Copyright 2021 Lady in the Blue Box Publishing, written by me, Rachel Beth Ahrens, originally when I was on WordPress in 2020 until I left them because they screwed me again. All Rights Reserved, here is my new blog! Again, Reader Discretion is Advised still in effect, RAYOR.
Published October 17, 2020.
Hi-hi! The Nerd Queen is back! And I’m still continuing my dissertation on Herr Hamilton, and yes, I’m going to Lindsay Ellis the shit out of this one. I’ve done a ton of research on this, lots of Google searches and Wikipedia escapades, as well as many, many trips down memory lane of my high school education of both American and world history classes…
I’m only getting started. Brace yourself, Miranda and Hamilton fans, strap yourselves in, you’re getting journalist-ed…
But first, let’s talk about something completely irrelevant but somehow relevant to the Broadway musical Hamilton, specifically the music and the text format, the way the show is set up. Please watch the following scene from the 1984 Milos Forman movie Amadeus below…
MOZART!!!! FORGIVE MEEEEE!!!!!!!
…. “I CONFESS, I KILLED YOU!!!! FORGIVE ME, MOZART!!!”
Completely without context, doesn’t Salieri sound like Aaron Burr to you? Aaron Bur moaning and wailing at the end of the finale of the musical “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” that he’s the villain and the murderer of Hamilton, a true historical figure and hero to the United States of the 1780s that we know today?
Ok, let’s get ready for another history lesson, from a music standpoint, coming from the perspective of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who also died young like Hamilton, died at the age of 35 while in the middle of writing his final piece, known today as “Mozart’s Requiem”, which today is still used in a lot of movies and even rock songs- Amy Lee, the “Goddess of Metal” who is one of my favorite operatic singers of what I like to call softcore metal, wrote a song called “Lacrymosa” for her band’s album The Open Door, the second installment of metal band Evanescence, which the song uses a full symphony orchestra and a multi-person choir, The Millennium Choir, which she arranged and conducted herself to play the final piece of Mozart’s Requiem, movement 6, “Lacrymosa”, singing it throughout the entire song.
By the way, if you are a newbie to metal or if you’ve never heard Evanescence’s Amy Lee’s interpretation of Mozart’s Requiem, please, please buy her album The Open Door on Amazon, Ebay, or at Barnes and Noble immediately. Her metal song “Lacrymosa” KICKS ASS and is totally da bomb.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the namesake for Eddie Van Halen’s son he named before the immortal rock and roll god Van Halen himself died of cancer this week in 2020, was born in the 18th century at the tail-end of the Classical Era, January 27, 1756, around the exact same time Alexander Hamilton was born on the Caribbean coast of St. Kitts and Nevis. Mozart’s actual full name is a mouthful- Johannes (pronounced yo-hahn) Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, born in what is now known as Salzburg, Austria during the Holy Roman Empire where the Pope of Vatican City was the one true King of Europe. Mozart changed his name for the sake of the King of Austria-Germany when he began writing and composing music professionally, and the kid actually started YOUNG: He wrote his first minuet at the age of five years old and a full scale opera at age 12. He was already a child prodigy genius in the making. Both Mozart and Hamilton were pretty much the same age when they rose quickly to fame, and almost the same age when they died too- Mozart died of illness at 35 years old in Vienna, Austria in 1791 and the illness he died of is still a total mystery, Hamilton died by his wife Eliza’s side hours after dueling with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, NJ, killed by a gunshot wound in 1804 in Greenwich Village in what’s now New York City, when he was in his 40s.
It seems that both Mozart and Hamilton were the same type of prodigy, as the song goes about Herr Hamilton, “scouring for every book he can get his hands on…” The famous Broadway-turned-Hollywood actor also sings the “My Shot” lyrics: “Between all the bleeding and fighting, I’ve been reading and writing, we need to handle our financial situation… what’s the state of our nation? I’m past patiently waiting, I’m passionately smashing ev’ry expectation, ev’ry acts of an act of creation, I’m laughing in the face of casualties and sorrow- For the first time I’m thinking past tomorrow!!!”
Dude, what the fuck? Again, too many notes, too much rhythm. Cut a few and then it’s perfect.
But… “Past patiently waiting, passionately smashing every expectation” has to be my favorite line. It sounds like a line from Eminem’s movie 8 Mile, almost like Miranda wrote the song “Lose Yourself”, but it’s not a white guy writing rap, it came from a Latino New Yorker with backgrounds from Puerto Rico including a very democratic activist and politician for a father.
Ok, now you’ve got my undivided attention, Miranda fans.
