Mozart: Rise of a Genius (2024) s01e01 Episode Script

Even when he knew that
he was so ill and dying,
his need to express himself
is so perfect and poignant.
That's our last flash of
light before the candle goes out.
It is gorgeous.
It is painful.
It is wondrous.
And that's genius.
This is the story of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
A child prodigy, a flawed human,
and a composer the like of which the
world has never seen.
Mozart has some magical touch.
He is above and beyond normal mortals.
I mean, where would we be without Mozart?
He is classical music.
Now, with the help of
experts, Mozart lovers,
and world-class musicians
Take one! using his private
letters and original manuscripts,
it's possible to piece
together who he really was.
A man who battled society.
Your world is not
this. Your world is this.
That's it. Battled his family.
You hid his rage against the world.
You must go this way. No, I won't. Yes,
you will. No, I won't.
And ultimately battled himself.
He is complicated,
Mozart, and slightly crazy.
[crowd laughing]
It's a grand history of
child stars who go off the rails.
A genius who channeled all this to chart
the human condition.
I'm going to be an artist regardless of how it is received.
I'm still going to create art.
That's a bad-ass mic
drop moment right there.
Mozart's music makes us question why
we're put on this earth.
What is it all about?
It makes us question our existence, I think.
It really is mind-blowing just how far
above that bar Mozart is.
Mozart's path to success
was far from straightforward.
Even though he's been
seen as a child prodigy,
by the age of 21, he can only find work
for a provincial archbishop,
Hieronymus von Coloredo.
Coloredo doesn't really care about music.
He's quite a pompous fellow, and he and
Mozart do not get on.
They rub each other up absolutely the wrong way.
Mozart believes he should be writing
major symphonies and operas.
Mozart is desperate to break free.
There's this need,
like an addictive need,
to be creative, to compose, to write.
But Coloredo has Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
playing background music.
During his meals.
It started when he was just a child.
Mozart's parents live
in a small apartment.
His father, Leopold, is
a violinist and composer.
The Mozart family house is modest.
Leopold works for the court.
He doesn't make a whole
heck of a lot of money.
But Leopold himself was
terrifically ambitious.
Leopold believes his
daughter, Nanal, is a musical prodigy.
She can effortlessly learn new tunes.
So he gives her a book of his own
compositions to play.
Five-year-old Wolfgang joins in.
As it happens, Mozart is not just working
his way through Nanal's
little book of pieces,
but suddenly Leopold discovers that
Wolfgang has been writing his own.
He just watched this extraordinary small
child produce it for himself.
It's absolutely remarkable.
He just is a natural.
For Wolfgang, I think this was like a
sort of childhood game.
But for Leopold, this was a bit of a
ticket to an outside world.
The Mozarts travel
nearly 200 miles to Vienna.
Leopold arranges an audience
with Empress Maria Theresa,
one of Europe's richest
and most powerful leaders.
He wants to show the
Empress what his son can do.
Leopold gets this all-valuable
introduction to the royal family.
They're entering a whole new world, a
world of status and money,
which Leopold
certainly wants to be part of.
If Wolfgang can make a
good impression at the palace,
it could change the family's fortunes.
The Empress, she is divine. She is of
God. She is enormously powerful.
I picture Wolfgang with
Leopold constantly saying,
"Sit still. Don't fidget."
When you get to the palace, the first
thing you do, Wolfgang,
is you bow. Remember the bow?
Yesterday, yesterday.
And then comes this extraordinary moment.
Oh, no, God, what do you owe?
He gives her a big
old smack on the cheek.
But then this tiny little kid sits down
and just starts to play.
Mozart's talent was blinding, unworldly,
for Empress Maria Theresa.
The entire experience is a revelation.
And she loved that little Mozart.
I think it would have been so
extraordinary for her
to see her fabulous genius bottled in a
tiny, small, charming boy.
Here he is at the centre of everything.
Mozart's faux pas is quickly forgotten.
His father, Leopold, leaves Vienna with a
gift of 450 florins,
more than his annual salary.
Leopold is really obsessed with money.
And that's not surprising. Money matters.
If you don't have any money and you're
also not an aristocrat,
then you're nobody.
Encouraged by Wolfgang's success,
Leopold plans an ambitious European tour.
