Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The Wilma's gorgeous revival of Peter Shaffer's juicy play, Amadeus, begins with whispered accusations and murmured confessions. We are in Vienna, "the city of slander," in 1823, and Antonio Salieri, the now-forgotten composer and Mozart's envious enemy, invokes us, the audience, the "ghosts of the distant future. " "Appear," the old, hoarse voice cries. House lights up. "There. It worked!" And so we are conjured up, cast in the role of confessor, witness, secret-sharer. Dean Nolen's magnificent performance as Salieri shifts from old to young, from fawning to cunning, from elegant to abject.

"If only the whole world could feel the power of harmony," wrote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Virtually every musical organization on the planet will be trying to fulfill his fondest wish this year with a flood of Mozart music spurred by the 200th anniversary of his death. Sunday also marks the Salzburg master's 235th birthday, and this weekend three local ensembles - each marking milestones of their own - will provide a spectrum of Wolfgang Amadeus' magic. All three coincidentally feature his final Symphony No. 41, the "Jupiter," one of music's most polished and perfectly balanced delights.

Rarely have composer and pianist been so closely linked as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Mitsuko Uchida. The Japan-born, Vienna-trained Uchida emerged in the '80s, after years of not winning piano competitions, as the Mozart oracle, a performer who repeatedly found the golden mean in his piano concertos and sonatas. Has anyone built a major career so mostly on Mozart? Only the sublime Lili Kraus came close. Uchida has also established herself with Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Schoenberg.

This should surprise and gratify people who remember the 1984 film, "Amadeus. " The face of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been reconstructed by an expert team of French anthropologists, and it doesn't look a bit like the actor, Tom Hulce. What a blessed relief! True Mozart enthusiasts still smart at the memory of Hulce's portrayal of the 18th-century musical phenomenon as a simpering, giggling, hedonistic fop, who knocked off masterpieces between burps, with no apparent recognition of the beauty his instinctive genius had wrought.

The mind of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is mostly a cheery, well-stocked fun house, though one of its overlooked dark corners raises a question: Why does some of his most arrestingly original music appear in works he never finished? Such as the "Dies Irae" in the Requiem, which he must have known he was too sick to complete. Or the deliciously leaping vocal lines of "Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben," perhaps his single greatest opera aria but found in the Zaide, which was abandoned just as it was on the verge of completion.

Temple University Opera Theater's current production of The Magic Flute may be the best uneven performance of the Mozart opera in years. And some of it looks, well, pretty wild. For instance, the Queen of the Night's three lady attendants resemble Amazons. They march and carry spears, and their costumes consist of green and black wigs, Christmas-tree tinsel over chest-enhancing corsets, mini-skirts, snake belts and knee boots. The three Boys (girls, in this case) raise a few eyebrows when they strut in on tiptoes: They wear harem pants, black vests, purple shirts and purple wigs.

The curse of the child prodigy is living long enough to become your own ghost. So it was with Michael Jackson in the quarter-century slide that followed his epoch-defining, still-brilliant Thriller . Of course, hits came after that, along with the extenuating circumstances of his child-abuse trial that no doubt caused his creative silence in recent years. But such circumstances often dog ex-prodigies in lives that most of us can barely imagine. Consider what's normal for too many prodigies: relentlessly pushy, impossible-to-please parents, worshipful public acclaim, and handlers who encourage whatever makes the kid feel good.

If there's a showier role in recent theater than Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, it doesn't spring to mind. Shuttling between infirm senescence and haughty middle age, between towering rage and abject despair, Shaffer's Salieri is a virtuosic test of breadth and endurance. If an actor can manage all of Salieri, he can manage just about anything. David Suchet, who has had a distinguished English stage career but is known mainly in America as television's Hercule Poirot, is making his belated Broadway debut as Salieri in a new Amadeus directed by Peter Hall, who staged the drama's London and New York premieres back in 1979 and 1980.

The traveler stopped amid bending fields of sweet corn and soybean and asked where the village of Mozart was. The lady - with rooster, cat and cranky goose underfoot - squinted into the sun and chuckled. "You're standing in it," said Kitty Wicen. "You go up to the road here. Then go four houses that way and four houses the other way, and you're out of it. " You're kidding. "It's small. " But where is the statue of the great composer? Not even a bust? Not even autographed sheet music enshrined under glass in the town hall?

If the modestly gifted 18th-century composer Antonio Salieri did - as he does in Amadeus - avidly seek fame, he has Peter Shaffer's popular 1979 play and the subsequent film to thank for the renown he has today, nearly 175 years after his death. It is, however, not the kind of fame the historical Salieri likely envisioned. Instead of acknowledging the once securely obscure composer as a musical creator, Shaffer presents him as the destroyer of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the genius Salieri could never be. Did Salieri, as legend and Amadeus propose, have something to do with Mozart's death?

