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]
Composer, conductor and teacher Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky struggles against his homosexual tendencies by marrying, but unfortunately he chooses a wonky, nymphomaniac girl whom he cannot satisfy.
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 were later Labour Party MPs in the British House of Commons.
Cast
Richard Chamberlain... Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Glenda Jackson... Antonina Miliukova
Max Adrian... Nikolai Rubinstein
Christopher Gable... Count Anton Chiluvsky
Kenneth Colley... Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Izabella Telezynska... Nadezhda von Meck
Soundtrack
The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn, performs excerpts from the following pieces:
Piano Concerto in B-flat minor (soloist Rafael Orozco)
Eugene Onegin (soprano April Cantelo)
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Pathétique
Manfred Symphony
Fantasy-Overture Romeo and Juliet
1812 Overture
Incidental music to Hamlet
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.
¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Absoluta recomendación¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡
