The Music Lovers

The Music Lovers is a 1971 British drama film directed by Ken Russell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson. 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.
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 allegedly 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 while his wife ends up in an insane asylum.
Producer Harry Saltzman had seen some of Russell's television work and wanted to collaborate with him. Russell had made many films for television about composers and artists, including Debussy (The Debussy Film) and Strauss (Dance of the Seven Veils), and suggested a biopic of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who he had long admired. Saltzman wanted to do something more commercial, leading to Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Following that film, Russell tried to get Saltzman to finance the Tchaikovsky film again but the producer declined as Dimitri Tiomkin was making his own Tchaikovsky film.
Eventually, United Artists agreed to finance following the success of Women in Love. Russell later claimed: "if I hadn't told United Artists that it was a story about a homosexual who fell in love with a nymphomaniac it might have never been financed."
The script was based on a collection of letters from Tchaikovsky, Beloved Friend, published in 1937.
Originally titled Tchaikovsky, Russell's film focused on the years 1874–76, which Russell felt were the most crucial in the composer's life. The title was changed to The Lonely Heart to differentiate from the Russian film released the previous year. The title card ultimately reads Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers .
Russell said: "The film is about the fact that Tchaikovsky couldn't love anyone even though he wrote some of the world's most beautiful music. He loved himself really and his sister. The film is about how artists transcend personal problems, how he used these problems and their results to create this particular kind of music." The director later added "there's as much tranquillity in my film on Tchaikovsky as there is in his music."
"Great heroes are the stuff of myth and legend, not facts," he added. "Music and facts don't mix. Tchaikovsky said: 'My life is in my music.' And who can deny that the man's music is not utterly fantastic? So likewise the movie! I sought to honour his genius by offering up my own small portion of his courage to create."
Russell offered the two lead roles to actors he worked with on Women in Love, Glenda Jackson and Alan Bates. Both accepted, but Bates then changed his mind. Russell felt this was because Bates "thought it might not be good for his image to play two sexually deviant parts in rapid succession."
UA wanted a star to play Tchaikovsky but Russell struggled to find someone willing. Richard Chamberlain was suggested, who had recently relocated to the UK. Russell said "When his name was originally put forward I nearly had a heart attack. I'd only seen him as a bland TV doctor." However, the director changed his mind after he saw the actor in a TV version of The Portrait of a Lady ("I knew we had a contender"). When he learned that Chamberlain was a skilled piano player, the actor was cast.
Chamberlain called the role "easily the biggest challenge of my career." Russell said Chamberlain "had a certain quiet dignity... which I felt the character needed. He was good to work with, very gentle and sweet; he did everything we asked him."
The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn, performs excerpts from the following pieces by Tchaikovsky:
In his review for 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 commented: "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."
In the London Times, John Russell Taylor wrote of Russell when reviewing this film: "His talent, his sheer zest for film-making are not in doubt. But there is no doubt that his unique gifts are matched at times by a unique talent for misapplying them."
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."
The Music Lovers was released to DVD by MGM Home Entertainment on 12 October 2011 via its DVD-on-demand service available through Amazon.