There is one more thing. How is Hamilton related to the 1984 movie Amadeus, directed by Milos Forman, another immigrant, as he’s from the former Czech Republic? (see director/actor Forman’s bio on IMDB, and also the Edward Norton written-directed-actor movie Keeping the Faith where Norton plays a Catholic priest who’s best friends with Ben Stiller, who plays a Jewish rabbi-in-training, and they’re both in love with the same woman, who’s a sexy workaholic career woman that they met many years ago in eighth grade, and no, we don’t know her religion, but she is definitely not Jewish. Milos Forman is telling a semi-true account of when he lived in the former Czech Republic when the Russians invaded in the 1960s height of the Cold War and he defected to the U.S. almost immediately, which he says in a scene in his rectory -because Forman is playing a bishop, he’s Father Brian’s boss- where he’s talking to Father Brian Finn, played by Norton in his first time being a film director in 2000. It’s my favorite romcom movie about religion.)
Well… let’s think about it like this…
According to history, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were not really each other’s villains. Neither were Mozart and Salieri. The movie Amadeus is actually a fictional tale depicting Mozart and Salieri constantly dueling each other for who is the best composer of music for the gods, or as Salieri put it, who is God’s chosen one to be “God’s chosen instrument” of the finest music the world will ever know. Other than that, Salieri was somewhat of a teacher who handed Mozart some music and they exchanged notes, just like Hadyn did for Mozart as well in those days. For Burr and Hamilton, they were respective colleagues in the Constitutional Convention for writing our famous “We the People” Preamble and the rest of the U.S. Constitution, as well as our infamous Declaration of Independence that we sent to the king of England, Mad King George, and basically threatened his life and flipped him the bird to tell him he’s a prick, and if he doesn’t cooperate by backing off, stop mistreating us, and go back to your country across the ocean, or we go to war. In the first paragraph, from what I learned in history class, our Fathers like Jefferson, Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin (yes, even HE helped write the Declaration too), and several others, made a disclaimer to the King, and let me paraphrase:
“Ok, Your Majesty Puffiness, we REALLY don’t want to do this because we still want to be friends and we still want to trade, we want to stay in business with you, and we really don’t want to downgrade our currency from the pound and give ourselves a new made-up currency we’re calling the dollar, but we have to threaten you now. We can’t take this torture and massacre anymore (see Boston Massacre and the infamous Tea Party). These are the shitty things you said and did- (the list goes on and on)- and this is what we’re going to do if you don’t be NICE- (murder death kill murder death kill)- We are now at war with you, Mad King George. Pray that the Heavens have mercy on your definitive delicate ass because we’re not going down without a fight and we won’t say we’re sorry and wipe your ass anymore.”
Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were actually writers for what’s now the Executive Cabinet for the President of the United States. Hamilton was appointed Secretary of Treasury in his 20s, the youngest person to ever do that, and Thomas Jefferson was appointed Secretary of State before he stepped down to run for president in 1800 and 1804, the year Hamilton died and several years after George Washington peacefully died in his home. According to Miranda’s immense knowledge of history after studying up intensely on Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton he started reading on vacation from his previous show In the Heights (love it, still haven’t seen it, and I’m DYING to see it when it comes out no later than May 2021- GRR!), Miranda noted that the very last letter Washington ever wrote and sent to anyone before he died, was a final letter addressed to Alexander Hamilton himself, his former aide du campe, and a Major General second in command to General Washington during the Battle of Yorktown where we cornered the main General of England, forced him to sign the treaty, and America declared victory and eternal freedom from Europe’s grasp, cue the Schoolhouse Rock! “No More Kings” song: “Over the horizon, what do you see? Looks like it’s going to be… a free country!”
To put it simple, like Salieri and Mozart, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were… coworkers. Not enemies. They only became enemies when Burr was running for president after being vice president for John Adams, and in 1800, Jefferson won the election instead. Why???
Because of MONEY. Hamilton endorsed Thomas Jefferson, not Aaron Burr, according to Chernow’s biography. Hamilton, though retired from his post as Secretary of Treasury, he sided with the man he opposed on SEVERAL Cabinet meeting debates, which in the Broadway musical, sound like presidential debates (*snicker snicker* Biden is kicking Donald Scrump’s ass, loving it, loving it!!!), but Miranda put his hip hop spin on it when he said in an interview with CBS News- “Why not have a rap battle for a Cabinet political debate?”
Woah, woah, slow the hell down- WHAT?
In this video, it actually WORKS. I don’t know how the hell it does, but it DOES:
(Again, Cabinet Battle video has been deleted because of copyright issues.)
“Sittin’ there useless as two shits, turn around, bend over, I’ll show you where my shoe fits!” -Now, that sounds like Eminem wrote that… I- OW, that’s gotta hurt in the morning!!!
