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.
Plot
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.
Cast
Richard Chamberlain as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Glenda Jackson as Nina (Antonina Milyukova) Max Adrian as Nikolai Rubinstein Christopher Gable as Count Anton Chiluvsky Kenneth Colley as Modeste Tchaikovsky Izabella Telezynska as Madame Nadezhda von Meck Maureen Pryor as Nina's Mother Sabina Maydelle as Sasha Tchaikovsky Andrew Faulds as Davidov Bruce Robinson as Alexei Sofronov Ben Aris as Young Lieutenant Xavier Russell as Koyola Dennis Myers as Von Meck, twin John Myers as Von Meck, twin Joanne Brown as Olga Bredska Alexei Jawdokimov as Dmitri Shubelov Alex Russell as Von Meck child (as Alexander Russell) Clive Cazes as Doctor Georgina Parkinson as Odile (SWAN LAKE ballet) Alan Dubreuil as Prince in Swan Lake Graham Armitage as Prince Balukin Ernest Bale as Headwaiter Consuela Chapman as Tchaikovsky's Mother James Russell as Bobyek Victoria Russell as Tatiana Alex Brewer as Young Tchaikovsky
Production
Development
Harry Saltzman had seen some of Russell's television work and wanted to make a film with him. Russell had made many films for television about composers and artists, including Debussy and Richard Strauss, and suggested a biopic of Tchaikovsky, who he had long admired. Saltzman wanted to do something more commercial, leading to Billion Dollar Brain. After that movie Russell tried to get Saltzman to finance the Tchaikovsky film again but the producer declined as Dimitri Tiomkin was making his own Tchaikovsky movie.
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 film was originally called Tchaikovsky. It focused on the years 1874–76 which Russell felt were the most crucial in the composer's life.
The script was based on a collection of letters from Tchaikovsky, Beloved Friend, published in 1937.
The title was changed to The Lonely Heart to differentiate it from Tchaikovsky, a Russian film released the previous year. The film's title card eventually 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."
Casting
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."