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noctuadormiens · 2 years

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Mozart's costume design in MOR: an analysis

As I said in my Salieri analysis: a good costume design should give us a clear look into a character just by looking at them and without knowing the backstory. Also, for specification: I'm basing my analysis off of the 2011 recording, since I find that this is the moment in the show's history, when the costumes were the most lush.

The first time we see Mozart, he is in Salzburg. He is rather well off and in the service of the Archbishop. He dresses in red, which is a color associated at the beginning with the Salzburg court, but he has black beaded appliqués trimming his coat, witch both give us a sense that he is well off enough to afford something like this and the appliqués also connect him to Nannerl, who has similar ones on her bodice.

Next time we see him, he is on the road in Mannheim. Since he is travelling, he wears a plainer jacket with a gray cheetah print. The gray jacket, combined with his black vest and pants especially stand out in the Inn/Le Trublion scene, where everyone else is dressed more colorfully, clearly showing that he doesn't fit in.

He wears the same jacket in Tatoue Moi, when he is in Paris, where once again, he doesn't fit in with the crowd. The crowd in dressed in duller colors than the people in Mannheim, but he still stands out. The cheetah print comes into reason once you get into the lyrics of Tatoue Moi: the song is essentially (at least from my pont of view) about Mozart's desperation to get by, willing to even prostitute himself to earn some money and the cheetah print is a lot of times associated with promiscuity.

After his mother dies, he gets to an all time low and barely scarpers to get back to Mannheim. Once he gets there, he is dressed in the plainest coat he wears in the show, which he probably bought cheap after his mother's death. It is plain red velvet with black buttons and even though it isn't a traditional "mourning jacket", the message of the mourning gets through: Mozart dressed so far in only extravagant clothing, be it detail or print wise, so the plain jacket does feel like him mourning and also conveys the message that he is as broke as can be.

After intermission, he enters in one of the most famous coats from the show, the pink snowflake coat. He is back in Salzburg and had to work 3 years for the Archbishiop and he has had enough. He has picked himself up and travelled to Vienna, where unlike in Mannheim or Paris, he at first fits in. The Viennese wear the most colorful costumes out of all the three cities Mozart visited. Mozart, after an entire act of not fitting into the crowd (be it Mannheim, the court of Princess d'Orange or Paris), he finally finds a place, where he seemingly belongs.

The next outfit we see Mozart in is the black rehearsal coat, which he ends up wearing for most of Act 2. Mozart tries to be a seriously-taken composer and so, he tones his clothes down a notch. This is also the coat he wears during his first meeting with Salieri. I've already talked about how Salieri later mirrors this outfit with the L'assasymphonie coat.

During the wedding, he swaps the black for a white coat with some white on white embroidery. I at first didn't notice that embroidery, since it's so subtle. But it can be interpreted as Mozart trying look more serious and grown up at first glance, but he is still as flamboyant in his clothing choices as in Act 1. He's just trying to be lowkey about it.

During the rehearsal of Marriage of Figaro, Mozart wears a coat made out of a red/silver sequined fabric. He is dressed to impress, since the Emperor is attending the rehearsal. This is his most flamboyant coat in the entire show and he ends up rewearing it for the curtain call.

At the end of the show, when Mozart is dying, he doesn't wear the coat, giving us a full view of that amazing poofy white shirt. While we're at it, let's discuss the coat symbolism. A coat can be seen as a sort of armor: it protects the wearer. The first time Mozart takes a coat off is in Le Trublion. He is down to fight the guys in Mannheim for disrespecting him and he takes the cost off to be on the same level with them. The 2nd time we see a coatless Mozart is in Je dors sur des roses. He is utterly heartbroken and he throws the coat (the symbolic armor) away as a way to let his despair flow freely and to get over the past. The discarding of this "armor" also lets us peek at who Mozart truly is inside. The extravagant, revolutionary libertine that Mozart presents himself as is only a part of him that he chooses to show the outer world. But inside, he is broken, desperate and full of passionate feelings. It is exactly in Je dors sur des roses and Act 2's finale when we see the most vulnerable of Mozart.

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noctuadormiens · 3 years

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