The whole family will
leave Salzburg behind them
to promote the child miracle.
What Leopold's doing when planning a great tour
is something which was really daring
because really only rich people travelled.
Travel is expensive, it can be dangerous.
In a way, Leopold's realised something
which every modern musician has to know,
which is that the only way to make real money is to tour.
And it's not just a matter of money.
He recognises in his children's talent
a possibility of climbing a social ladder
and of showing the world something he
could never have done on his own.
For the child Mozart, it means
a tour of 88 European cities.
In 1764, Mozart comes to London.
The family take rooms above a barber's
shop in Westminster,
in the heart of theatre land.
And it's in London that for the first time,
Mozart has access to a small orchestra.
Wolfgang thinks, "Hmm, maybe I should
write a symphony now "rather than just keyboard
pieces for me and my sister."
And Leopold knows darn well that
nothing's going to put butts in seats
more quickly than a
symphony by an eight-year-old.
And I tell you, I've
performed this symphony a lot,
and it's amazing. I mean, it's in three movements.
It's written for strings and horns and oboes.
And the structure is perfect.
And the music is great. And the music is great. And
the music is great. And the music is great.
What I love about this is
the energy of the beginning,
a forthright opening, and he's moving
with such confidence.
But for heaven's sake,
he's eight years old.
Mozart is the ultimate child chronology
and has displayed an inexplicable ability
that goes way beyond his age
and apparently beyond his
own personal experience.
The family is in demand everywhere.
Mozart's first symphony
seems too good to be true.
Rumours start flying around London.
Some suggest the boy
is really a grown man
with a condition that
makes him look like a child.
Others say his dad wrote the whole thing.
London society is pretty cynical about
what this talent is.
They think the child is a fake. They
think the dad's a con man.
So they put Mozart
through a series of tests.
The Royal Society is brought in.
Their vice-president is
given the task of judging.
Is Mozart a natural-born genius?
There was no way for him to prepare
what they were going to ask him to do.
There's no way he would have known
what they were going to ask him to do.
Mozart has asked a
sight reader, and he does.
He's asked to improvise.
At one point, can you play if there's a
blanket over the keyboard?
And young Mozart says,
"Well, of course I can."
He is doing things on a keyboard that
seemed physically impossible.
And the jaws drop.
By the way, halfway through the test, he
sees the family cat,
and he's so distracted he jumps down and
starts playing with the cat.
It took them forever to
get him back to the keyboard.
It's a wonderful reflection of the fact
that we're still dealing with a child.
After careful deliberation, the Royal
Society come to a conclusion.
The child is a genius.
The boy wonder is
performing almost every day.
And Leopold, as manager and promoter, rakes in the profits.
But after over a year in the capital, the
Mozarts must find a new audience.
Leopold first had his children performing
for the creme de la creme
of the aristocracy, but then familiarity has bred a kind of
"familiarity" of the world. And the child is a genius.
Leopold ends up having a performance pub,
just try and flog the act for
as much as he possibly could.
Mozart is a genius.
He's a genius. He's a genius. He's a genius. He's
a genius. Mozart sees his father hustling,
basically, trying to make money.
And Leopold is forced into
more and more desperate measures,
eventually setting them up
as a kind of party piece.
You can go down to the Swan
and Hoop and see them playing
every lunchtime for half a crown.
(applause)
They're working constantly, performing constantly.
Leopold is at this point completely
wrapped up in the notion
that Wolfgang is his
to use any way he wants.
Mozart is now back in
his hometown, Salzburg.
But even as an adult, he is
still under his father's thumb,
and he fears his days of adventure and
stardom are far behind him.
Mozart the young man has
lived two lives, really.
He's had this extraordinary time as a
child where he was celebrated
and spoiled and petted,
and now he's discovered.
As he gets older, that the cub and the
puppy can be admired,
but then the working dog
has to do what he's told.
Mozart understands that you can only be a
prodigy when you're a kid.
Eventually, you stop being a prodigy,
and you're just another adult who can play really well,
and then you're stuck.
How do you cope with that? I think that's hard,
and I think Mozart would have certainly
struggled with that.
The sense of loss, the
loss of that reflected gaze,
must have been painful and confusing.
