"Legit" - Nico Caldwell (A good friend of mine)

Have you ever wondered why we need to learn classical music if we're interested in learning music? And we need to dive into this world of "nonsense" in our urban or modern definition on how music should sound like? Of course, "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart", will be in at least one of the power point slides from your instructor. You're not just required to listen to his compositions, like, Eine Kleine Natchtmusik, First Movemens of Symphonies 25 & 40, or Piano Sonata movement "Alla Turca", but you need to dig in his biography. Where he was born, who his father was, when did he start touching piano, what kind of early education he had, etc.

Early in a morning before heading out to have breakfast with Endo for his birthday, I watched "Amadeus", a Milos Forman directed movie , screenplay by Peter Shaffer, and fantastic cast led by F. Murray Abraham playing Antonio Salieri and Tom Hulce playing Wolfgang Mozart. It blew me away! Now, I could get a glimpse, may be, the reasoning behind those "nonsense" biography work. Or why people still use his works nowadays to speak elaborately about arts or even..........commercials??

You need to be personal in your art work. Mozart didn't grab all the music notes and put them down in music sheets. It's coming from deep within himself. Who was "himself"? That's why we study his history to understand who Mozart was in order to understand his music.

One of the best scenes in the movie for me -

The music swells. We see Salieri standing alone in the back of a box, unseen, in

semi-darkness. We also see that the theatre is only half full. Music fades down.

OLD SALIERI

(V.O.)

And I knew - only I understood - that the horrifying apparition

was Leopold (Wolfgang's father), raised from the dead. Wolfgang had actually

summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the

world. It was terrifying and wonderful to watch.

Music swells up again. We watch the scene on stage as the Commendatore ad-

dresses Giovanni. Then back to Salieri in the box. Music down again.

It was a fantastic and thrilling piece! It brought me to the edge of my seat that I was really into the scene. The music he composed for this opera was dark and convoluted in a beautiful way expressing his feelings about the death of his father. There are more scenes in the movie explaining on how he was inspired to composed greatest classical music numbers.

Kudos to Shaffer and Forman for such a brilliant story. They tell the story from a perspective that no one could have thought and it is the best point of view to convey a story about one of the greatest artists in humankind history, which is rich with various aspects of humanity, like Sarieli says "I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater, conferring on all who sat there, perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar."

Think about why we still take Mozart's music into our lives, especially for those studying arts (what kind of authority I have to pose such question when I'm an actuarial science student? ;-) )

oh yeah.."What a scandal.....What a COMEDY!...."