3/30

jonathon reinhardt
on
falco, “rock me amadeus”

(march badness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

Postscript to Rock Me, Amadeus.

I remember one day in 1991 I was walking down a street in Vienna and was stopped by a woman with a clipboard. She asked whether I would like to taste test some chocolate, and of course I agreed, thinking wow, this is what happens when you live in Europe. She brought me into a little office, sat me down at a desk, and plunked down a huge chocolate truffle, literally the size of a baseball. She asked me to taste it and give her my impressions. It was so huge I had to bite the side of it like it was an apple. Oh my god. A wave of endorphins and dopamine flooded my brain. I had to say something as she looked at me. "Sehr gut" (very good) I responded, my taste buds in ecstasy, "es ist aber sehr gross" (but it's very big). She scribbled something on the clipboard. "Was sonst?" (anything else?) she asked, but I couldn't respond. I was like Augustus Gloop swimming in the river. I might be failing the test, but I had already won. "Würden Sie das kaufen?" (Would you buy it?) she asked. A simple "ja" is all I could manage. What more is there to say, it was fucking delicious. After some awkward silence she looked a bit exasperated and sat back. Thank you, she said, that is all, you can take the remainder home. So that was it, I walked home chomping on the thing, thinking wow, Vienna, thanks for the huge chocolate ball. —Jonathon Reinhardt

jonathon reinhardt on “rock me amadeus”

Vienna, Austria is a good place to be dead. Both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Hölzel, better known as Falco, are buried there, one remembered for his musical legacy to all of humanity, and the second, for a frenetically syncopated 1980s pop song about the first. Both were young when they passed—Wolfgang was 35 and Johann was 41—having led the hard lives that musicians always do, no matter their century. But until Falco, the modern world had sort of forgotten Mozart was Austrian and associated its music with a certain 1965 American musical, much to the annoyance of Salzburg tour guides, who were more often asked to point out where Do-Re-Mi was sung than where Mozart was born. No, Edelweiss was not the national anthem, the real anthem was written by Mozart, yes, those are the steps where Liesl and Ralf danced.
But in 1985, people started asking about lieber Wolfi again, thanks to Milos Forman, who in 1984 filmed a great movie about Mozart in Prague, since it still looks like 18th century Vienna, which had the shit bombed out of it in WWII. Amadeus was a huge hit, and little problematic Austria finally had the opportunity to be proud of something, one of it sons even, drawing attention away from the son it was embarassed about, the one everyone assumes is German, the one who can be blamed for the bombing, the one whom Julie Andrews reminded everyone about. Falco, rocked by Amadeus, captured this moment of national pride and justified a bit of self-forgiveness.
There is something anxious and urgent about the song. The staccato-esque glottal stops that typify German pronunciation (in English, a glottal stop is the difference between ‘uh-oh’ and ‘a ho’) add a weird, machine-gun like cadence to it, which, combined with the rather simplistic octaval alternations of the chorus, make it seem off to many English rock-accustomed ears. As any non-European viewer of the Euro-vision song contest realizes, the syncopation in much Euro-pop, especially from the 1980’s, is clumsy. It seems awkward and even a little silly. The effect of it in Rock Me Amadeus, however, is almost like heavy-footed marching, and combined with its minor key, repeated over and over with an occassional wail, it’s almost carnevalesque, like a new-wave funeral procession. A synth-pop dirge if you will, celebrating death.
I studied German in the 80s, and answered Falco’s second global hit, Vienna Calling by spending my junior year, 1987-88 near Vienna, during which I heard Falco quite often exhorting me to remember what a superstar Mozart was. He was a punk, he lived in the great city of Vienna, where he did it all, he was in debt because he drank and all women loved him and called to him come on and rock me Amadeus. I was there again in 1991, coincidentally the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death. Everywhere I turned there was a Mozart concert, cheap or free, playing everything he ever wrote, along with the regular concerts of Strauss, Brahms, Haydn, and dozens of other composers, making the city the Hollywood of classical music. But Mozart was the superstar, he was popular and exalted because he had flair—it was clear why Falco would be jealous, why he’d try to emulate him. And all over the country, Mozartkugeln, or Mozart balls, were on sale at every candy and souvenir shop and café. These balls were prolific, the rockstar object of desire of so many women and men, and everyone wanted them. It was as if their delicious, marzipan and nougat-filled sweetness brought new life, hinting at the superstar’s power to redeem.
Death and reminders of the past are all over Europe, but they seem to be especially poignantly abundant in Austria. Each town has a massive, weirdly beautiful baroque monument to the black death, with golden angels flying among bubo-like clouds. Vienna’s cemeteries are glorious places to stroll around in, and its beautiful Jugendstil art and architecture (Art Nouveau, ironically translating to ‘youth style’) is nothing less than fin-de-siècle goth. The city is a global monument to the virility of the 18th and 19th century Habsburgers, who spread their seeds into every European royal family. This makes it a good place to mourn the dead and be wistful about things like the divine right of kings. When my beloved grandmother back home in the US died while I was there, I wept openly walking through the streets, and all of the imperial splendor, all of the many graveyards, all of the monuments to the dead comforted me. The many elderly of Vienna, sitting on park benches and in church pews, whose faces normally seemed unhappy and slightly bitter, appeared to my mournful eyes full of sympathy, and I felt better. I ate a lot of chocolate that year.
Every place in the world has stories about its founders and its origins that its inhabitants tell themselves over and over to make it special, to create a collective, unique sense of place. Since WWII, Austria and Germany have had to re-imagine their stories in order to re-invent and be able to live with themselves—the Marshall Plan made it mandatory that every German and Austrian history textbook included a clear account of what ‘never again’ meant. Berlin has in some parts been reconfigured as if its history followed some alternate timeline starting in 1910, where Prussia and the Hohenzollern continued on—fine, really, because who has a real opinion about Bismarck or Friedrich the Great anyway. For its part, Vienna mourns its lost empire through the ongoing repetition of its music, as if it will fade forever from human memory if the waltzing ever ends.
Johann Hölzel died in a car crash in 1998 and like Wolfgang Mozart, he died in debt and left many lovers behind. His funeral was a massive affair, with 10,000 mourners—in comparison, imagine 400,000 Americans today showing up for a pop star’s funeral. One 78-year-old mourner, laying roses on his coffin, summed up the national mood telling a reporter, “There was Mozart, Schubert, and Falco”. Falco’s dirge, “Rock Me, Amadeus,” is somehow comforting in its badness. I would not be surprised if Falco balls were offered in 200 years by some Viennese confectioner, filled with chocolate synth-pop, staccato tears. This might have been Falco’s plan all along.

Jon Reinhardt is an Associate Professor of English Applied Linguistics at the U of Arizona. He normally writes about language learning and video games, but he also enjoys 80s synth-pop as well as the music and balls of Mozart.