Mozart’s Birthday
Yes, I know, it was last last week. But still, they call it Mozart year because that’s how big the guy is. So if he was alive, he’d be 250 years old! And he’d probably be writing new music and maybe even scoring a few films.
After all, he did score one of the best films of all time, Amadeus. It’s a movie that gets his music right (Immortal Beloved showed how easy it is for even great music to suffer misuse in a film).
So below I’ve compiled a few memorable other Mozart movie moments:
1. Trading Places - the opening sequence uses the overture to the Marriage of Figaro to show the pompousness of immaculate Wall Street men.
2. Out of Africa - uses the slow movement from the clarinet concerto that’s being played from a record player as an elegy
3. The New World - Malick has a Kubrickian knack for picking music. In this film, he has Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto (adagio movement) to serve as a strange counterpoint to the courtship of John Smith and Pocahontas and later as a remembrance of their forgotten past. Also the film uses Wagner’s Vorpsiel to Das Rheingold to great effect in a way that would do Wagner proud.
4. Jack Jack Attacks - Okay, you have to get the Incredibles DVD for this one, but this is a short film that fills in the gaps regarding the film’s baby character. He terrorizes his babysitter with various superpowers all to the music of Mozart. A smart way to avoid having to commission a new score. They use many pieces including Dies Irae from the Requiem, the Turkish March from the piano sonata no.11 in A, and others.
5. The Best of Youth - A six-hour Italian film that made my “best of 2005″ list. After a flooding calamity, a woman emerges to play the Sonata no. 8 in A minor. And of course, the guy falls in love with her.
6. The Spy Who Loved Me - The slow movement of the Piano concerto no. 21 plays as people are eaten by sharks in a tank.
7. Manhattan - A love triangle is made awkward while sitting on a balcony watching the Symphony no. 40 in G minor.
8. The Living Daylights - James Bond prepares to aid a defection where the defectee is attending a concert also of the Symphony no. 40. This is probably one of the first times I heard this piece, and it definitely made Mozart come alive for me even though it is such a part of the background. I’m just a sucker for Bond.
What are your favorite Mozart movie moments?
February 11th, 2006 at 6:11 am
Mozart moment: “A Little Night’s Music” in The Witches of Eastwick (1987). When a frustrated and newly sexually liberated Jane (Susan Sarandon) tells her children’s orchestra, who have been playing awfully up until that point, “When I count to three, we’re going to play the hell out of this thing.” The kids then play perfectly, and go nuts and everyone’s spinning in the room and she kicks off her shoes and the school people see her and she’s fired soon after.