Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Musical genius, hot mess express.
The Starz’s series based on Peter Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning play illuminates the dichotomy of its central character, who is one of the world’s most brilliant creative minds but who also can’t seem to grasp the importance of social mores of 18th-century Viena.
“Part of his character in this series is that he doesn’t really know how to read a room,” Will Sharpe (“The White Lotus”), who plays Mozart, tells TVLine. “He doesn’t really communicate in a way that other people do, and sometimes he doesn’t really know how to express what he wants to say except through his music.”
We see that in this week’s episode, in which Wolfgang channels his grief over the death of his and Constanze’s son, Raimund, into his writing of a Mass.
“There’s a degree to which he’s expressing himself most purely and eloquently in the musical setpieces,” Sharpe continues. “There’s a degree to which he doesn’t get to say properly what he means in any of the other scenes, and then only in the setpiece do you get to really feel what he’s feeling underneath.”
Why Mozart fell for Constanze
Episode 2 also chronicles the wedding of Mozart and Constanze (played by Gabrielle Creevey, “Three Women”), who captures the composer’s heart. And, as we see in the episode, she’s willing to do just about anything to help her husband succeed.
“She seems to understand him, and to be able to read him, arguably on a human level, maybe even better than he, himself, can,” Will Sharpe says. “So there’s just a basic, human connection — whether or not Amadeus sort of understands it in those terms.”