But in this case, I didn’t even get to the part where Mozart and Hamilton are somehow connected, and it’s not because they’re almost the same age during the Revolutionary War. Amadeus is a fiction, and Hamilton as a musical is a fiction that’s told in voices of the minorities instead of the old white men that are constantly talked about in biographies and history classes. But here’s the kicker- the musical is actually a precursor to historical FACT- every rap and hip hop or pop song in the entire musical is almost a paraphrase right out of Chernow’s book- everything you see in the show is EXACTLY true to what happened to Hamilton hundreds of years ago in real life. I’ve cross-checked it with Wikipedia, it’s all there.
And guess what? So is Amadeus.
Also, did I mention that the movie Amadeus actually didn’t come first? Amadeus is actually a PLAY for the stage! That’s why when Broadway decided to recreate the play of Amadeus for the stage almost 20 years later, they asked Luke Skywalker’s Mark Hamill to play the title role of Wolfie himself, Herr Mozart of Austria.
Not only that, but the scene where Mozart is a “fiend” running around on the floor with teenage Marie Antionette at a party for the King of Austria-Germany, somehow it reminds me of “Farmer Refuted” where Hamilton and his Revolutionist buddies like Lafayette and John Laurens are bullying the hell out of the Tory loyalist farmer-clergyman squawking about the Continental Congress before they’re interrupted by a declaration from Mad King George. Boys will be boys, as they say.
By the way, by the order of the Roman Empire and the King of Austria-Germany, Mozart did have to go to France more than once to play music for Marie Antoinette, who in fact was the king’s sister. Marie Antoinette was born in Austria as a duchess and betrothed to the King of France before Marquis De Lafayette and the French commoners declared a heavy civil war in overthrowing King Louis and Marie and sentencing them to death by the most gruesome death imaginable: the guillotine, which somehow reminds me of the evil Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. (off with their heads… ewwwwwwww.) So up until the French Revolution where they killed their own king and queen and so many other people in nobility before electing Napoleon, Mozart was actually hired to write and play music for the French Queen Marie Antoinette in those days, that’s actual historical fact. Mozart did everything the German-Austrian king ordered him to do, until Mozart up and quit because he wanted to create artistic music from his own hand without being controlled by a monarch. Thus, he wrote such incredible masterpieces of operas and symphonies, such as the tragic tale of Don Juan the libertine (Don Giovanni, written in Italian, since a lot of opera composers could speak, read, and write in many languages), and my favorite German opera of all time, written in Mozart’s native tongue (in Austria, they still speak German as their primary language): Die Zauberflute. You know it better as The Magic Flute. Can’t wait to see it at Christmastime in the movie theatres, thanks to my amazing history-loving boyfriend and Fathom Events, HA!
More history facts: Mozart wrote close to 41 symphonies, including his Requiem in D Major, and hundreds of minuets, divertimenti, and serenades. His wife Constanze had to number them with K numbers to tell them apart (K. 235, K. 626, etc.) when she went to have them published after her husband’s death. My favorite serenade is the “Serenade for Winds in E Major”, which is used in the same scene of Amadeus where Salieri meets Mozart at that party for the first time, where Mozart is flirting and crawling around with the soon-to-be French princess bride, saying that people speak backwards and fart backwards.
Hamilton? Same thing. He wrote the Federalist Papers, 51 of them TOTAL, while his other “coworkers” could only write a few of them. He also was dumb enough to write The Reynolds Pamphlet, ripping open some private stuff that he slept with a random woman who wasn’t his wife Eliza Schuyler, and because he had this sexual affair with this woman, her awful husband forced Hamilton to start paying him under the table, almost making his own wife a prostitute. It pissed off his wife so much that Eliza ran away and almost killed their marriage with divorce until their world crashed to a halt immediately with tragedy: Philip Hamilton, Alexander’s firstborn and favorite son, at 19 years old, was stupid enough to stand up for his dad in a fight, that ended up being a gun duel in Weehawken, NJ, same exact place and same town where his father was doomed to die years later, and Philip got shot. When Philip arrived home, before you can say “go get the leeches” (because medicine in the 1700s was barbaric), it was already too late. At age 19, Philip Hamilton died in his parents’ arms, his younger sister Angelica went crazy, Alexander collapsed in total depression at his son’s funeral, and Eliza Schuyler came running back to Alexander Hamilton to forgive his sin and took him back as her husband.
(Video of "Stay Alive" where Philip dies also has been deleted due to copyright.)
The scene in the Broadway musical, with the softest purest angelic voice of Anthony Ramos as Philip Hamilton cutting through the heartbeat, almost broke me to pieces. And when the heartbeat stopped, and Ramos let his hand slip and fall off Philippa Soo as Eliza, and she screamed her head off after realizing her son was dead…
Yeah, you definitely saw me crying there. My eyes were very wet.
