10 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, October 19, 1999 Suchet to portray Mozart's nemesis Classical music fans remember Chopin Los Angeles Times LONDON - One of the many ways David Suchet prepares for a theatrical role is by making private lists of the attributes he shares with his character and those he doesn't. Seeing him without the weight and waxed mustache of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, then, it's fun to imagine what he might have in common with the brainy, pompous, irritating and charming Belgian detective with whom he has become so identified. It is somewhat more daunting, however, to consider what the 53- yearold Suchet might see of himself in the character of Antonio Salieri, Mozart's nemesis in Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," now playing in Los Angeles before heading for Broadway. The play had been in rehearsals at the Chelsea Center Theater here after a run at the Old Vic. Salieri, as many film and theater fans will recall, is the Hapsburg court musician who agonizes over his own mediocrity in the face of Mozart's genius and feels betrayed by God, who gave such musical gift to a giggling, scatological upstart instead of to the devoted Salieri. Exactly how he identifies with Salieri, the highly successful British character actor isn't saying. A pri- vate list is private, after all. But Suchet will say why he thinks the tortured man who tried to silence Mozart's music strikes a chord with so many people, himself included. "Salieri represents all of us in his envy and jealousy, in his hopes and ambitions and his realization of the fact that there are going to be people better than him," he said. "It is something that every person past 35 is aware of. "A-lot of people start life with huge hopes. There is such a thing as the American Dream. We all have dreams and get caught out by our dreams." Shaffer's Salieri, however, might be more actively vengeful than most Free tips and Cash!!! Spring Break 2000 StudentCitv.com is look- ing for High ly Motivated Students to promote Spring Break 2000! Organize a small group and travel FREE!!! Top campus reps can earn Free Trip & over $10,000! Choose: Cancun, Jamaica or Nassau! Book Trips On-Line Log-In and Win Free Stuff. www.StudentCity.com or 1-800-293-1443 people. 'The play is based on rumors that circulated after Mozart's death that Salieri had killed the younger com- poser. He didn't, but he worked hard to ensure that Mozart lacked gainful employment and that his brilliant operas were heard by as few people as possible. He tried to kill Mozart's music. But Suchet insists that Salieri is no two-dimensional villain. "He is a very complex man. He has evil intent," he said. "But the play starts with Salieri as an old man who desperately wants to confess. One only wants to confess if one feels shame. Throughout the play, when he is narrating, he is not just saying, 'Look how clever I am. I destroyed Mozart.' He is well aware of the shame. "He never asks for forgiveness. He asks for understanding. If you understand him, you won't sympa- thize with him, but you have a deep- er appreciation of why he did what he did." In his efforts to understand Salieri, Suchet visited the compos- er's birthplace in the Italian village of Legnano. He made his way from there to "the huge, baroque city of Vienna," as Salieri might have seen it. "He arrived with a chip on his shoulder. He was an outsider, prov- ing himself, trying to maintain respectability," Suchet said. "He tried to behave well, to please God and the emperor. "He is essentially a weak man, not a natural courtier. He is a small- town man, sort of out of place in the city. His music was quite good, but it was court music that he wrote to order. He was a conservative, tradi- tional musician, not a Mozart, who felt he had to write. Who needed to write." Suchet seems to need to act. At least, he seems to have been born to the medium. His mother was an actress; his father was a successful gynecolo- gist, and Suchet was expected to fol- low in his father's scientific foot- steps until he proved hopeless at physics. He made his stage debut at age 5 as an oyster in "Alice Through the Looking Glass," and at 23 became what might be the youngest Shylock in British stage history. The stocky, deep-voiced Suchet quickly made his mark as a character actor. "My gift, if I have a gift, is to be different people, to understand peo- ple and to become them. I'm told there are not many of us around any- more," he said. "There have always been film stars who will put bums in the seats and make the film industry a suc- David Suchet rests at a rehearsal of "Amadeus." cess. I would hate to be in that pro- fession. It's rather dangerous for an actor to have so much adulation." This might be the spiritual side of Suchet peeking through. Married and the father of two, Suchet is a religious Protestant who feels an affinity for Salieri's struggle with God. "Salieri believes naively that God is on his side, that he has a relation- ship with God because of the way he behaved," he said. "His contest is with God, and he fights God by destroying Mozart. "One always likes to believe God is on your side. Salieri believes God has let him down. He is betrayed by God. I put myself in the same posi- tion and wonder how it would feel to be in his place. It is despair when you feel God has let you down. It leaves