MOSTLY MOZART

Fictionalized flick enjoys a live score

IT

was nominated for 53 awards and won 40, including eight Oscars, one for Best Picture. So it’s high time “Amadeus” — the 1984 (fictionalized) bio of Mozart and the man who may have murdered him — gets the “Art of the Score” treatment, unspooling as the New York Philharmonic and the Musica Sacra chorus perform its soundtrack, live.

And what a score: bits and pieces from “Don Giovanni,” “The Magic Flute” and the “Requiem” Mozart feverishly tried to finish before dying, at 35, so destitute he was laid in a pauper’s grave.

Tom Hulce, the film’s Mozart (inset), will introduce the first of five performances of “Amadeus: Live” alongside Alec Baldwin, the program’s artistic advisor.

Until he was cast, Hulce tells The Post, “I didn’t know hardly anything about Mozart. I had to read everything I could find. The biggest challenge was making sense out of all the contradictions — the degree to which he was so childlike, and yet such a genius... and how he’d work incredibly long hours and then drink and dance and carouse.”

Before “Amadeus” was a Milos Forman film, however, it was a Peter Shaffer play. Opening on Broadway in 1980, it starred Tim Curry as Mozart. And while Curry, Kenneth Branagh, David Bowie and Mikhail Baryshnikov reportedly vied for the film role, Forman preferred casting a relative unknown — “relative” being the operative word: Just six years before, Hulce played Pinto, the wide-eyed pledge of “Animal House,” with John Belushi. Not that the two hung out together, the 64-year-old says: While he, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen and the others lived in a motel during the filming, Belushi lived “somewhere else, someplace nice.”

“Amadeus” was filmed mostly in Prague, where Hulce had another challenge: learning to fake playing the piano. “I worked hours every day for six months,” he says, “playing unbearably slowly until I could put my fingers on the right keys.” Pianist Ivan Moravec and others recorded the film’s soundtrack, which won the 1985 Grammy for Best Classical Album and hit No. 1 on Billboard’s classical chart.

Hulce was nominated for an Oscar, only to lose to his co-star, F. Murray Abraham, as his poisonous rival, Salieri. Hulce says they bump into each other now and then in the Village, where they live across the street from one another. But whatever favorite moments he has of them making “Amadeus” together, Hulce prefers, at least until the performance, to keep it to himself.

“I think I’ll talk about it on the 11th,” he says.

“Amadeus: Live” will be performed April 11-14 and 17 at David GeffenHall, Lincoln Center; tickets, $69 to $165, NYPhil.org