASMF podcast in 2015, he shared his memories of working with Foreman (he arrived in Devon to discuss music “with very large Hungarian sausages to spend the weekend eating”, and playing tennis – “he was very good but he didn’t win”) and actor Tom Hulse (who spent a merry Christmas with the Mariners learning to sound as if he could play the piano), and talked about the importance of the film.

“Young people sometimes feel a little ill [with classical music’s] Major events, such as symphony concerts and opera performances, for example. “The movie was like coming in through the back door,” Mariner said at the time.

“Still, traveling around the world even now, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in China or America, one of the first things people want to talk about is Amadeus and how much he impacted their lives.”

The only group that will not rejoice at the return of Amadeus is Salieri’s team. Poor Salieri, who certainly deserves a better title than Shaffer’s “patron saint of mediocre people.”

“There have been valiant attempts to rehabilitate his reputation over the years,” Collingford said. “This will undo all the good work.”