The "Mozart year" is over. And with it, the excesses that first defined the short-lived Austrian composer and then submerged his memory in a torrent of commercial hype and cocktail-party chatter.

The Complete Mozart Edition, an unprecedented (and somewhat futile) recording project undertaken by Phillips to present every note the composer penned (even as musicologists discover new ones, each less significant than the previous), still clutters the shelves. Similar ventures by other recording companies add to the heap of re-releases (at last count, the Sony classical catalogue included no less than three different box sets of Mozart re-issues). As the year's hangover subsides, a disquieting question seems inescapable" can we still take Mozart's music seriously?

The initial signs seem promising. Period-instrument ensembles, whose preoccupations often serve as an index of the most exciting and ground-breaking activity in classical music interpretation, are forging ahead in their revision of the Mozart canon. As the Mozart bicentenary wheezed to a close, John Eliot Gardiner embarked on a project to record all of the operas; his first release, Idomeneo, has solidified Mozart's claims to mastery of opera seria as well as opera buffa.

In January, Christopher Hogwood offered a concert performance, with the Handel and Haydn Society, of Mozart's second and last effort in the serious vein, La Clemenza di Tito. The renewal of these two pieces, which circumscribe Mozart's years of maturity and his best musical output, has been the major revelation in the months after the festivities anticlimaxed with innumerable performances of the Requiem last November.

The Magic Flute Music dir. Teresa Marrin at Lowell House Dining Hall.

But what is missing is a creative re-evaluation of our understanding of the composer himself. The immensely popular Milos Forman film Amadeus effectively destroyed the image it set out to falsify: the delicate porcelain infant seated at a porcelain keyboard. But as the child prodigy gives way to the giggling imp, the relationship between the reprehensible or at least unremarkable man and his great music becomes paradoxical. And, ironically, the popular conception of Mozart has been shaped by a film in which the composer is a supporting actor.

The Mozart of the public consciousness is now an absent author, a passive mouthpiece for, according to Salieri in the film, "the voice of God." But in a world without God, whose voice is it that we hear in Mozart's music?

It is a question that we instinctively shrink from. And our incapacity to account for the power that undeniable resides in this music leaves room for cynicism and the logic of the market. Mozart the man is today an inscrutable phenomenon and, as such, we have no reason to assume a priori that his music is good, that his long-dismissed serious operas deserve another look.

The sneering cynic, contemptuous of Mozart's "pretty" music, and the record company huckster, who likes "pretty" music because it sells, offer us two sides of the same worthless coin. They both depend on Forman's film and is assassination of Mozart the genius, the child prodigy whose music was great because it was the work of a great man. The film liberates us from what may be an illusionary image of Mozart, but leaves us with no reason to judge the music as worthwhile. The notion that the "voice of God" resides in the notes of this music carries little credit if we acknowledge no such God.

AMADEUS AT THE LEVERETT OLD LIBRARY

The Salieri of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, from which the film was adapted, sees the transcendent in Mozart's music, and, inevitably, the immanent in his own. And his own barrenness torments him. He despairs that he can only hear, and not create, the absolute music that flows from his rival's pen. In this sense, Amadeus is brutally relevant, as it engages the quintessentially post-modern problem of creative importence. More coherant and more powerful than the film it spawned, the play presents itself as a speculative exercise rather than a revisionist biography.

The play centers even more closely than the film around Salieri himself and his frustration with God's refusal of his bargain in favor of an immoral brat. Salieri's God is an angry deity, a scornful, faceless presence in the action of the play who mocks his servant with Mozart's high-pitched giggle.

The Leverett House Arts Society production of Amadeus (directed by Grace Fan) effectively exploits this difficult but potent script, and presents an earnest reading of Shaffer's Salieri. Arthur Wu dominates the production with his impressive control of both voice and gesture, and makes the psychological portrait of Salieri's anguish convincing. Jessie Cohen plays an irrepressible and eminently likable Mozart, and the casting of a woman in the role of the composer-child emphasizes the youthful and effeminate side of the composer's character as Shaffer interprets it.

Amadeus dir. Grace Fan at Leverett Old Library Through April 11

The supporting roles are less impressive but competent, the positive exception being Justin Levitt, who makes the most of the play's hilarious characterization of Emperor Joseph II as a benign fool. More troublesome are the Venticelli, played by Howie Axelrod and Eleanor Kincaid, and the three nobles, Baron von Strack (Alfred di Venturi), Count Orsini-Rosen-berg (Peter Galatin) and Baron von Swieten (Arzhang Kameri). The Venticelli are cold and supercilious while the nobles are earnest and straightforward in their delivery: thoughtful characterization would have thing the other way around. Finally, overacting is a recurring problem with these roles, since minor disputes and even neutral exchanges inevitably explode into shouting-matches, threatening to detract even from Wu's thoughtful and truly moving performance.