Note perfect
As Amadeus and Mozart/Mozart shine a fresh spotlight on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, DQ speaks to the musicians behind the series to explore how they faced up to the challenge of meeting the legacy of the genius composer.
More than two centuries after his death, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart remains revered as arguably the greatest composer of all time. So modern-day musicians would be forgiven for feeling a little overwhelmed when faced with the challenge of scoring the soundtrack to a TV series all about the prodigious Austrian.
“Was it daunting? It definitely was,” admits Benjamin Holder, the musical director and orchestrator of Sky drama Amadeus. “If you think about classical music, this is some of the most famous classical music in the world, so it was definitely quite daunting.”
“For me, he’s one of the biggest geniuses with his music. He’s a pop star,” says Jessica de Rooij, the composer on Mozart/Mozart. “He’s one of the faces of modern music, because his themes, you can find little pieces of his ideas in hits and pop tunes nowadays. That’s a genius.”
A six-part series produced by Story House Pictures for ARD in Germany and ORF in Austria, Mozart/Mozart centres on a young Mozart (Eren M Güvercin) and his equally talented sister Maria Anna (Havana Joy), who has long been overshadowed by her sibling. When Amadeus is fired from a position in Salzburg, Maria Anna sees an opportunity to escape an arranged marriage by helping him secure a place in the court of Emperor Joseph II in Vienna – but when his erratic behaviour jeopardises her plan, she disguises herself as Amadeus. Receiving a commission to write the first German-language opera, she must protect her true identity, manage her brother’s behaviour and keep her secret from the love of her life, Antonio Salieri.
De Rooij had previously worked with Mozart/Mozart showrunner, head writer and executive producer Andreas Gutzeit on period drama Sisi, the true story of a Bavarian princess who falls in love with the emperor of Austria. It was then while composing the music for that series that she heard about plans for a drama about Mozart and immediately thought, “Wow, that’s my thing.” It was a project made all the more appealing by the fact the series would play freely with history when it came to the story and the music being used. Bavaria Media and Beta Film are the international distributors.
“The story is just perfect for it,” she says, “because we have Maria Anna, which gives us much more freedom than if we only had Amadeus. It was a great challenge. His music is unique, so what I was facing is how can you make this music interesting today? Maria Anna gives us the chance to go much more into his music emotionally.”
By the time the series debuted in December last year, de Rooij had spent 18 months working on the show. “It needed a lot of time to find the right voice or the right sound for what we really wanted,” she says. “We went through every single scene and decided, ‘What do you want to hear? Where’s Mozart’s music?’ That was a long process, creating the songs and finding the right performers and musicians.
“Then preparing everything for the shoot, that was a lot of work, creating sheet music and working with the props department, and with all the doubles and finding young kids who can play piano well enough – all these little factors, that’s what I had to do.”
On the set of Mozart/Mozart, de Rooij was supported by a “big music team” and a real conductor. “There were so many people in the background just to make sure the music was working on screen,” she says.
But when it came to choosing the music that would make up the soundtrack as well as the pieces played on screen, “it’s not always Mozart, but it has something to do with Mozart, which is nice. We had a lot of freedom to choose pieces we wanted to include, including some modern pieces,” de Rooij explains.
“I had a lot of fun listening to all these Mozart themes while I’m scoring my music, which I usually do always with the picture and then I think, ‘Hey, this tune I can put in here.’ So Mozart was helping me. It’s awesome, because they’re all hits. In his time, he was a pop star, and now we can use it in the score or in the source music and we can make a new pop star out of Mozart.”
Amadeus, which also debuted in December, is based on the stage play by Peter Shaffer and explores the rivalry between Mozart (Will Sharpe) and the esteemed, pious and madly jealous court composer Salieri (Paul Bettany), who works tirelessly to destroy the gifted composer following his arrival in Vienna.
“The brief was always that they [Sky and producer Two Cities Television] wanted a score that was different, a juxtaposition to the Mozart [music played in the show], which would be its own thing,” says music supervisor Chantelle Woodnutt, who also works as an agent for music company Air Edel and helped to coordinate the music and performers who would be needed on camera.