you so isolated." There are three roles Suchet has always wanted to play. One is the embittered academic George in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," which he played in 1996 in London's West End. Another is Napoleon, which he has just finished doing for a black- comedy film called "Sabotage" that was written and directed by Spanish brothers Esteban and Jose Miguel Ibarretxi. The third is Salieri, an intensely demanding role that keeps Suchet on stage for most of the play, switching back and forth between the 31-year- old Salieri and the composer as an elderly man. On this wet fall afternoon, Suchet and director Peter Hall are going over the timing of his lines with Mozart's music, and of his move- ments with those of his fellow actors. Suchet's voice resonates above a noisy rain. "And now! Gracious ladies! Obliging' gentlemen! I present to you - for one performance only - my last composition, entitled 'The Death of Mozart - or Did I Do It?"' British actor Michael Sheen plays Mozart in L.A., as he did in London, but most of the rest of the cast is American and new to the show. Shaffer has tinkered with the 20- year-old script, trying to perfect it, and Hall is making changes in the staging. The play is still a work in progress. Sheen, 30, who received favorable reviews in London, says he tries to portray Mozart not simply as a genius-victim but as a party to his own downfall. "Salieri describes Mozart's music as having incredible need in it. I started thinking of him as a needy person - in modern-day terms, someone like Michael Jackson who might have certain parts of his per- sonality develop hugely and other parts stultified," Sheen said. "He is not a genius, but possessed by genius. He has to live life almost with a terrible curse that he can't understand. "As much as Salieri and the estab- lishment, he is being destroyed by his own genius." That makes two, of course, because Mozart's genius also destroys Salieri, who doesn't stand up to comparison. The Baltimore Sun Five and a half feet tall and never weighing more than 110 pounds, Frederic Chopin looked delicate, almost transparent, and not quite of this world. Novelist George Sand, whose .10- year love affair with him has become the stuff of legend, called him her "little one." His friend, composer Felix Mendelssohn, not exactly a heavy- weight himself, dubbed him "Chopinetto" He was always suffering from some- thing. "Chopin has been dying his whole life long," said one malicious Parisian lady, and another: "He has the most charming cough" He was also a bit of a prig. He found foul odors intolerable, noise anathema and an unannounced visitor could make his hair stand on end. He possessed a mordant wit. During the notoriously cold and wet winter of 1838-1839 on Majorca, when he had his first serious brush with death, he wrote to a friend: "The three most famous doctors on the island have examined me; the first sniffed what I had spat out, the second pummeled me where I spat and the third felt and lis- tened how I spat. The first said I was dead, the second said I was dying and the third - that I am going to die." When Chopin finally did die of tuberculosis 150 years ago, he was only 39. But in the less than two decades since his arrival in Paris in 1831 from his native Warsaw, Poland, this weak, tubercular man had succeeded, however quietly, in revolutionizing music in gen- eral and his own instrument, the piano, in particular. He had anticipated many of the innovations usually attributed to composers such as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mahler. Without Chopin, it is impossible to imagine either the jagged, almost bar- barically powerful achievements of Russian music or the polished urbanity and nuanced sophistication of French music in the 20th century. Almost everything by Chopin has entered the standard repertory - a claim that cannot be made about any other composer, and that includes Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. It seems strange, therefore, that this major anniversary is being celebrated with considerably less fanfare - in the way of performances, recordings and scholarly conferences - than those of Schubert (in 1978 and 1997), Brahms (1983 and 1998), Bach (1985) and Mozart (1991). "That Chopin should be relatively neglected in so important an anniver- sary year seems inexplicable," says Vincent Lenti, the administrator of the Eastman School of Music's piano department and one of the foremost authorities on the history of keyboard style. Although perhaps unfortunate is a more accurate term than inexplicable. Such anniversaries generally are sponsored by large institutions, such as orchestras, performing arts centers, music schools and opera houses. And Chopin wrote almost exclusively for solo piano, eschewing orchestras, chamber ensembles, choral groups and opera companies - the musical media large institutions are created to support. And Chopin's ubiquity in the reperto- ry of almost every pianist makes anniversary performances of his music superfluous. "Chopin is our daily bread," says pianist Horacio Gutierrez. "Every year is a Chopin year for me and the audiences I play for" Still, Gutierrez, along with several other noted pianists and music histori- ans, agrees that Chopin rarely receives scholarly and critical attention that accords with his greatness. He was indeed an isolated figure. He was a Pole