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Tom Cervone and I were approached by KSO’s Rachel Ford and Lucas Richman in the spring of 2009. They asked us if we had any ideas regarding a project in which we could collaborate – meaning, I supposed, something in which an orchestra and a play or musical theatre piece could occupy the stage together. After a short pause, I suggested Amadeus and Candide. It didn’t take too much discussion to settle on Amadeus. Perhaps we will take on Candide at some later anniversary.
Amadeus is ultimately about the ravages of envy. But it plays on a number of other interesting stories: the personality of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the inventive theological arguments of the play’s protagonist, the way a composer “hears” and experiences music, the legends and rumors surrounding Mozart’s untimely death, the gift and curse of “genius.” But for me, the story is about something quite commonplace: that no matter how “good” we might feel about what we do, how satisfied or unsatisfied we may feel about our abilities, how much the world values our contribution and talent, there is always somebody who does it better. For the creative artist this realization comes upon us almost daily, and it can become terrible. It can destroy talent, take over lives and displace our conception of who we are. Amadeus takes this condition and dramatizes it vividly, operatically, and beautifully.
Aside from the normal challenges of producing such a gem of theatricality and brilliance, there was the matter of harmonizing three very different performance idioms. Orchestral, operatic and theatrical performance are quite different in the ways they are approached, the methods of rehearsal, the way they are presented to an audience, and the expectations the audience has of the experience. The range of sound and the scale of performance required are all different as well. Much of my time as a director has been not merely to insert concert and operatic performances into the play, but to harmonize the scale – to open up the theatricality without overwhelming the small, human story of the authors of this grand music. The original play made this happen with sound design – live performance is a very different matter.
Our design decisions were based on a single principle: that Salieri is talking to posterity – the people of the future who he knows will be familiar with the music of Mozart, and unfamiliar with his own. In some magical place – a theatre – Salieri pulls together the characters of his own time and place, their stories, and their legacy to the future: the music they have composed. This magical place allows for their past and our present to exist simultaneously. And in that moment we see how extraordinary people have imagined legends that we possess in the musical forms and theatrical figures of their art. And we, for our part, are allowed some understanding of the very human ordinariness from which these legends were imagined.
Jim and Natalie Haslam
The University of Tennessee | College of Arts & Sciences | UTK Theatre Department | Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 | 865-974-5161