As far as the archbishop was concerned,
Mozart is in his employ,
and that meant he was just as much a
servant as his cooks and his valet.
Mozart cannot accept his lot.
So he approaches Archbishop Colorado,
seeking permission to leave.
Hieronymus von Colorado
has no patience for Mozart.
Colorado says, "No, you're an employee.
I'm paying you money.
You're under contract."
What, do you think you're going to go
gallivanting around Europe again?
Well, young Mozart hates the archbishop
because the archbishop treats him like
the servant that he is.
Colorado does eventually change his mind,
but on one condition, the
Mozarts must take unpaid leave.
For Leopold, losing his income is too
much, and he decides to stay behind.
So Mozart hits the road again, this time
with just his mother as chaperone.
He's travelled so often,
but he's never been in that carriage
without his father by his side.
He's been tethered to
his childhood for so long,
but this time it's him, it's his rules.
He gets to do it his way.
There's an awful lot at
stake in him leaving Salzburg,
and if he's going to leave, then there's
only one place to go,
and that is the greatest musical court in
Europe, at Mannheim.
Mannheim's orchestra is the best, most
rigorously trained there is.
This was a band that could play
ferociously together,
and if you had any orchestra at all you
could write for, it's these guys.
Mozart couldn't believe
what he was witnessing.
The Mannheim Court Orchestra has clarinets,
which is a brand-new instrument that
Mozart has hardly ever heard before.
He writes back to his
father, "They have clarinets.
"I wish we had clarinets in Salzburg."
The only people who get to command this
orchestra are the Kapellmeisters.
He wants to be one of the Kapellmeisters,
one of the musical leaders in Mannheim.
He feels that the family's financial
future rests on his shoulders,
but he's got all the
confidence of a guy in his early 20s,
and he's convinced it's basically a done deal.
The person who chooses the Kapellmeisters
is the aristocratic ruler
of Mannheim, the Elector,
and Mozart sees he's
in the house tonight.
It's the end of a concert.
Mozart tries to get
the Elector's attention,
but it's so noisy that Mozart's not sure
whether the Elector has actually heard anything he said.
He's just desperate to get his teeth into
something really big,
a new musical adventure.
I am a composer and was
born to be a Kapellmeister.
I neither can nor ought to bury the
talent for composition,
which God in his goodness
has so richly endowed me.
I may say so without conceit,
for I feel it now more than ever.
But the Elector decides there's no place
for Mozart in his orchestra.
It's his first big failure,
and he can't quite see why.
As his debts mount up, Mozart must seek a
new position to make ends meet.
Wolfgang knew that he had to make money,
and then in Mannheim, a job opens up.
He will give lessons out on the keyboard.
It's terribly limiting for
some of Mozart's talents.
One of Wolfgang's new
pupils is Aloysia Weber,
the daughter of a court musician.
The family have four daughters, and
they're all wonderful musicians.
And he falls totally
head over heels for Aloysia.
And he decides that he's going to
dedicate his life to making Aloysia
the star she should be.
Suddenly, Mozart finds a
new passion for teaching.
He composes a solo,
especially for Aloysia to perform.
He's never been inspired in this way before.
Before now, he's been writing to earn
money for the family,
but now it's purely coming from his
heart, coming from his feelings.
It must have felt unbelievable.
Leopold can't accept
that his son is growing up.
And therefore, Leopold writes,
"I will tell you who you can marry, who
you can fall in love with,
"and where you're going to perform."
And says, "Off with you
to Paris, and that soon."
What a fuck. Fuck!
Leopold may be hundreds of miles away,
but he's still in charge.
So Mozart now has to leave the woman he
loves, and set off again, across Europe.
To make money for his family.
Mozart's resentful.
He doesn't really want to go to Paris,
but he is his father's son,
and he's going to do what his father
tells him to do for a
little while longer. They take simple lodgings
in a run-down neighbourhood,
just above the Marais district.
It's as close as they can afford to the
centre of the music scene
at the Tuileries Palace.
But things do not start well.
Mozart's appalled by Paris.
He can't bear it, he can't understand it.
It's this filthy city at this time, it's
incredibly expensive.
And he thinks, "What is this place?"
Mozart's mother, Maria
Anna, struggles to settle in.
