The Music Lovers: how art reigns supreme in Ken Russell’s orgiastic Tchaikovsky biopic

“All art is one, man, one,” Michael Powell wrote, defining his concept of the ‘composed’ film. It was an idea borne of Wagner’s application of the aesthetic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, translated by Brecht into ‘epic theatre’ and Powell into cinema: that is, the fusion of multiple art forms into a single whole. For example, music and image brought together as opera or ballet, and then heightened in cinema through editing and camerawork. Unlike most cinema, which merely decorates its imagery with a soundtrack written in post-production, the ‘composed’ film choreographs each movement and cut to the time and rhythm of the musical bar. 

Think of Powell and Pressburger pictures such as The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), in which the line between opera or ballet and cinema is rendered invisible. Or Walt Disney’s great musical experiment of 1940, Fantasia, a visual realisation of synaesthesia which embraces the unreal possibilities of animation. In 2004 Ken Russell wrote in The Guardian about the first time he heard Tchaikovsky on the radio: “With music came pictures, dream images when I closed my eyes.” Russell’s films about classical music and composers, ranging from Delius and Debussy to Mahler and Richard Strauss, bring to life biographical episodes through their music in a series of “dream images”.

Russell’s Tchaikovsky film The Music Lovers (1971) is a series of fantastical tableaux staged as operetta. From the first shot it explodes to musical life, as a night of hedonism is soundtracked by the composer’s ‘Scherzo Burlesque’ in all its vivacious pleasure, replete with accordions and cascading strings and brass. As the snow falls, Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) dances through the streets, bustling with traditional dance and soldiers like a concatenation of Tolstoy and the market sequence from Puccini’s La Bohème. It is unadulterated, and unashamed, onanism, quivering with sentimentality and bombast. It laughs in the face of historical realism.

The Music Lovers is not confined to the stifling realm of sense and logic, but to sex and romance. When Tchaikovsky looks out into the concert hall at the end of his own performance of the first movement of his Piano Concerto in B-flat minor, he sees his sister Sasha (Sabina Maydelle) and the scene shifts into his head during the melodious second movement, to swans on a sun-dappled lake, girls in white making music together in the luscious countryside. Upon receiving a letter from Tchaikovsky, his future wife Nina (Glenda Jackson) reads that he might love her as her heart soars to a brass eruption from Swan Lake, a harbinger of the doomed relationship to come. The screenplay – penned by Melvyn Bragg, no doubt from tireless research – falls by the wayside as soon as Tchaikovsky’s music drowns out the dialogue.

It was by foregrounding the music that Russell moved beyond the composer biographies of the past, which had been a reasonably popular Hollywood genre in the first half of the 20th century. Not, however, by the 1970s. After Russell made his most commercial movie, a Harry Palmer picture called Billion Dollar Brain (1967) for Harry Saltzman, he pitched to the Bond producer a Tchaikovsky biopic. An excuse was found to turn it down as composer Dmitri Tiomkin was set to make a Tchaikovsky film in the USSR, forcing Russell to take the idea to United Artists who had produced his 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Reflecting on the meeting, Russell 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 never have been financed.”

After the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, he is scolded, “It’s not only trivial. It’s bad. Vulgar. Woman’s stuff.” Russell might even have been preempting the contemporary reviews of The Music Lovers, which rallied against the verbosity of the composed sequences and the sidelining of so-called ‘truth’. Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote, “[His] speculations are not as offensive as his frontal – and often absurd – attacks on the emotions”, while Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader went further to term it, “musical biography as wet dream”. But that is precisely what Tchaikovsky’s music is: the outpourings of both heart and libido, overflowing with cello vibrations and brass ejaculations. Tchaikovsky himself said, “My life is music”, and that is precisely how Russell told it. 

If one would prefer to see the life of Tchaikovsky stripped of its music, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky’s Wife (2022) focuses on Nina’s sexual obsessions while casting her composer husband as a manipulative misogynist. Yet for those who prefer their musical films lascivious and unrestrained, the recent revival of interest in classical music as a cinematic subject shows promise. There is more than a little in common between The Music Lovers and Bradley Cooper’s 2023 biopic of Leonard Bernstein, Maestro, which is bedecked with dream ballet and extended musical sequence. There has always been pushback against composed cinema from those unwilling to abandon themselves to overt emotional manipulation. For those who enjoy the ride, please take your seats.

The Music Lovers is out now on BFI Blu-ray.