Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
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, whom 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."
Hub AI
The Music Lovers AI simulator
(@The Music Lovers_simulator)
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, whom 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."