Notes from the piano stool

David Owen Norris

It had been a stimulating morning, working with the cast of Amadeus at the National Theatre. We’d roared our way through a very vulgar canon by Mozart, and a much more prim and proper one by Salieri. We’d clapped Mozart and whistled Mozart, and paced him out around the rehearsal room. And now on the train home, I was sleepy, but I suddenly heard Mozart’s voice…

‘Happy Christmas, Salieri!’ ‘Ah, my dear Mozart, Happy Christmas!’ ‘Hey, now that they’ve found the one surviving copy of that piece we wrote together, d’you think they might get over all this poisoning stuff?’ ‘Alas, I think Pushkin and Peter Shaffer between them have made the idea indelible.’ ‘Just what you wanted, you clever old rogue.’

There was a touch of hauteur in Salieri’s reply. ‘I wasn’t quite myself shortly before I joined you up here,’ he huffed. ‘Well, you can’t say it hasn’t worked,’ replied Wolfgang. ‘Beethoven owned opera scores by me, you, Paisiello and Méhul, You’re the famous one – well, after me, of course.’ ‘Beethoven’s quite famous…’ ‘Yes, back in the 1930s he was way out ahead of me. I think it’s because the ’30s found things difficult, and after all, Beethoven’s the only person that’s ever been celebrated precisely because he found things difficult.’

Salieri sniggered. ‘Those eternal sketchbooks!’ he exclaimed. ‘Such terrible ideas, to start with.’ ‘What an idiot!’ said Mozart. ‘Oh, hello Ludwig.’ ‘You’re a rude scoundrel, Wolfgang. Remember, I can hear in heaven.’ He hurried on, and there was a resentful silence.

‘Whereas I found things easy,’ continued Mozart. ‘Since the computer came along, I’ve really fitted into the zeitgeist.’ ‘Ah, your command of languages,’ said Salieri. ‘Well, practise a little Italian, now – here comes Cherubini.’

‘Was that bloody Beethoven?’ puffed a new voice. ‘You were as famous as him once, weren’t you?’ said Mozart, with feigned innocence. Cherubini exploded. ‘Much more famous!! That talentless waster had to copy me even to manage his pathetic ONE opera. But it’s all Fidelio, Fidelio – no one puts on my Deux Journées. Or any of the others. I must have written, ooh, three dozen at least.’

‘Indeed,’ said Salieri, ‘and I wrote two score. You know, Beethoven only plucked up the courage to write Fidelio because of his lessons with me.’ ‘More fool you.’ ‘I only managed 21, and some of them are no better than yours’, interrupted Mozart. ‘You should have done Salieri’s trick, Luigi, and pretended to have poisoned Beethoven.’

‘What d’you mean, pretended?’ bellowed Cherubini. ‘My one mistake was not to tell anyone…’

‘You’re a rude scoundrel, Wolfgang. Remember, I can hear in heaven’

David Owen Norris is a pianist, composer and Radio 3 presenter