Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"Song," said the French writer-statesman Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, "is the daughter of prayer." And as prayerful introspection takes hold tomorrow in commemoration of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, song will figure prominently in the ritual of tribute. Beginning at the international date line and radiating outward, performances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's choral Requiem will begin in the world's various time zones at 8:46 a.m., the moment of the first attack on the World Trade Center.

There's nothing dull about Mozart. He composed and played for all of Europe, leaving more than 600 pieces when he died at age 35. Giddy with genius, he ignited jealousy among his contemporaries.On Friday, in purple silk coat and ruffled shirt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart bounced out of the music and history books at Spring Garden Elementary School in Hampstead.Ted Brown of Annapolis, a retired school principal, musician and painter, is known for his theatrical portrayals of masters of art and music.

Just another week at the office for the Naval Academy Glee Club.Fresh from a live television performance on CBS' salute to the troopsof Operation Desert Storm, the singers have returned to Annapolis topresent the Requiem of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Naval Academy Chapel at 3 p.m. Sunday.John Barry Talley, director of musical activities at the Academy,will conduct the concert, which will also include Domenico Cimarosa's Oboe Concerto.Soloist will be James Dale, the principal oboist of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra who also serves as the organist of the Naval Academy Chapel.

Although Peter Shaffer titled his splendid 1979 play "Amadeus," the protagonist isn't Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but the man who considered Mozart his arch-rival -- Austrian court composer Antonio Salieri.In Shaffer's interpretation, however, the rage and revenge Salieri feels aren't primarily directed against Mozart, though the young tTC upstart feels the brunt of it. Most of all, Salieri is raging against God -- the "God of Bargains," as he puts it.But that overweening anger isn't readily apparent in Mitchell Hebert's portrayal of Salieri at Olney Theatre Center.

A host of complementary forces will come together Saturday evening at the Jim Rouse Theatre when the Columbia Orchestra takes the stage to present a concert program titled "Mozart and More." To begin with, there's the juxtaposition of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the two bulwarks of music's classical age whose works will be performed. Haydn, tradition tells us, was so bowled over by the genius displayed by his junior colleague that he told papa Leopold Mozart, also a composer, that young Wolfgang would eclipse them both before he was through.

What's a Mozart bicentennial celebration without a dispute about his death, burial and remains?Now comes Pierre-Francois Puech, a French anthropologist who says his study shows a skull held by the Salzburg Mozarteum since 1901 is definitely Mozart's. Puech says the skull shows a left temple fracture possibly resulting from a fall. Further, he says, the fracture caused a chronic hematoma (bleeding between brain and skull) that may have led to Mozart's previously documented headaches, weakness, fainting, coma and death 200 years ago Dec. 5.Not so fast, says Friedrich Gehmacher, president of the Mozarteum, which is the official home of archival materials and Mozart memorabilia.

"I like an aria to fit a singer as perfectly as a well-tailored suit of clothes," said a 22-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart's flair for vocal fashion was on display at the St. John's College Great Hall this week, when the Annapolis Opera presented a quartet of talented young singers in a program of excerpts from some of Mozart's greatest works for the musical stage. The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and the less famous but still wonderful Abduction from the Seraglio were the opera scores represented, along with the chirpy "Alleluia" from Mozart's most famous motet, Exsultate, jubilate.

During the recent commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 tragedy, one masterwork of the choral music canon made history as the vehicle for mankind's first "Rolling Requiem." That piece, performed sequentially across many of the world's time zones by musicians honoring those who sustained loss in the terrorist attacks, was the Requiem Mass composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as he himself was dying in the late autumn of 1791. "It's a profound piece of music," says Frances Motyca Dawson, whose Columbia Pro Cantare Chorus will open its 26th season Saturday evening at Jim Rouse Theatre with Mozart's grand setting of the Roman Catholic liturgy for the dead.

The Annapolis Chorale displayed an amazingly full sound in its performance Saturday of Mozart's Requiem at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts. In his innovative grouping of singers, Music Director J. Ernest Green dispensed with the usual center placement of males, moving them in groups of three and four among the female singers across the stage. When this increased fullness was added to the group's usual brightness and depth, the result approached "surround" sound. As those who have seen the film "Amadeus" know, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was working on the Requiem ("Mass for the Dead")

Everyman Theatre has mounted the most elaborate, elegant production in its short history -- in support of a play about mediocrity.The play is Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," and the staging is perfectly appropriate since Shaffer tells his story through contrasts.The central contrast concerns Antonio Salieri. At one time the most celebrated composer in Europe, Salieri has the inescapable truth of his own mediocrity forced upon him when confronted by the bona fide genius of that obnoxious prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.