Mozart “Wreckquiem”: A Classical Music Video Game Gone Wrong

Mozart “Wreckquiem”: A Classical Music Video Game Gone Wrong

We live in an age where classical music has lost much of its wider cultural relevance, but a select few composers still loom large in the public consciousness. Take Mozart, for instance. His recognizable face is plastered on everything from ugly Christmas sweaters to chocolate wrappers. He’s shown up in books, movies, TV shows (both live-action and animated), and pop music. He’s even appeared on Saturday Night Live, as played by Justin Timberlake. (You know you’ve made it when your life becomes an SNL sketch.)

Mozart is everything everywhere all at once.

One area of pop culture Mozart hasn’t fully infiltrated is the world of video games. The composer and his music have appeared only sporadically in the gaming realm, including a 1988 home computer game called Amadeus Revenge (which sounds incredible, tbh).

In 2008, the French outsourcing company Gameco Studios—in collaboration with Micro Application, S.A.—sought to fill this gap with a point-and-click adventure game titled Mozart: Le Dernier Secret (Mozart: The Last Secret). At first, it was a European exclusive. Originally released in France for PC, it was soon translated into German, Dutch, and Russian as Mozart: The Conspirators of Prague. Then, in 2022—with the help of GS2 Games and Hoplite Research—it was translated into English and reworked for Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Playstation 4 under the new title Mozart Requiem. (Yes, that’s Mozart Requiem, not the more grammatically correct Mozart’s Requiem.)

The game’s official description reads, in part:

It’s 1788 and Mozart is in Prague. He is giving the inaugural showing of his famous opera, Don Giovanni. The plaudits he receives are universal, but very quickly the events that are shaking the capital of Bohemia will take his mind off the music. Far from the footlights, a terrible conspiracy is underway, designed to dethrone Joseph II, Austro-Hungarian Emperor and Mozart’s benefactor. Left bereft and manipulated, the musical prodigy finds himself plunged into the heart of a grand conspiracy!

Glaring historical inaccuracy aside—Don Giovanni premiered in Prague in 1787, not 1788—a murder mystery game built on real-life characters and events sounds intriguing… and fun! The game developers seem to think so too. In an interview, creator Jean Martial LeFranc stated:

[Our] target audience will encompass several groups: the history buffs, the lovers of music, people who like to learn as they play, fans of narrative games, fans of murder mysteries… We expect the community for “Mozart’s [sic] Requiem” to be large enough to make it a success.

Jean Martial LeFranc

Well, is the game all it cracked up to be? Was the game’s translation into English worth the wait? Is this Amadeus: The Video Game??

No. No, it’s not.

Upon its English release, many gamers panned Mozart Requiem, calling it “a woefully outdated experience,” “a disappointment all around,” and “not worth your time.” Just take a look at the trailer below. It’s quite something.

Still, as a musicologist, casual gamer, and fan of so-bad-it’s-good media (à la Plan 9 from Outer Space), I was morbidly curious. So, I bought a discounted copy of the Switch version on Amazon—saving $17 in the process; the absurd cover price is $30—and braced myself for the worst.

But I didn’t want to take the leap into Mozart’s virtual Prague alone. I decided to bring along my dear friend, Sarah, for the ride. Sarah is an avid gamer who regularly streams on Twitch under the handle @AWildFanAppeared. During the anxious early days of the pandemic, Sarah was a part of my local social “bubble,” and we streamed several games together, including The Sims and a wacky Nancy Drew computer game from the early 2000s. She was the ideal candidate to venture into the world of classical music video games with me.

Apparently, Mozart is out to solve a murder mystery but has to get through tedious puzzles and boring dialogue first.

We streamed Mozart Requiem on Twitch for about two hours and got a small taste of the game, its mechanics, and its story. While it’s certainly not the worst thing ever created or an abomination to Mozart and his music, the game is still a HUGE mess. The controls are clunky. The pacing is slow. The minigames are frustrating. The puzzles are confusing. The voice acting is awkward. The animation is creepy. The plot is thin. The list goes on and on. It was both hilarious and aggravating at the same time. (We did agree that one of the few redeeming factors is the soundtrack—all music by Mozart.)

