This week, the National Theatre put their production of Amadeus on Youtube. (Until Thursday.) Directed by Michael Longhurst, starring Lucian Msamati as Salieri, Adam Gillen as Mozart and Karla Crome as Constanze. One of the Masters (from Doctor Who, that is), Geoffrey Beevers (aka Crispy!Master), plays the Baron van Swieten, who has more to do in the play than in the movie. Most importantly, this production got around the problem of the play not being able to do what the movie did - i.e. use Mozart's and a bit of Salieri's actual music as soundtrack - by constantly having 20 musicians and six singers on stage along with the cast (sometimes in the background, sometimes prominently displayed) and incorporating the music where appropriate. It doesn't manage purely cinematic transitions like Mozart's mother-in-law to the Queen of Night (not least because the character isn't in the production), and of course the death scene is quite different anyway, but it really contributes a lot, not least because the play's Mozart, Adam Gillen, was, I felt, the one less than stellar actor.

( Spoilers want to channel God )

Still in an Amadeus mood, I see the original premiere of the stage play was the occasion of Margeret Thatcher displaying the kind of reality reordering that currently has become almost universal among conservatives of all calibres. Wrote Peter Hall, who directed the original stage production:

She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour (...) "I don't think you heard what I said", replied the Prime Minister. "He couldn't have been like that". I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart's letters to Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary. But it was useless: the Prime Minister said I was wrong, so wrong I was.

( Cut to protect minors from Mozart as well as Habsburg/Bourbon marital difficulties )

What I'm trying to get at: context! The 18th century was far more comfortable discussing bodily functions than the two subsequent ones, and Mozart might have been an extraordinary musical genius, but when it came to his attitude towards sex and waste, he fit right in with his contemporaries. :)

Sunday evening I was at the Corine, which is Germany's attempt to make handing out annual awards for books look glamorous. Was amused that while Kazuo Ishiguro was there (because he got an award for best book for Never Let Me Go), all the photographers predictably ignored this awesome writer in favour of, wait for it, not even Diana Gabaldon (who got "best beloved author of the year by the general public") but the actress presenting said award to Ms. Gabaldon and hence sitting next to her. Ishiguro also had an actress as a presenter sitting next to him, but his was Regine Lutz, introduced as "the last living Brecht actor" (err... that's one way to express it), a classy old lady and hence not of interest to photographers, either. Ah, the media.

All in all, the ceremony was well done, with one of the highlights being Klaus Maria Brandauer reading a letter from Mozart as he had won an award for "audiobook of the year" (said audiobook was Brandauer reading a great selection of Mozart's letters, something he also went on tour with). He was in fine form, with his slight Austrian accent just right for Mozart; his presenter, Sir Peter Jonas, started the laudatory speech by remarking that if people thought of Austria's other big export article after Mozart (and the Mozartkugel, aka that bit of chocolate all the tourists buy), they hopefully didn't think of "the governor of California" but of Mr. Brandauer. Here's hoping, though I fear they think of "The Sound of Music", aka the best way to drive Austrians mad first.

Other outstanding moments: Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who won for best non fiction, talking about how "Gone With the Wind" and Scarlett O'Hara changed her life as a teenager right along with Alice Schwarzer and discovering feminism. Why Scarlett? Because Scarlett walked out of that hospital and later fought tooth and nail to be never hungry again, which teenage Necla translated at getting what she wanted instead of conforming to traditional expectation.

And: Diana Gabaldon talking about how she got the idea for her Highland-saga. She watched an episode of Dr. Who, saw a Highlander (I went "omg, she must have managed to catch one of those rare ones of the second Doctor! She saw Jamie! I thought Two made it never to American screens and that they started with Four over the ocean?) and got inspired. Despite not being a fan (I read the first book which left me cold and didn't read on), this cracked me up. Clearly, this makes the Second Doctor the inspiration for Claire. *veg*