Violinist, composer, soldier

Engaging portrait skin deep

Hot on the heels of The Spirit of Harriet Tubman (cross-reference below), Raymond Saint-Jean’s Le Mozart Noir might well find its way into required viewing/hearing for future installments of Black History Month.  With the irrepressible energy and skill of Jeanne Lamon and her Tafelmusik Orchestra providing the seldom-performed score, and Kendall Knights’ most excellent physique and haunting eyes miming the title role, this production—despite the fact that it asks more questions than are answered—is a welcome addition to the cause of entry-level accessibility of our most universal art.

From the opening jail scene, where Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges awaits his post-Revolution fate, it’s clear that Saint-Jean understands that the music must lead—the drama can fall where it may.  Cutting to the band, the opening selection has just the right amount of reverb to imagine it being played in a high-ceilinged stone-wall prison, adding aural, if subliminal, verisimilitude to the sequence.  The invigorating sound swirls with waves of Mozart’s 25th symphony’s syncopation and drive, only in need of a second subject that might remain in memory after the resin dust settles.

The capable narrator and a montage of period prints soon provide the back-story of the Guadeloupe, mixed-race (“mulatto” has been expunged from polite conversation years ago and rings a false note with every utterance here) boy who, with mid-aristocrat father and plantation-slave mother decide to return to Paris and find a way to crack “enlightened” society’s taboos.

Soon the determined teen is beating all comers with his rapier, which he exchanges for a violin bow, then a composer’s plume and bursts into the upper class with his incredible musical talent and legendary bedroom dexterity.  But to no avail.  Exotic as he is, no Parisian woman would dare marry an “animal without a soul,” but, nonetheless, aren’t averse to a sample.  A short ballet, with masks lurking in the background, shows a trio of courtly beauties teasing their favourite celebrity before he cuts in and separates the wheat from the chaff, oddly echoing Maddin’s Dracula:  Page’s from a Virgin’s Diary (cross-reference below) in this stylish Invitation to the Dance.  But before you can say contraception, the resultant baby is ordered dead. 

From time-to-time, additional facts, comments and musical offerings are interlaced with the action.  At this conjuncture, Lamon and soloist Linda Melsted make the case that the Adagio movement from Saint-George’s D Major Concerto with its “simplicity” and “tender sighs” is the Requiem for his child who also began life from mixed parentage, but couldn’t rise above gossip and scandal.

Not as successful is Saint-George historian, Gabriel Banat whose equally out-of-tune excerpts of a phrase found in the Sinfonia Concertantes of Saint-George and Mozart fail to convince that the one copied the other after the storied pair briefly shared the same postal code.

Saint-George’s ultimate humiliation is to be deprived of the vacant music director’s post at the Paris Opera on the strength of a poison pen letter to the Queen from the reigning Diva’s.  “Queen’s of the Night” indeed!

Politics, revolution and anti-slavery organizations start to crowd the stage and the fabled musician, after successfully leading a ghettoized battalion in the defence of France, finds his shaky connection to aristocracy lands him on death row.  For once, even his plume “I address myself to your sense of justice” cannot overturn his sentence.

As the story winds up, more music flows.  The superimposition of the jailed artist conducting, like the earlier, mercifully brief shots of him playing grate on the ear and the eye.  With such magnificent performances from the real musicians beautifully rendered in so many frames, the “close but no cigar” bow and arm syncing of the hero does everyone a disservice when compared with the many thoughtful body shots and penetrating glances, which underscore the special moments so much more effectively.

Loose ends abound:  once winning the fencing title, where did Saint-George’s parents go?  The black superstar premièred Haydn’s Paris Symphonies, did they ever have contact again?  Why not mention that, like Mozart, Saint-George was a Mason—a stronger link, perhaps, than a scrap of tune.

Quibbles aside, the biggest question remains in the last half of the title:  “Reviving a Legend.”  With only one third of his work surviving, will the next discovered score send the musical public into hysterical jubilation?  Or will the publication of a personal encounter from a hidden-away diary of one of his short-lived conquests become an overnight best seller?

Director	Raymond Saint-Jean
Producer	Robin Neinstein
Cinematography	Arthur E. Cooper
Editor	Craig Webster
Production design	Aidan Leroux
Music	Joseph Boulogne Le Chevalier Saint-George, performed by Tafelmusik Orchestra, Jeanne Lamon, music director, Linda Melsted, violin soloist
Main Cast	Kendall Knights, Domenico Fiore, Matt Hopkins, Marcus Johnson, Geneviève Gilardeau, Mylène Guay
Featuring	Jeanne Lamon, Gabriel Banat, Ashley Horne, Linda Melsted

Cross-references: The Spirit of Harriet Tubman; Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary; The American Piano Duo