The curse of the child prodigy is living long enough to become your own ghost. So it was with Michael Jackson in the quarter-century slide that followed his epoch-defining, still-brilliant Thriller. Of course, hits came after that, along with the extenuating circumstances of his child-abuse trial that no doubt caused his creative silence in recent years. But such circumstances often dog ex-prodigies in lives that most of us can barely imagine. Consider what's normal for too many prodigies: relentlessly pushy, impossible-to-please parents, worshipful public acclaim, and handlers who encourage whatever makes the kid feel good.

The curse of the child prodigy is living long enough to become your own ghost. So it was with Michael Jackson in the quarter-century slide that followed his epoch-defining, still-brilliant Thriller . Of course, hits came after that, along with the extenuating circumstances of his child-abuse trial that no doubt caused his creative silence in recent years. But such circumstances often dog ex-prodigies in lives that most of us can barely imagine. Consider what's normal for too many prodigies: relentlessly pushy, impossible-to-please parents, worshipful public acclaim, and handlers who encourage whatever makes the kid feel good.

Droves of tourists can always be found on Salzburg's narrow Getreidegasse, the street where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. But a far greater number would rather take a Sound of Music bus tour to see where Julie Andrews climbed the hills in one of the most popular movies of all time. Generally the two camps don't meet. Classical-music lovers who gather at Salzburg's summer music festival tend to dismiss the sugary Broadway show-turned-Hollywood movie, about the rosy-cheeked novice at a local convent who captures the hearts of a handsome widower, Capt.

The Wilma's gorgeous revival of Peter Shaffer's juicy play, Amadeus, begins with whispered accusations and murmured confessions. We are in Vienna, "the city of slander," in 1823, and Antonio Salieri, the now-forgotten composer and Mozart's envious enemy, invokes us, the audience, the "ghosts of the distant future. " "Appear," the old, hoarse voice cries. House lights up. "There. It worked!" And so we are conjured up, cast in the role of confessor, witness, secret-sharer. Dean Nolen's magnificent performance as Salieri shifts from old to young, from fawning to cunning, from elegant to abject.

Just in time for Halloween, the Wilma Theater is redecorating itself for its current production of the Peter Schaffer play Amadeus, with an outcome somewhere between an art installation and a haunted house. White curtains are draped everywhere, and 30 chandeliers, all swathed in cobwebs, hang every which way, as if adhering to different forces of gravity. Audiences expect a fair amount of 18th-century Viennese pomp from the hit Broadway play and the celebrated film version that swept the 1985 Academy Awards.

Rarely have composer and pianist been so closely linked as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Mitsuko Uchida. The Japan-born, Vienna-trained Uchida emerged in the '80s, after years of not winning piano competitions, as the Mozart oracle, a performer who repeatedly found the golden mean in his piano concertos and sonatas. Has anyone built a major career so mostly on Mozart? Only the sublime Lili Kraus came close. Uchida has also established herself with Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Schoenberg.

The mind of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is mostly a cheery, well-stocked fun house, though one of its overlooked dark corners raises a question: Why does some of his most arrestingly original music appear in works he never finished? Such as the "Dies Irae" in the Requiem, which he must have known he was too sick to complete. Or the deliciously leaping vocal lines of "Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben," perhaps his single greatest opera aria but found in the Zaide, which was abandoned just as it was on the verge of completion.

If there's a showier role in recent theater than Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, it doesn't spring to mind. Shuttling between infirm senescence and haughty middle age, between towering rage and abject despair, Shaffer's Salieri is a virtuosic test of breadth and endurance. If an actor can manage all of Salieri, he can manage just about anything. David Suchet, who has had a distinguished English stage career but is known mainly in America as television's Hercule Poirot, is making his belated Broadway debut as Salieri in a new Amadeus directed by Peter Hall, who staged the drama's London and New York premieres back in 1979 and 1980.

If the modestly gifted 18th-century composer Antonio Salieri did - as he does in Amadeus - avidly seek fame, he has Peter Shaffer's popular 1979 play and the subsequent film to thank for the renown he has today, nearly 175 years after his death. It is, however, not the kind of fame the historical Salieri likely envisioned. Instead of acknowledging the once securely obscure composer as a musical creator, Shaffer presents him as the destroyer of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the genius Salieri could never be. Did Salieri, as legend and Amadeus propose, have something to do with Mozart's death?

Temple University Opera Theater's current production of The Magic Flute may be the best uneven performance of the Mozart opera in years. And some of it looks, well, pretty wild. For instance, the Queen of the Night's three lady attendants resemble Amazons. They march and carry spears, and their costumes consist of green and black wigs, Christmas-tree tinsel over chest-enhancing corsets, mini-skirts, snake belts and knee boots. The three Boys (girls, in this case) raise a few eyebrows when they strut in on tiptoes: They wear harem pants, black vests, purple shirts and purple wigs.