The Music Lovers movie storyline. 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.
The Music Lovers is a 1971 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.
Brief Notes
Jackson said the filmmakers tried to research insane asylums in Russia at the time by asking the Russian embassy “but they told us they were all wonderful so we ended up literally making the film out of the imagination of Ken Russell.”
Jackson said “I think people will love it or hate it but I doubt that anyone will go away feeling nothing. I think it’s really quite extraordinary.” She also said she preferred Women in Love to The Music Lovers “because it had the better script and that makes all the difference.”
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.
In one sequence, Tchaikovsky and his patron glimpse each other from a distance as she passes through a wood in her carriage. In real life their paths accidentally crossed in an Italian park. Later, his wife Nina loses her mind and is placed in an insane asylum; in reality she was not 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, while the screenwriter Melvyn Bragg has been a Labour member of the House of Lords since 1998.
The Music Lovers (1971)
Directed by: Ken Russell
Starring: Richard Chamberlain, Glenda Jackson, Kenneth Colley, Christopher Gable, Max Adrian, Isabella Telezynska, Maureen Pryor, Andrew Faulds, Sabina Maydelle, Xavier Russell
Screenplay by: Melvyn Bragg
Production Design by: Natasha Kroll
Cinematography by: Douglas Slocombe
Film Editing by: Michael Bradsell
Costume Design by: Shirley Russell
Art Direction by: Michael Knight
Music by: André Previn
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: January 24, 1971 (US), February 25, 1971 (UK)
Views: 166