On that note to conclude this part of the multi-part dissertation on Hamilton, here is the super cool part. If you actually watch the 1984 movie of Amadeus and compare it to the Hamilton Broadway musical either on the stage or Disney +, whichever you saw first, and I have seen neither one because I’m way below poverty in Maryland (or state average income and standard of living is WAY too high at $70,000 a year per household because Maryland is a cesspool of rich people from Congress, poor people in Baltimore City that are on the verge of getting evicted, and a lot of corrupted police officers and idiots who think they’re “entitled” -fuck you, Maryland, you’re the worst state in America)- Guess what? BOTH playwright scripts in dialogue and nature with the settings and the way the people present themselves are almost IDENTICAL.
The critics of the play and 1984 movie Amadeus always said that the way they presented Mozart on stage and on film was that they tried to make the history of Mozart similar to that of a rich and famous celebrity, so they could appeal to younger audiences. The way Tom Holce as Mozart speaks is almost that of a teenage boy, somewhat like Justin Bieber almost, but he has an infectious hilarious laugh. Mozart also stomps furiously on Salieri’s pride when Salieri as Court Composer for the king (Jeffrey Jones from Ferris Bueller where he was the villain- Dean Ed Rooney) writes a song for Mozart’s entrance that Salieri teaches the king to play on the pianoforte. Mozart takes the music, but he doesn’t accept the manuscript because he already memorized it after only hearing it once, then he plays it back and says, “It’s the same isn’t it? It doesn’t really work, does it? Would you try…?” And he corrects the song and does a little twist on it in a very Mozart way, and you get to hear his ridiculous laugh too!
His laugh always reminded me of Mickey Mouse for some reason.
Oh, and by the way, Tom Hulce learned how to play piano vigorously so that he could step into the shoes and wig of Wolfie and played that song perfectly! He really wanted to see and feel how Mozart really played music and wrote it. In that scene, he’s actually playing the pianoforte.
Also, the biography play of Mozart is definitely written in the common tongue of the 1980s at the time, as it was a contemporary movie, but the settings were exactly the same as what Austria-Germany looked like in the 18th century. Hamilton does the EXACT same thing. Instead of white people playing all the roles like in the musical 1776, the ORIGINAL musical-turned-movie that captured the entire writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence (I honestly love the song “Mama Look Sharp” 100 times better than the theme song “Alexander Hamilton”)- Hamilton prefers a different vibe that’s not 80s, but is contemporary, and that of the 21st century, but more 90s than anything. The music and lyrics part of Hamilton, which is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s forte and tremendous expertise, is totally that of R&B, hip hop, rap, pop, and mainstream music. The Schuyler Sisters remind me that of rap duo Salt N Pepa with a little bit of EnVogue and Destiny’s Child from the glory days of the late 1990s. Aaron Burr, as I’ve said already, sounds a lot like R&B artists Seal and Boys II Men. Alexander Hamilton, Lin-Manuel’s acting part as the leading man, is tricky to pinpoint, because his styles are everywhere: Eminem, Jay-Z, LL Cool J for the rap singers, and when he becomes tender, his lyric tenor singing voice is more on the edge of Drake and Bruno Mars’s slower ballads, such as my favorite Bruno Mars love song, “If I Knew”.
Not only that, but the entire cast of Hamilton is made up of racial minorities. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s family is from Puerto Rico, so it’s obvious that he’s Latino descent. Everyone else is either Hispanic, Latino, Asian, or African or Caribbean descent, or even some people in those roles are mixed ethnicities. The way he wrote the musical was that he wanted the show to be completely inclusive, that he did not judge by the color of your skin if you want to play a role in his show. He knew that in the 18th century when we went to war against England, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, as many of the Founding Fathers did. It wasn’t until the 1860s when the southern states declared the Civil War with the northern Union, Union versus Confederate, and the bloodiest Battle of Gettysburg (I’ve been to the Gettysburg battlegrounds twice in my whole life), when President Lincoln slammed down three new Amendments to the Constitution making slavery illegal, giving Black people the right to vote, and establishing definitive permanent equality with people of all races and ethnicities as a warning to anyone who won’t be nice and wants to be a racist.
Donald Trump, BITE ME. #VoteHimOut November 3rd! I want Kamala Harris as our first female and Latino Vice President!!! That would be the coolest thing for us girls! A woman VP, history for WOMEN!
And speaking of women in total power, guess what I’m going to write about next…
HER:
I think there should be a part three to this, because this has gone way too long.
Watch out, ladies, it’s Miss Eliza… She’s got a story to tell as well, that will blow your mind. I’ve always adored feminist stories about the cool women in history that shaped the world.
Eliza Hamilton-Schuyler is one of those historical feminist ladies. And she is one total badass.
Can’t wait to meet her!
To be continued…
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