The Music Lovers

For the Goodies episode, see The Music Lovers (The Goodies).
The Music Lovers
Directed by Ken Russell
Produced by Ken Russell
Written by Melvyn Bragg, based on a collection of letters edited by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck
Starring Richard Chamberlain
Glenda Jackson
Kenneth Colley
Christopher Gable
Max Adrian
Isabella Telezynska
Maureen Pryor
Andrew Faulds
Music by André Previn
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Cinematography Douglas Slocombe
Edited by Michael Bradsell
Production
company
Russ-Arts
Distributed by United Artists (1970, theatrical) MGM (2011, DVD)
Release dates
 December 1970 (UK)
24 January 1971 (US)
Running time
 122 min.
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Budget £1,600,000 (UK)

The Music Lovers is a 1970 British drama 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 the director's biographical films about classical composers, which include Elgar (1962), Delius: Song of Summer (1968), Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975), 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 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; the two never spoke, although their paths crossed once by happenstance in a park in Italy. Later, his wife Nina goes mad and is placed in an insane asylum, prompting the composer to call his Sixth Symphony the Pathétique, when in reality she wasn't institutionalised until after his death.

Glenda Jackson and Andrew Faulds later served together as Labour Party MPs in the British House of Commons from 1992 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 when it was released in the United States, but elsewhere has since become somewhat of a cult movie. On July 28, 1991 it aired on the BBC cult film TV series Moviedrome. [1]

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

“ Mr. Russell has told us a lot less about Tchaikovsky and his music than he has about himself as a filmmaker . . . [His] speculations are not as offensive as his frontal – and often absurd – attacks on the emotions. Richard Chamberlain . . . is fine as Tchaikovsky, looking a bit like a haunted faun, and Glenda Jackson is all sinewy nerves as Nina, but they are hard put to match the . . . nonstop hysteria of the production that surrounds them . . . I expect many people may look on The Music Lovers as an advance on the classical musical biographies turned out by Hollywood in the 1940s, but for all of its so-called frankness, there isn't much difference between this kind of sensational, souped-up popularization and the sort of pious, souped-down popularization that cast Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Robert Walker as Brahms.[2] ”

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."[3]

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."[4]

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."[5]

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."[6]

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."[7]

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."[8]

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."[9]

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."[10]

DVD

The Music Lovers was released to DVD by MGM Home Entertainment on October 12th, 2011 via its DVD-on-demand service available through Amazon.

References

  1. ↑ http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/80/20?q=cult+film#search
  2. ↑ Canby, Vincent (25 January 1971). "Screen: Ken Russell's Study of Tchaikovsky Opens". The New York Times. Retrieved 13 January 2012.
  3. ↑ Chicago Sun-Times review
  4. ↑ Time review
  5. ↑ Variety review
  6. ↑ Cleveland Press review
  7. ↑ Chicago Reader review
  8. ↑ TV Guide review
  9. ↑ Time Out New York review
  10. ↑ Malko, George (1996). "Pauline Kael Wants People to Go to the Movies: A Profile". In Brantley, Will. Conversations with Pauline Kael. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi. p. 28. ISBN 0-87805-899-0. OCLC 34319309.
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