Minor, in a Major Key

 The false history of Chevalier. From City Journal:

The movie’s opening episode telegraphs the duplicity to come. A self-satisfied young prig performs on the violin in a rococo theater. “My name is Mozart, in case you are unaware,” he smirks to the audience, who presumably would have known the name of the performer they had come to hear. “Because you have been such a delightful audience, I might open the floor to requests.” A voice comes from the back of the hall: “Violin Concerto Number Five!” and then asks, “May I play along with you?” A light-skinned black man in a silk outfit and wig strides toward the stage and jumps onto it. Mozart mocks him to the audience: “I now give you music featuring the dark stranger,” and then sneers in a stage whisper: “This will be embarrassing for you.”

Instead, Bologne furls out a silken, singing line from his violin. Flustered, Mozart stops the orchestra and calls out for his cadenza (a solo at the end of the first or third movement of a concerto that allows a performer to show off his talent). After Mozart plays a few bars, Bologne improvises his own jazz-inflected cadenza. Audience members look at one another in amazement—as well they might, since anyone who had played such harmonies in the 1770s would have been regarded as a lunatic. Bologne jumps off the stage and, still playing, walks toward the back of the theater, now sounding like the nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini. The orchestra backs Bologne up with resounding chords; Mozart is furious. Bologne jumps back onto the stage, now weaving into his solo some bluegrass touches. Then, raising his arms and violin, he bows, like a boxer who has just knocked out his opponent. The audience leaps to its feet in applause. Mozart rushes off the stage and hisses: “Who the fuck is that?”

This scene not only did not happen; it could not have happened. None of the Mozart family’s copious correspondence mentions Bologne. Two definitive Mozart biographies, those by Maynard Solomon and Stanley Sadie, make no reference to Bologne. A third biography, by Robert Gutman, brings up Bologne only in a footnote in order to say that Mozart did not meet him. Mozart was not even in Paris when this scene allegedly occurred. No contemporary account of Mozart gives any hint of the mean-spiritedness that defines his character in Chevalier’s opening scene. Though he could be critical of his fellow musicians in letters to his father, in public he showed his colleagues respect. As for the racial jab, that is even ranker fabrication.

But the primary reason that this seminal scene could not have happened is the music. Bologne’s alleged cadenza is as anachronistic as if he had pulled out a smartphone and taken a selfie. Its jazz idioms would not become possible for another 150 years. The cadenza is even more out of place when compared with Bologne’s own compositions, which were thoroughly conventional. His music can be mildly pleasing, not because of any unique gifts on Bologne’s part but because the eighteenth-century Classical style in which he wrote is inherently delightful. Indeed, it is the banality that he achieves within that idiom that sets him apart, as his most performed work, the second symphony and its lugubrious second movement, makes clear. (Admittedly, the final decades of the ancien régime were not a high point in French music history, as the works of François-Joseph Gossec and the organist Claude Balbastre demonstrate.) Bologne favors truncated melodic phrases that are almost immediately repeated verbatim, with little development.

It is no surprise, then, that any time in Chevalier when we hear Bologne in an alleged performance of his own composition, the music has actually been written by one of the film’s composers, drawing on modernists such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Thelonious Monk. Bologne’s actual music is confined to the background, as the actors talk over it, making detection of its blandness impossible. Yet the takeaway from the opening scene is that Bologne is Mozart’s musical superior and that Mozart—that miracle of majesty and beauty—knew it.

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