who wrote his most important music in France and who worked in the Austro-Germanic musi- cal tradition of his idols, Bach and Mozart. But Chopin's ears had been filled by the folk songs and dances of his native land, and his music exudes an "exotic" Eastern European appeal (some earlier critics even called it "Asiatic") Chopin's successful championship of miniature musical forms when other composers gravitated to ever grander musical colossi confounds our attempts to compare him to contemporaries such as Berlioz, Liszt and Schumann. His music likewise confuses our sense of gender boundaries, He was a male composer who wrote in "femi- nine" genres, such as the nocturne and the waltz, for the salon, a domestic se ting in which his most enthusiastic lis- teners tended to be women. And while all pianists study and per- form his music during their student days, a surprisingly large number of celebrated musicians - Alfred Brendel, Glenn Gould, Rudolf Serkin, Radu Lupu, Walter Gieseking and Artur Schnabel among them - have chosen not to perform Chopin, ignoring his music in a way they would not dream A, doing with that of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert or Brahms. "There are two pianistic lines," Brendel says. "One is the central European tradition that links Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. The other is the more exotic but minor line, in which Chopin is the central figure, that extends to Russians such as Rachmaninoff and Scriabin and to French composers suc as Ravel and Debussy. Chopin is a kind of bird of paradise among composers; and he seems to require specialization more than any other." There are three central myths about Chopin that distort our image of the man and his music. The first is that of the sexually ambiguous salon composer, whose rel- atively insubstantial music was aimed at, as well as partook of, the feminin sensibility. The second myth surrounds Chopin with the aura of the doomed Romantic artist. It was especially, although by no means exclusively, in France that Chopin was regarded as the pianist, par excellence, of the emotions. It was also French audiences who culti- vated the image of Chopin as "a com- poser of the sickroom' for whom musi- cal inspiration, erotic yearning and impending death were inextricably linked. Finally - and this comes closest to the truth - there was the notion of Chopin, the Slavic composer, embraced by the Russians much more than by the composer's Polish countrymen. The first of these myths - that of the effete pianist-composer, specializing in miniatures - has been the most perni cious and pervasive. Chopin did write exclusively for the piano, and small (a least in duration, if not in emotiona T power and musical complexity) forms constitute most of his output: more than 50 mazurkas, 21 nocturnes, 19 waltzes,; 26 preludes and 27 etudes. Chopin's small stature and poor health probably contributed to the lack of forcefulness in his playing, about which most of his contemporaries commented. This attitude resulted in the com- monplace derogation of Chopin's" efforts in genres such as the sonata ant concerto. Most critics of the time sim- ply found it implausible that the "femi- nine" Chopin was capable of writing sonatas that measured up against those by the more "masculine" Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. But the truth is that Chopin was the only composer of his generation who felt comfortable with creating new large forms. Each of the ballades and scherzos, as well as the F Mino Fantasy, the F-sharp Minor Polonaise and the Polonaise-Fantasy, is as long as or longer than an average movement of Beethoven. Moreover, Chopin's two mature piano sonatas are more satisfy- ing in public performance than any, written after the late masterpieces of Beethoven and Schubert, including those by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Brahms. Consider the University of Michigan School of Education for graduate studies in education Attend a meeting for prospective graduate students Saturday, Oct. 30, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. School of Education Building 610 East University Avenue Educational Studies Programs: Curriculum Development (M.A.) Early Childhood Education (M.A., Ph.D.) Educatlonial Administration and Policy (M.A., Ph.D.) EducatinalFoundations nd Policy (M.A., Ph.D.) Educaifonal Technology (M.A. M.S., Ph.D.) English Education (M.A.) Literacy Education (M.A., Ph.D.) Learning DisabilIties and Literacy (M.A.) Mathematics Education (M.A M.S., Ph.D.) Science Education (M.A., M.S., Ph.D.) Master of Arts with Certification (M.A. SocialStudies Education (M.A.) Special Education (Ph.D.) Teacher Education (Ph.D.) Center for the Study of Higher and Postseconddiy Education Programs: Academic Affairs and Student Development (Ph.D.) C -meitm nlhtyCanan Adminsrntinr l(M A . The Department of Philosophy The University of Michigan announces The Tanner Icui On HumanValues 1999-00 Helen Vendler Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Harvard University Whitman on Lincoln: Aspects of Value Friday, October 29, 4:00 p.m. Rackham Auditorium, 915 East Washington Street Symposium On The Tanner Lecture HELEN VENDLER KENNETH FUCHS Director and Professor of Music University of Oklahoma London...........$472 Paris..............$496 New York.......$270 Amsterdam.....$583 Read the Daily. Write for the Daily., I-