She doesn't speak the language.
She finds the city hostile, and they're broke.
But Mozart's on a mission.
Wolfgang's out all day,
trying to find himself a job,
trying to ingratiate
himself with the right people.
And meanwhile, poor
Maria Anna is left all alone.
He's not around,
Mozart, and she's lonely.
It's dingy and cold,
and she can't get out.
As for my own life, it is
not at all a pleasant one.
I sit alone in our room the
whole day, as if I were in jail.
(APPLAUSE)
Paris is changing.
The concierge spirituale
is a new and radical idea.
For the first time, paying punters can
hear music at public events.
Mozart spots a chance to compose, not
just to please an aristocratic patron.
He can write for the people.
The concierge spirituale is dedicated to
performing music for everybody,
anyone who could afford a ticket.
This was much more down Mozart's alley.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
The musical director is Joseph Le Grun, a
star of Parisian opera.
For the first time, Mozart is speaking
musician to musician.
And in fact, he finds a
sympathetic listener at last.
And he's commissioned to
produce a symphony for them. (MUSIC PLAYS)
I think Mozart must have
felt the greatest relief.
His career up to this point wasn't easy.
And now you get the impression that once
again he felt, "I've made it."
As a young man, Mozart has experienced
his fair share of disappointment and heartbreak.
But now, as he begins rehearsals in
Paris, the stars are finally aligning.
With the Paris Symphony,
Mozart's been given an orchestra,
the scale at which he hadn't worked with
before and hadn't really been heard before.
21 violins, eight celli, four violas,
four basses and a full wind section.
So he's been given this tapestry to show
off everything he can do.
The concert spiritue will allow him to do
essentially whatever he can
imagine doing with an orchestra.
There are no limits.
He's actually quite canny about the piece
of music that he writes. He's thinking about a
paying public, the audience.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
It's such a grabby opening.
There's no slow start into some lovely
theme. It's bang! Here we go.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
His Paris Symphony, it starts with these
crudage, these bow strokes.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
These big emphatic chords to begin with.
It's like it's fizzing.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
And the effect this has on
the audience is enormous.
Mozart turns round and he sees them
giggling and applauding.
(MUSIC PLAYS)
It feels like he's showing off.
And you can hear in the music the sheer
joy of what he could achieve
with this scale of orchestra.
He'd gone from a small family car to a
real F1 engine in front of him
and he was going to
enjoy every second of it.
(APPLAUSE)
But within days of the premiere, Mozart's
mother falls dangerously ill.
When Wolfgang does realise that his
mother is really sick,
he drops everything to be with her.
But it's too late.
Mozart's mother got sicker and sicker.
She went into a coma.
Mozart is by her bedside.
He watches her take her last breaths.
He adores his mother.
And he doesn't know what to do.
And now he's suddenly
alone, genuinely alone.
And so he writes this horribly moving
letter to a friend in Salzburg
to break the news.
Mourn with me, my friend.
This was the saddest day of my life.
I must tell you that my
mother, my dear mother, is no more.
She went out like a light.
I wished at that moment to depart with her.
Oh, dear. I don't think he can quite believe it,
can he, in that letter?
Mozart doesn't know how to
tell his father the news.
It takes him five days to find the words.
Well, it is all over. God willed it.
She was fated to sacrifice herself for her son.
If your mother had returned home from
Mannheim, she would not have died.
His father blames him
for the mother's death.
This is what cruel people do, this
emotional blackmail.
Lepor implies that Wolfgang has not
looked after his mother properly,
and he's failed in some way.
And this seed, I regret to say, will grow
over the next few years.
You can always come back to that, that
you let your mother die in Paris.
He's 22, and for the first time in his
life, Mozart is alone,
without a parent to guide him.
He turns, for solace, to the keyboard.
The instrument his
mother first heard him play.
The sound, for him, of
innocence and childhood.
I see a person who's in a lot of pain,
and now he's looking to hold onto
anything that's going to
make him feel grounded.
When he puts his
fingers at the piano forte,
the harmony will come. That
is something he can hold onto.
That is something real.
That is something tangible.
Everything else feels
like it's falling apart.
And then, things get worse for Mozart.