After our riveting and seemingly-pointless adventure, Sarah and I sat down to discuss our thoughts and impressions of the game. Below are some highlights from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity. I have also included several short video clips from our Twitch stream, so you can experience the pain that is Mozart Requiem yourself without spending the money or wasting the mental energy.

(If you’d like to check out our full two-hour stream, click here. Be forewarned: our language gets a bit salty at times!)


Kevin McBrien (KM): So… Mozart Requiem. For one thing, it didn’t look as bad as I thought it would. The animation is pretty uncanny, but the environments looked mostly fine. The controls and walking mechanics were quite janky, though.

S: Yeah. I’ve played a lot of games that have those tank controls, but for 2008, we’ve definitely moved past that era of game.

KM: I also feel like we didn’t really get into the story.

S: Well, we didn’t have time! We were too busy making coffee! [Both: Laugh.] I was excited for the murder mystery, but there were so many tedious things to do.

KM: Yeah, I guess we’re still in the early stages. There are supposedly 30 hours of gameplay! [Laughs.]

A small taste (ha!) of our annoying, 10-minute quest to make coffee in Mozart’s apartment.

S: It’s like the developers thought, “Oh, there’s 30 hours of gameplay because it’s complicated.” It’s not clever complicated; it’s unnecessarily complicated! [Laughs.]

KM: Yeah, wandering around an apartment for ten minutes trying to figure out how to make coffee is not how you want… you need to help people along the way! [See clip at right.]

S: Most games have a tutorial, where the game will tell you what to do at the first stage, and then after that, they’ll stop doing it. This game never did that. They just left us to our own devices. In other games, it makes way more sense. Think The Painscreek Killings, for example. That game is similar in that you have an inventory, but you gradually figure out how to use it along the way. With this Mozart game, you grab an item and try to use it, but if you don’t click on the right pixel or in the right area, it won’t work.

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The Flawed Artistry of TÁR

The Flawed Artistry of TÁR

Good—actually good—films about classical musicians tend to be elusive. On one hand, movies like Amadeus and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould present compelling depictions of real-life artists, even if they stretch the truth a bit along the way. Others take a purely fictional approach but are nonetheless successful. (The Red Violin comes to mind here.) Then you have films whose intentions may be good, but the results are anything but. (Apparently, someone thought it would be a great idea to make a musical about Edvard Grieg starring Florence Henderson of The Brady Bunch.) Of course, there are also some movies that fit into the prestigious “so bad, they’re good” category. This honor is lovingly bestowed upon the fever dream that is Ken Russell’s Lisztomania as well as the amazingly ridiculous Grand Piano, which features Elijah Wood as a concert pianist who will be shot by a sniper if he plays one wrong note. (Seriously, I’m not making this up.)

Enter Tár.

Directed by Todd Field, Tár has received almost universal acclaim since its release in October 2022. Critics praised the film for its complex and nuanced exploration of power, toxicity, and abuse, with nearly everyone agreeing that Cate Blanchett’s role as the fictional conductor Lydia Tár is one of her best performances. Additionally, Tár has already won several major awards, with more pending—including six Oscar nominations—and was even singled out by former President Barack Obama as one of his favorite films of the year.

With such high praise, this begged the question: would this finally be the classical music film that paints an accurate portrait of the industry, uniting critics, classical musicians, and music lovers in the process?

Unfortunately, no.

Tár has polarized, shocked, and even offended the classical music community. Some loved it. Gustavo Dudamel called the film “wonderful” and “very credible,” and praised Blanchett’s conducting. British conductor Alice Farnham applauded Tár for normalizing the image of female conductors. Others weren’t so generous. Mark Swed of the LA Times likened it to “a mean-spirited horror film with a… chip on its shoulder the size of the Hollywood Bowl.” JoAnn Falletta appreciated the craft but had issues with some of the film’s finer details. Leonard Slatkin was also not much of a fan. Most notable and damning of all was the reaction of Marin Alsop, former music director of the Baltimore Symphony and, arguably, the real-life inspiration for some of Lydia Tár’s character details. Alsop derided the film, stating, “I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.” She continues: “To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser—for me that was heartbreaking…. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.” Yikes. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Regardless, the buzz piqued my interest. Was Tár really that polarizing? I had to investigate.

