Main Cast: Joanne Brown, Richard Chamberlain, Glenda Jackson, Max Adrian, Christopher Gable, Isabella Telezynska
Release Year: 1971
Country: UK
Run Time: 122 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is given the Ken Russell treatment in The Music Lovers, which means that there is plenty of music, plenty of passion, plenty of debauchery, and plenty of excess. Tame by Russell's later standards (Lisztomania), The Music Lovers nevertheless thrives on creative and sexual anguish. Richard Chamberlain plays Tchaikovsky with a bug-eyed intensity as a composer consumed by his art -- so consumed that his romantic attachments become bisexual and irrational. He falls in love with Nina (Glenda Jackson), the hysterical trollop he marries with dire consequences. As he explodes emotionally, his public performance of Piano Concerto in B flat minor becomes a cue for flashbacks to a series of discomforting childhood events that suggest incestuous relations with his sister. Back in real time, Tchaikovsky has to deal with Nina's outbursts while juggling his homosexual urges and his almost hidden desire for Count Anton Chiluvsky (Christopher Gable). The film also details the curious relationship between Tchaikovsky and his rich patroness, the middle-aged widow Madame Nadedja von Meck (Isabella Telezynska), who loves Tchaikovsky deeply, but refuses to meet him -- their only communication being through letters, even though he lives on her estate. Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra perform Tchaikovsky's music. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
The films of Ken Russell tend to provoke strong reactions from audiences. Never one to sacrifice drama for subtlety, his work on The Music Lovers is among his most passionate, oversized, and florid, although it is relatively restrained in terms of surreal visual imagery and storytelling technique. Russell seems to be trying to create a movie that is as fractured and schizophrenic as Tchaikovsky's life, and he succeeds admirably in doing this. Unfortunately, there's insufficient dramatic payoff for all this effort, especially as the end result tends to discomfort and alienate many viewers. Credit must be given to the director's imagination, however, as well as to his visual sense -- the play of colors, the editing, and the imagery are stunning. Richard Chamberlain is a bit overwhelmed by the goings-on; although he puts up a great fight, he doesn't seem sufficiently keyed in to Russell's vision to make the part his own, leaving the film with a bit of a hole in its center. Glenda Jackson, on the other hand, gives a powerhouse performance that is perfectly in tune with Russell; she is one of the few actresses capable of giving Russell what he is after without losing touch with either reality or with her own core inner being. Jackson, along with the lavish sets and the sometimes fascinating, sometimes bewildering camera movements, doesn't make up for the many flaws in the film, but she and those flourishs do make it much easier to take. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Kenneth Colley - Modest Tchaikovsky; Ben Aris - Young Lieutenant; Graham Armitage - Prince Balukin; Alain Dubreuil - Prince Siegfried in "Swan Lake"; Andrew Faulds - Davidov; Alexei Jawdokimov - Dimitri Shubelov; Sabina Maydelle - Sasha; Georgina Parkinson - Odile in "Swan Lake"; Maureen Pryor - Nina's Mother; Alexander Russell - Mme. Von Meck's Grandson; James Russell - Bobyek; Peter White - Von Rothbart in "Swan Lake"; Imogen Claire - Lady in White; Bruce Robinson - Alexei; Victoria Russell - Tatiana; Maggie Maxwell - Queen in "Swan Lake"; Xavier Russell - Koyola; Ernest Bale - Headwaiter; Xavier; Joanne Brown - Olga Bredska
Credit
Michael Knight - Art Director, Terry Gilbert - Choreography, Shirley Russell - Costume Designer, Jonathan Benson - First Assistant Director, Ken Russell - Director, Michael Bradsell - Editor, Andre Previn - Composer (Music Score), Andre Previn - Musical Direction/Supervision, George Frost - Makeup, Natasha Kroll - Production Designer, Douglas Slocombe - Cinematographer, Ken Russell - Producer, Roy Baird - Producer, Ian Whittaker - Set Designer, Melvyn Bragg - Screenwriter, Pyotr Tchaikovsky - Featured Music, Barbara VonMeck - Book Author, Catherine Drinker Bowen - Book Author
The Music Lovers is a 1970Britishbiographical 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 RussiancomposerPyotr 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.
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 nymphomaniacalAntonina 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.
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.[1]
”
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."[2]
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."[3]
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."[4]
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."[5]
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."[6]
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."[7]
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."[8]
Elgar (1962, TV) ·French Dressing (1963) ·The Debussy Film (1965, TV) ·Always On Sunday (1965, TV) ·Isadora Duncan, The Biggest Dancer In The World (1966, TV) ·Dante's Inferno (1967, TV) ·Billion Dollar Brain (1967) ·Song of Summer (1968, TV) ·Women in Love (1969)
