AMADEUS

Set and Lighting Design Statement

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No. 23 A Major – Adagio II. That is where I found him. His back to me. Each page as played, cast to his side and making a soft sound as it meets the floor. The work, perfect. How humbled was I, Sitting there in that dark chamber lit by flame. Humbled to be welcomed, but scared, scared I didn’t belong with my hands on these pages. Someone moved, almost imperceptivity to my right. I recognized another in a chair. Off, where the light barely caught him. His assassin. Long dead and forever entrapped in mediocrity.

The design came from those notes, each and many. Unique, ascending, scaling, and sliding on the air. Lungs filling as air passes the reeds. These characters, these souls, forever captured on the aether as dueling notes. Their harmonic and dissonance. The symphony of talents and their gravitational field forever trapped in a dance macabre. I had been tasked by the music to create an instrument of gods where men dueled. Where the celestial battleground of the soul existed. All these characters, all these memories: the notes.

The floor represents three layers of class, eclipsed. The artists, the scholars, the scientists. The eclipse of Saturn, roman gods and mortal men. The sound of his rings, the devastation of ego. Of shadows growing from portraits, shadows cast by submission, dishonesty, sin. What rumours hiss on the air, when the sun is blotted out by the black ink of the artist? From opulence to dirt. Icarus fell wings wide, not for getting too close to the sun’s radiance, but in turning his back to the face of the heavens, saw his own shadow consume the earth. The shadow that too would consume him as he fell into it.

What is left hangs impossibly in the darkness. Our harmonies suspended in the universe.

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