Several weeks ago, I sat down over Zoom with my good friend Tanner Cassidy—PhD candidate in music theory at UC Santa Barbara—to watch the film and discuss our thoughts afterward (similar to what we did in 2021 with the AI-completed Beethoven 10).

So, what did we think? It’s complicated. The film definitely isn’t terrible, as some of the reactions would have one believe; it’s beautifully shot and marvelously acted and offers some interesting moments and thought-provoking ideas. But, our final assessment was not positive. The film contains numerous flaws—from irritating factual errors to broad, uncomfortable misconceptions—that end up doing a significant disservice to the drama, to the art of conducting, and to the music itself. It was, in a word: disappointing.

Below are some curated excerpts from our almost two-hour Zoom discussion, in which we lament the film’s dismal ending, puzzle over the use of Mahler 5, and reassert our love for Amadeus.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[Before starting, we chat about our initial impressions of the film.]

Kevin McBrien (KM): So, this movie is getting a lot of buzz right now with the Oscars coming up. Other than Cate Blanchett’s role as this revered but toxic conductor, I don’t know a ton about it.

Tanner Cassidy (TC): I know more about the reaction than about the movie itself. Critics love this movie, from what I can tell. But it seems a bit like a Whiplash or La La Land situation because nobody I’ve talked to who’s in classical music has liked it. I’ve heard reactions from “It was interesting” to “I turned it off after twenty minutes.” I know that people like La La Land because there’s good craft and good drama, even though it gets so many details wrong. I wonder if that’s what’s going to happen here.

KM: And it’s interesting because a lot of these reactions are coming out now, more so than when the movie was in theaters.

TC: The movie bombed in theaters, from what I can tell. It was not marketed or released super well back in October. It’s also factored into a bigger discussion about “the death of cinema,” which is ridiculous. A movie doing poorly is fine; it happens. Again, I know so much about how this movie is functioning in a conversation more than I actually know anything about it.

KM: Right. Well, let’s check it out…

[We watch Tár, and pick up our discussion afterward. Spoilers ahead!]

TC: Man, that ending… It’s like the filmmakers said, “What’s the craziest punishment we can give this person? Oh, conducting Monster Hunter concerts for a bunch of cosplayers in Asia!” That’s ridiculous. And the idea of Tár talking about the “composer’s intent” is a silly question for that kind of music. I mean, come on… So many symphony orchestras do video game scores!

KM: Yeah, the “high art” versus “low art” conversation is just tired at this point. If this movie came out 25 or 30 years ago, we might look at that ending and say, “Bummer, that sucks for her.” But it’s so prominent now. Of course, there are still people who roll their eyes whenever an orchestra programs John Williams, but that seems so much less of an issue now.

Our faces for most of the film.

TC: Right! Film and video game music are certainly not as prestigious as classical music, but they’re more culturally relevant these days. The ending could have been triumphant in that Tár is punished by losing her titles and her lifestyle. I could see a version where she “has her cake and eats it too” in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re letting the character off for being abusive. That’s something I did like; the movie shows that anybody can be an a**hole and, for much of it, you vacillate between being on her side and being horrified by her. That’s good drama, that’s good characterization. But at the same time, her punishment at the end is… a fulfilling career, and the movie doesn’t seem to think of it like that. The ending is just so disheartening to me.

KM: And in a way, it’s reminiscent of some real-life figures who have been “Me-Tooed” in the US. I think of someone like [Plácido] Domingo, how he is basically done here but is still performing in Europe and South America.

TC: Or like Roman Polanski. The thing the movie doesn’t do—which I’m mixed on—is that it doesn’t clearly confirm or deny that Tár actually did what she’s accused of. We see and hear bits of evidence, of course, but it’s unclear if she’s always acted in a way that’s professionally and ethically irresponsible, or if it’s something else entirely.

KM: Especially with how fragmented the film becomes in the last 45 minutes. I think it’s implied that Tár might be dealing with schizophrenia or OCD, but I don’t know…

TC: Right, with the ringing sounds throughout [implied to be misophonia] and the medications she needs. I wonder if that’s what they were going for. There are cuts where the passage of time erodes, and you could argue that the editing gets more concise to show the fragmentation of her mind and the unraveling of her life. Those are things I usually love to think about—how the editing or the structure of a film marries its content—but I was just annoyed by it this time. [Laughs.] And her fall from grace seemed too quick as well.