His dad writes, claiming
his son owes him money,
and that he must return to
Salzburg to repay the debt.
I hope, after your mother had to die so
inappropriately in Paris,
that you will not also have the
furtherance of your
father's death on your conscience.
You alone can save me from
death, if it is God's will.
I want to live a few years longer, pay my debts,
and then, if you care to do so, you can
run your head against a wall.
It is like Groundhog Day for Mozart. He
just can't get away from this place.
Mozart is depressed and grieving.
He is beside himself. Once
again, he is back to his father,
and he is back to the archbishop.
Mozart will spend the next
two years stuck in Salzburg,
desperate to get away from his boss,
Archbishop Coloredo.
Mozart seemed disobedient,
and that was unacceptable.
And so Coloredo is always getting out his
ruler and slapping Mozart.
And, as it were, like
a naughty schoolboy.
And Mozart is And furious.
He's been, in Salzburg, mouldering away.
And then, sort of out of nowhere,
the elector of Mannheim
asks him to write an opera,
and it's exactly what
he wants to be doing.
Opera requires everything. It's not just music.
It's also not just theatre. It's the
combination of the two.
It requires everything you've got as a composer.
It's the most prestigious
type of music out there.
To be able to write a big, serious opera
is the peak of a
composer's ambition at this point.
What happens is that he
writes what people now think of
as being the first sort of mature
operatic work of his career,
which is a dominero.
Mozart has been
separated from his first love,
bullied by his father,
and has lost his mother.
Now, on the grand stage of opera,
he can pour out all that human drama.
Mozart's all over the dominero.
He's revising the script,
he's revising the music.
He's helping to design the sets.
So this is a complete creative experience
in which he's in charge.
A dominero will premiere in Munich
just days after Mozart's 25th birthday,
and as opening night approaches, he's
bursting with confidence.
My very dear father, the rehearsal went
extraordinarily well.
I cannot tell you how full of joy and
astonishment everyone was,
but I did not expect anything else.
By this time, Mozart had
no self-doubt whatsoever.
He knew his talent.
He knew his worth.
He just didn't fear anyone.
Everything that he's doing at that moment
is really in response to his
understanding of how the world works.
He's learnt you're either controlled
or you are controlling. There is no in-between.
[applause]
Finally, he can be his own master.
[singing in German] A dominero is an epic family
saga of a king and his son.
[singing in German]
The young prince is being sent into exile
for reasons he cannot understand.
It's a story of a family, of course,
and you feel these echoes of him and his
father together so strongly in it.
It also contains perhaps the most
extraordinary piece of music that Mozart
ever wrote, in my opinion, the quartet.
[singing in German]
The quartet has the four central
characters thinking about their loss,
their son, who they're
never going to see again. [singing in German]
And it's all bound together in music of
the most extraordinary pathos.
And they're all coming from different perspectives.
And he manages to weave it all together
into this fabric where it
makes perfect musical sense.
So he's using the voices
almost like four instruments.
It's one of the greatest quartets that
anyone has ever written in any opera.
In terms of getting that
drama to its boiling point.
And what we end up with is a quartet of
such pain, heartache and beauty.
I don't know how we did it.
The opera ends with a
glorious coronation.
The gods allow the young prince to return
home on condition the old king, his
father, gives up his crown.
Mozart's own father is in the
audience on the opening night.
It's extraordinary to think how Leopold
Mozart would have felt an opera about a
father relinquishing the
crown and giving it to the son.
Because in that moment Wolfgang is
crowned. He's crowned the great composer
that we know him to be today.
The domineal is instantly acknowledged as
being something exceptional. It's a game
changer for Wolfgang.
Somewhere inside him is that the ability
to say no, damn it. I am going to put one
finger up to you. I'm going to be Mozart
whether you want me to or not.
I think for a father to recognize that
your son is so famous and so celebrated
is a sort of double whammy of great pride
on the one hand and a feeling of your own
failure on the other.
That you will never achieve what your son
has but you know paternal pride and
jealousy at the same time.
Lethal.
The child prodigy has grown up.
It gives him the
confidence to do what he does next.
Wish to go through your lance. Break away
from Dad. Break away from Archbishop
Colorado. Break away from Salzburg. Break
away from everything. Find himself.