The Music Lovers

Wikipedia:

The Music Lovers is a 1970 British biographical film directed by Ken Russell. The screenplay by Melvyn Bragg, based on Beloved Friend, a collection of personal correspondence edited by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, focuses on the life and career of 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It was one of a series of films, including Elgar (1962), Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975), delineating the lives of classical composers the director made from an often idiosyncratic standpoint.

Synopsis

Much of the film is without dialogue and the story is presented in flashbacks, nightmares, and fantasy sequences set to Tchaikovsky's music. As a child, the composer sees his mother die horribly, forcibly immersed in scalding water as a supposed cure for cholera, and is haunted by the scene throughout his musical career. Despite his difficulty in establishing his reputation, he attracts Madame Nadezhda von Meck as his patron. His marriage to the nymphomaniacal Antonina Miliukova is plagued by his homosexual urges and lustful desire for Count Anton Chiluvsky. The dynamics of his life lead to deteriorating mental health and the loss of von Meck's patronage, and he dies of cholera after deliberately drinking contaminated water.

Production notes

The film's title card reads Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers in order to differentiate it from Tchaikovsky, a Russian film released the previous year.

Rafael Orozco recorded the piano pieces played by Tchaikovsky in the film.

Director Russell hired his wife Shirley as costume designer and cast four of their children - Alexander, Victoria, James, and Xavier - in small roles.

The film includes at least two major factual errors. In one sequence, Tchaikovsky and his patron see each other on the road, although in fact the two never met. Later, his wife Nina goes mad and is placed in an insane asylum, prompting the composer to call his Sixth Symphony the Pathetique, when in reality she wasn't institutionalized until after his death.

Jackson and Andrew Faulds would later serve together as Labour Party MPs in the British House of Commons from 1992 to 1997. Jackson was the MP for Hampstead & Highgate from 1992 to 2010 and has been the MP for Hampstead & Kilburn since 2010 whereas Faulds was the MP for Smethwick from 1966 to February 1974 and for Warley East from February 1974 to 1997.

Cast

Principal production credits

Soundtrack

The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn, performs excerpts from the following pieces:

Critical reception

The film received mostly bad reviews upon American release.

In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby stated,

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "an involved and garish private fantasy" and "totally irresponsible as a film about, or inspired by, or parallel to, or bearing a vague resemblance to, Tchaikovsky, his life and times."

Time said, "Seventy-seven years have passed since Tchaikovsky's death. In this epoch of emancipated morality, it would be reasonable to expect that his life would be reviewed with fresh empathy. But no; the same malignant attitudinizing that might have been applied decades ago is still at work . . . [the film's] arch tableaux, its unstable amalgam of life and art, make it a director's picture . . . attempting to reveal psychology through music, Russell makes every character grotesque, every bar of music programmatic."

Variety opined, "By unduly emphasizing the mad and the perverse in their biopic . . . producer-director Ken Russell and scripter Melvyn Bragg lose their audience. The result is a motion picture that is frequently dramatically and visually stunning but more often tedious and grotesque . . . Instead of a Russian tragedy, Russell seems more concerned with haunting the viewers' memory with shocking scenes and images. The opportunity to create a memorable and fluid portrait of the composer has been sacrificed for a musical Grand Guignol."

In the Cleveland Press, Toni Mastroianni said, "The movies have treated composers notoriously badly but few films have been quite so awful as this pseudo-biography of Tchaikovsky."

Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader described the film as a "Ken Russell fantasia - musical biography as wet dream" and added, "[it] hangs together more successfully than his other similar efforts, thanks largely to a powerhouse performance by Glenda Jackson, one actress who can hold her own against Russell's excess."

TV Guide calls it "a spurious biography of a great composer that is so filled with wretched excesses that one hardly knows where to begin . . . all the attendant surrealistic touches director Ken Russell has added take this out of the realm of plausibility and into the depths of cheap gossip."

Time Out New York calls it "vulgar, excessive, melodramatic and self-indulgent . . . the drama is at fever pitch throughout . . . Chamberlain doesn't quite have the range required in the central role, though his keyboard skills are impressive."

Pauline Kael would later say in an interview: "You really feel you should drive a stake through the heart of the man who made it. I mean it is so vile. It is so horrible."