Amadeus

At the moment I am working on a post about music, the title will be Countertenors and Castrati. As usual I do quite a lot of surfing on Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, to collect information. Surfing around I can get easily distracted. This time it happened again…:-) Here is an intermezzo about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

My distraction started with this YouTube recording of Mozart’s symphony nr 25 in g-minor. The Wiener Philharmoniker directed by Karl Bohm in 1978, when he was 84 year old.

When Mozart composed this symphony (in only two days), he was a teenager of 17 year old! Almost unbelievable! Even when you are not really a lover of Western classical music, you should at least listen to the opening bars of this symphony. Because it could well be that the theme is familiar to you. It is used in the award winning movie Amadeus, about the life of Mozart Here is a trailer, with the same music.

If you have not seen this movie, you don’t know what you miss. I have watched it many times and always get weepy eyes…:-). Short videos from the movie can be found on YouTube, like for example this clip, where Mozart comes home to find that his wife has left him. In the next scene his vulgar mother-in-law scolds him, and this scolding goes over in the famous Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s opera die Zauberflote. Pure magic.

You can find many recordings of this beautiful aria on YouTube. Here are two interpretations by the sopranos Diana Damrau and Lucia Popp

And here is another recording, this time by a boy soprano, 14 year old  Robin Scholtz:

Before puberty sets in, with its voice break, boys can sing soprano parts. Here is another recording, by Jacques Imbrailo , also 14 year old when this was recorded in 1993, he is now a well known baritone.

But this young man, Olmo Herdia Blanco is 16 years old. He sings the aria as a countertenor. He looks nervous, but he has a promising voice.

So we are almost back at the topic of my next blog, Countertenors and Castrati…:-)

To end this post in a lighter vein, here is a hilarious performance by a 7(!) year old Chinese boy. At the piano a not much older girl. Clear fight between the singer and the pianist, won convincingly by the girl…:-)

1 thought on “Amadeus

  1. Personally I consider Mozart’s Requiem to be his masterpiece it might well even be his best. It took one of his understudies to complete it at the appeal of his wife after his death. Originally commissioned by Count Franz Von Walsegg, as a tribute to the death of his young wife Anna. Mozart’s was sadly unknowingly writing his own Requiem. Having heard it played in the Royal Albert Hall in London, you would not want to hear it played anywhere else.

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