Upon revisiting Milos Forman’s AMADEUS, after forty years since it premiered (and nearly as long since I first saw it) how history got rearranged in his favor. Listening to classical radio, catching Mozart’s music in other movies, tv, advertising, and miscellaneous pop culture, broadly, there was, and still is, a sense that we live in a musical universe in which He is the sun.

AMADEUS swam so that IMMORTAL BELOVED could pretty much sink like a stone. So that the memory of Ken Russell’s 1974 turd, MAHLER, an interpretive dance-era curiosity saved only by Robert Powell’s truehearted. snobby performance as the maestro, could live on in garish infamy. The point is, AMADEUS, which is a yarn first, a dramatic ensemble piece second, a bunch of other things third and forth, and only then, a biopic, changed the way we all grew up thinking about (classical) music.

I thought about this today on the way home, when I heard one of Haydn’s London Symphonies on the radio, and I went into a daydream about what the alternate universe would have been like, if Milos Forman made a movie about him, instead—this avuncular figure, and, father of the symphony.

Something like the Powell-Pressburger TALES OF HOFFMAN, in which movements of Haydn’s symphonies (at least 104, but as many as 130) play out in pancake-make-up carnivalesque, fairy tales, ballets, puppet shows, and other subversive fantasies.

My favorite has always been the ‘Evening’ symphony, his eighth, first performed in 1761, when Haydn was not quite thirty years old. It foreshadows Schubert’s ‘Wintereisse’ and Patti Smith’s HORSES, in the way it side-swipes mortality from the point of view of a young person. The not getting it is the point of it —and it’s heartbreaking.

But I can imagine vignettes from throughout the lot that might’ve made a different kind of history-telling juggernaut. Not that I mind the Mozart trajectory we’re on, but I think Haydn is due.