8. Amadeus (4:30) | ||||||||
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Mozart did not set these words Mozart wouldn't write these chords But there's a reason for this song Which will emerge before too long A few short verses will suffice To tell you all about Greg Trice He was a brilliant engineer. We threw his ashes from the pier. They scattered in the icy sea. He lost his life to HIV. This is not in Mozart's class To imitate is not my purpose But it was from Greg I found In the time he was around That Mozart wrote a song called Lick my Arse As well as one called Ave Verum Corpus © 2000 Andrew Hodges |
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Like the first song in the sequence, this song is autobiographical and a true story about a real person: Greg Trice wasn't a close friend of mine but I did go along when my friends scattered his ashes off Herne Bay pier in an icy wind. Afterwards we sat around in a naff sea-front cafe to reminisce about Greg's many eccentric hobbies, one of which was playing the accordion; he was a world expert in a particular fingering system.
As you may guess, a genuine ceremony like this meant infinitely more to me than the lies, hypocrisy and conventional triviality of most funerals and memorial events. The music is a Mozartian theme and variations played on the piano, until at the end, a Mozart orchestra enters so that the song ends as a piano concerto. The songline is for baritone, deliberately drawn out with long gaps, and the emotion understated. All the crucial words are packed into a rapid passage set against classical diminished sevenths. Then there is an unexpected window of sound, rather as in the Prelude for Max Penrose, when Greg's ghostly concertina is heard against a string quartet. But the recapitulation restores the classical breeziness and only a few chromatic variations in the recapitulation are allowed to hint at the sadness of lost and wasted talent, until another surprise comes at the end. Obviously I am also drawing on the material of the play and film Amadeus. The connection of the gutter and the stars, the transcendent amidst the shit, is a queer spiritual exercise in the mystery of Mozart's name: Amadeus, love god. Like Heavenly Bodies this song also refers in the last line to the truth of true bodies, our own material bodies, in life and death. Mozart's classical restraint leads back to Bach for the opening of the next song, Horizon. © 2000 Andrew Hodges | ||||
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