KM: Yes! I thought the film was going to focus more on that. I had Whiplash in mind—just the idea of a straight-up abusive authority figure. On one hand, I’m glad this film didn’t do that because that’s uncomfortable in a completely different direction. I liked how it shows that toxicity isn’t always just “violent rage.” It can be small, behind-the-scenes things like microaggressions and slights and biases. But it didn’t end up exploring that in a satisfying way.

TC: And she didn’t need to be a conductor either; she could have been anything. But conductors are just such a great shorthand for totalitarianism—one person with a stick. A stage director has the same dynamics, but I guess it’s not as visually significant. The film also espouses a surprisingly neutral view on cancel culture. It’s like, “This is what it is and this is how it’s bad, but also here are five people who did things and got caught, like James Levine.” It’s trying to go for nuance in a way that I do appreciate, but it doesn’t really end up working. It tries to do too much.

Continue reading “The Flawed Artistry of TÁR”

Favorite Albums of 2022

Favorite Albums of 2022

Well folks, we made it. Another year in the books. 2022 was, for the most part, a seemingly normal year (whatever “normal” may mean these days). Besides the start of a senseless war in Ukraine, a contentious election season, climate change worries, and other tensions and tragedies at home and abroad, many of our activities have largely returned to how they were pre-spring 2020. It seems that, finally, the worst of the pandemic is behind us. (At least, one can hope. *Knock on wood.*) Personally, I have a lot to be thankful for this year. I finished my dissertation, graduated with a PhD in musicology, and got the chance to travel to London and the East Coast/Midwest. There were some low points, too. A mild bout of COVID (after successfully dodging it for 2.5 years) and a so-far-unsuccessful job search cast a bit of a cloud over the final months of the year, but all things considered, I’d give 2022 an enthusiastic two-thumbs up.

Goodbye, 2022! You were aight.

Classical music also experienced something of a renaissance this year, and the recording realm captured some incredible artistry and fantastic music. There’s lots to love: vivacious viola music from an underrated Baroque composer, a shimmering Christmas oratorio, the soundtrack from a mind-bending new streaming series, the list goes on. Vocal music made quite a showing, in particular, with many intimate recordings that probe the depths of the human experience, particularly those of underrepresented communities.

Below are ten of my favorite recordings from this past year and five honorable mentions. As I say every year, Spotify and Apple Music are great for their convenience, but streaming royalties are generally atrocious. By all means, feel free to stream and enjoy the albums below, but if a particular one strikes you, please consider purchasing it as a digital or physical copy. Outlets like Bandcamp are especially great options for this, as most of the proceeds go directly to the artists.

Alright, let’s begin. In no particular order…

J’Nai Bridges, Will Liverman, Paul Sánchez, Leonardo Altino & Caen Thomason-Redus – Shawn E. Okpebholo: Lord, How Come Me Here? – Spirituals, Folk Hymns, and Art Song Reimagined (Navona Records)

The African American spiritual is perhaps the most miraculous genre of American music. Though a by-product of slavery—an abhorrent scar on our nation’s history—these songs encapsulate a stunning range of human expression in the face of shocking injustice, from grief and anger to joy and hope. Lord, How Come Me Here? presents a new look into this rich repertoire, featuring several spirituals and folk hymns arranged by the young American composer Shawn E. Okpebholo. Okpebholo is a remarkably-gifted arranger; his harmonic palette is broad and luminous, yet sensitive, and the results are breathtaking. This album tag-teams between the voices of two extraordinary singers—mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and baritone Will Liverman—with amicable accompaniment from pianist Paul Sánchez. (Cellist Leonardo Altino and flutist Caen Thomason-Redus also appear in two separate tracks, which add an extra dash of color.) Rounding out the album is Two Black Churches, an original composition by Okpebholo that offers a striking reflection on two separate tragedies—the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 and the mass shooting at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in 2015. “How much has changed?” asks Okpebholo in the liner notes. Clearly, we have a long way to go as a nation. We would do well to listen to this music, learn from our history, and work towards a brighter, more just future.

Continue reading “Favorite Albums of 2022”