She then brought Holder onto the project, which featured solo arias and piano performances, fully staged operas and orchestral works. Also among his tasks was to teach Sharpe and Bettany how to play piano and how to conduct an orchestra for the show’s numerous music scenes that would be performed on set.
“In pre-production, we did a lot of prep. The director [Julian Farino] picked a lot of the music based on the script, but also working with a music historian, and we did pepper some other bits in there. But then we got to work where Ben stepped in, started coaching, and then we just started all the background prep for all the things needed for set.”
Across the five-part series, there were some 145 music cues. “But it’s a mixture of piano stuff, opera stuff. Thinking back, it did feel daunting,” Woodnutt continues. There was also the job of finding the right pianos that would be played on camera. “The whole concept was this is a very musical city, so in nearly every scene there’s some kind of instrument.
“There are a lot of scenes when they’re in a tavern and there’s folk music going on in the background, or all those parties at Mozart’s with more non-traditional music. Part of the process in those early stages as well was who are they going to cast, and what are their abilities? How much will we need to teach them?”
Holder spent six months teaching Sharpe, who could already play piano and guitar, to play “fiddly” classical piano pieces for Amadeus. “We had to just get the finger technique working,” he notes. “I will say, in general, actors are just really brilliant at getting there with a skill if they need to, whether it is a music thing or whether it’s horse riding or scuba diving or fencing.
“Will was adamant that he wanted to play everything for real, and he did. That’s a huge thing for the show, and we’re enormously proud of that. He was really busy as well and would go away a bit, so we got him a small keyboard in a flight case that he’d take away with him, and he’d set it up on an ironing board in his hotel room and just plug away at it, one cue at a time. That was only possible because he was already quite musical.”
The conducting work then commenced closer to production starting. Sharpe practiced with a metronome while listening through to each piece of music that would feature in the show. “I got to understand a lot of the music better doing that,” Holder says, “because if you’re playing a lot of classical music all the time for work, you don’t always stop and think about it that much.”
Gabrielle Creevy, who plays Mozart’s wife Constanze, also learned to play piano and had a singing coach, while Holder also taught piano and conducting to Bettany, with both Bettany and Sharpe adopting contrasting performances that informed how they were taught.
As music supervisor, Woodnutt later joined Holder on set in Budapest for the grand orchestral and operatic sequences, which featured 18 musicians in the pit, with strings, horns, trumpet, flute, oboe and bassoon.
They also provided a sharp eye – and ear – in the edit, ensuring the actors’ conducting was correctly in sync with the soundtrack. After much of the show’s music was played and recorded live on set using replica 18th century fortepianos, most pieces were also then re-recorded in a studio to ensure a clarity of sound, tone and pitch they couldn’t guarantee on set. They also oversaw two recording sessions with a full orchestra playing the music for the operas that are staged during the series.
“One of the nicest things about that was some of the orchestra were people we’d had playing on set as well,” Holder says. “People we’d had dressed up in the 18th century garb with candles on the music stands then came into the studio to do the re-record, and we did it to picture [where they watched themselves on camera].”
The finished result is a show and a soundtrack “I’m so proud of,” says Woodnutt, “and it works really well with the picture, which is the thing that matters most. That’s the thing a lot of people forget sometimes. While this is about Mozart, and we’re trying to do the best portrayal of Mozart’s music we can, the reality is this is also a TV show, so you’re trying to entertain people. There’s some real emotional beats and also some real moments of beauty in the music, so hopefully people can appreciate the music.”
Holder adds: “All the actors should be really proud of their music performances on camera, because it was an enormous effort for them all. Big important moments completely rely on the music performance being right. We all did really achieve it. I hope that comes across.”
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tagged in: Amadeus, ARD, Benjamin Holder, Chantelle Woodnutt, Jessica de Rooij, Mozart/Mozart, ORF, Sky