Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Chasing Mozart

When I wrote the libretto of Mozart! I did what I always do when giving a character a voice: I tried to inhabit him. This turned out to be extremely difficult. Wolfgang Amadé escaped. I can't find another expression for what happened. Whenever I thought I got him, he was somewhere else. Trying to catch him was like running through a bright forest. He mocked me, peeping out behind a tree trunk, and whenever I approached he was behind another tree already, laughing at me. It was quite funny until I lost my hope ever to be able to write his part and despair set in. At last it struck me that his behavior told me everything I needed to know. That Mozart was a trickster and shapeshifter, elusive, evasive, baffling. I don't suggest this has to do with the fact that he was also a musical genius. I'm a writer, not a musicologist.

1 comment:

  1. cs: when did you split him? From the beginning?

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