Attack on Mozart and Gluck in 'Chevalier'

 Ironic that it takes a Socialist to point this out. From WSWS:

The first scene sets the tone. At a concert in Paris, following the completion of his scheduled pieces, a youthful and arrogant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen) turns to the audience for “requests.” His “Violin Concerto No. 5” is called out. Beginning to play the piece, Mozart is interrupted by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who comes out of the audience and asks if he can join the composer on the violin. Mozart agrees, sneeringly, (“Well, I hope this won’t be embarrassing for you”) and proceeds to be outplayed by this “dark stranger.”

No such incident ever took place. Saint-Georges may have attended a performance by Mozart, a 10-year-old child prodigy, during the Mozart family’s visit to Paris in 1766. When Mozart was in Paris again in 1778, his father urged him to approach the Le Concert des Amateurs, the orchestra where Saint-Georges served as conductor, for a possible commission. In his biography of Saint-Georges (The Chevalier de Saint-Georges—Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow), Gabriel Banat points out that Mozart followed Leopold’s advice and sought out Saint-Georges. Banat goes on, “They met at a difficult time in Mozart’s life, for on July 3, 1778, Wolfgang’s mother died in their tiny, dank apartment on rue du Gros Chenet.” Wolfgang, “alone and helpless,” found lodging through an admirer. “It is a matter of record that from July 5 to September 11, 1778,” writes the biographer, “Mozart and Saint-Georges lived—and dined—under the same roof.”

Referring to the initial sequence in Chevalier, the Guardian reviewer comments that this “is the moment that Amadeus finally knows how Salieri felt. Strutting with arrogance, Mozart is challenged to a violin duel and upstaged by a precocious rival. … Whether this showdown ever took place is doubtful but it makes for a playful opening.” People who take comfort in such ethno-historical wishful thinking are driven by something other than an interest in truth and reality.

Chevalier generally plays fast and loose with Saint-Georges’ life and times. It suggests that Joseph is roughly taken from his mother, Nanon, at a tender age, by his father George (Jim High) and kept from her as long as the latter is alive, until Joseph is an adult. In the film, Nanon tells her son, once she has arrived in Paris, over images of her distraught self: “After he took you from me, I ran to find you nearly every day. … I fought anyone who tried to stop me. … I did not care if I died. I chose to fight for you, my son. And now, I am here.” None of this is true.

In reality, mother and son were separated for only 20 months. Nanon came to live in Paris in 1755, and Banat writes that it is clear that “George Bologne was not ashamed of their relationship, either at home or in France. As for Joseph, there is no question that he was and remained deeply devoted to his mother.”

As for Nanon’s economic situation in Paris, “she certainly did not need to work because he [George] left her and Joseph an annuity more than adequate for a comfortable lifestyle.” George “was always generous to a fault, seeing that Joseph had the best of everything,” and “Nanon was well taken care of … She had a nice apartment where the boy could feel at home—whether his father was sharing it with her or not.”

Mozart is hardly in need of a defense, but the lesser-known Christoph Gluck perhaps could use one. Why the malicious, entirely gratuitous assault on an important, revolutionary figure in the history of opera? Have the filmmakers looked into the history at all? Nearly all the facts presented in the film surrounding Gluck are fictional.

Each time Saint-Georges refers to Gluck, his comments are dipped in spite and jealousy. Told that the composer has “hopped over from Vienna” and that he is “putting on a concert for someone,” Saint-Georges snidely responds, “Someone without ears or taste, probably.”

American violinist Rachel Barton Pine, an admirer and performer of Saint-Georges’ music, replying to the question, “Did he [Saint-Georges] disparage other composers and musicians on a regular basis?,” writes that “Such a characterization contradicts what we know of Bologne’s character from contemporary reports. For example, in La Borde’s entry on Bologne in his Esssay sur la musique (1780), he writes: ‘In addition to his multiple talents … M. de Saint-Georges possesses the uncommon virtues of great modesty and gentleness.’”

In any event, Christoph Willibald Gluck never sought the Paris Opera position and Saint-Georges had been rejected for the job well before Gluck arrived in Paris. They were never asked to write competing operas, nor did Saint-Georges ever attack Gluck in public. All of this is fanciful, and stupid. (Read more.)

Share