Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The genius, the divinely inspired child, the idiot savant, the skilled populist craftsman, the underappreciated artist in his time who died tragically young in anonymous penury. Every generation makes of him what they will; the legends abound. And 250 years after his birth in 1756, he still remains, despite a well-documented life, an elusive, myth-bound figure.
Phil Grabsky, the British documentary filmmaker behind "Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World" and "The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan," seems, at first, an unlikely candidate for untangling the "real" Mozart. But his fresh perspective helps and the 129-minute film, "In Search of Mozart," gives a lucid, fast-paced and beautifully shot account of a man very different from the one who appeared in the 1984 film "Amadeus," adapted from Peter Schaeffer's play and directed by Milos Forman.
Including excerpts from more than 80 works and through interviews with a surprising number of major figures in the classical music world -- Renee Fleming, Roger Norrington and Imogen Cooper to name just a few -- Grabsky puts Mozart in context and debunks popular notions that he was a dirty-mouthed philanderer, who wrote as if from divine dictation and died neglected, forgotten and poor. In a telephone interview, the director spoke to The Japan Times about the true Mozart vs. the mythic Mozart, and his attempts to discover what exactly makes the Austrian composer's music so timeless.