Films about Classical Music, Composer Biopics et al. (Strictly Classical)

[James]

New one out called The Devil's Violinist (on Paganini) .. from the same director of Immortal Beloved (Beethoven) ..

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-devils-violinist-2015

Perhaps we can use this thread to bring into focus .. news, info & discussion on Feature Films that are about classical music, classical composers biopics (Docudrama/Biography/Historical drama) ..

[Cato]

Walt Disney's television show in the 1950's offered The Peter Tchaikovsky Story.  I recall an opening scene where the boy Tchaikovsky is seemingly tortured by music in his head: those original melodies just will not leave him alone!

IMDB says it is included in this expensive collection: I could not verify it, however on Amazon.

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[Karl Henning]

Walt Disney's television show in the 1950's offered The Peter Tchaikovsky Story.  I recall an opening scene where the boy Tchaikovsky is seemingly tortured by music in his head: those original melodies just will not leave him alone!

IMDB says it is included in this expensive collection: I could not verify it, however on Amazon.

[asin]B000ICM5RG[/asin]

Do I read that right? A two-disc set for $180?

[Karl Henning]

Gotta give Disney credit for refusing to water down the noun treasures 

[Cato]

Do I read that right? A two-disc set for $180?

Yes, one REALLY wants to walk down memory lane to buy this set!   

To be somewhat fair, this was a limited edition, and is no longer available directly from Amazon.  So you are looking at collector prices.

[Corey]

Ken Russell's more straightforward composer biopic are all uniformly fantastic: Debussy Film, Song of Summer [Delius], The Music Lovers [Tchaikovsky], Mahler. I haven't yet seen his Elgar or Bruckner films, though I expect good things. Lisztomania is too fantastic to be considered a biopic, but still really entertaining

My favorite of the ones I've seen, Song of Summer is available on Youtube (with French subtitling).

https://www.youtube.com/v/Vyy2SagDwcY

[North Star]

Do I read that right? A two-disc set for $180?

Available on Youtube with Spanish subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/v/itZGI-CSv9U

[Drasko]

There is a film about Paganini directed and starred by Klaus Kinski, more about Kinski than Paganini but I seem to remember liking it.

There are two films about Chopin. One with Hugh Grant and one, La note bleue, directed by Andrzej Zulawski with pianist Janusz Olejniczak in a role of Chopin. Again I seem to remember liking both.

Also Death in Five Voices, an off-beat sort of documentary on Carlo Gesualdo by Werner Herzog. I definitely liked that one.

[Drasko]

Also Le roi danse, a favorite of mine but not strictly a biopic, more about relationships between Loius XIV, Lully and Moliere.

http://www.youtube.com/v/OO2HBhwk05g

[listener]

TCHAIKOWSKY  2-DVD edition from RUSCICO with English subtitles
btw:  And they have a 2-dic set of a master class and concert by the Borodin Quartet playing Shostakovich and Beethoven
... Schnittke and Kipling ? the film score for Rikki Tikki Tavi ?  http://www.ruscico.com/
The Great Glinka seems to be out of print.

[EigenUser]

I really enjoyed the film After the Storm -- about Bartok's life in America. It includes interviews with his son Peter and others who knew the composer. I don't think it is on YT, though.
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And there's always this amazing series, which is responsible for many favorite pieces of mine:

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And yes, James, they talk about Gruppen .  BTW I love Rattle's quote, which was something like "I cannot claim to understand Gruppen -- I simply like how it sounds".

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

TCHAIKOWSKY  2-DVD edition from RUSCICO with English subtitles

I saw this one. It's a very Soviet production in two ways: it makes Tch. out to be some sort of progressive who was looking forward to the glorious future, and it doesn't go into the real reason why his marriage broke up.

[Mirror Image]

I've really enjoyed John Bridcut's documentaries on Elgar, RVW, Britten, and Delius. I wish the Elgar, RVW, and Delius would get released on DVD. I'd buy them all! I already own one of the Britten ones titled Britten's Endgame.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Disney's Fantasia surely ought to count despite Stokowski. But the animations are still spell-binding, and then there's Mickey Mouse in his greatest role.

Ingmar Bergman's early To Joy concerns the love between two orchestral musicians.

Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours, about a conductor with an unfaithful wife. It has had several remakes.

Dustin Hoffman's only directed film, Quartet.

Madman Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo starring madman Klaus Kinski, about a madman building an opera house in Peru, and lugging a huge ship over the Andes.

A Late Quartet, one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's last films, unfortunately not very good.

Copying Beethoven, a god-awful flick about a girl who became Beethoven's copyist. It's even worse than Immortal Beloved. Paul Morrissey also did a film on Beethoven's Nephew, very hard to find.

Milos Forman's Amadeus is both highly entertaining as film and wretchedly inaccurate as biography.

Zeffirelli did something with C. Thomas Howell as Young Toscanini. I'm sorry to say I've seen it.

I think Mr. Holland's Opus with Richard Dreyfuss is absolutely wretched, but it does concern a high school musician with ambitions to write a Great Symphony. As if to prove he can be bad not only once, Dreyfuss also starred with Amy Irving in a silly film called The Competition. (At the end the Amy character decides at the last minute she doesn't want to play the concerto she's rehearsed, so without notice she substitutes the Prokofiev Third. See how far that would get her in real life.)

People Will Talk, with Cary Grant and Hume Cronyn, is only in part about classical music, but it does end with CG conducting the Brahms Academic Festival, and Grant's taciturn assistant is (intentionally?) made up to look almost exactly like Anton Bruckner.

Visconti's Senso "opens in an opera house and in a way never leaves it" (Ebert). And then his Death in Venice transforms Gustav Aschenbach from Thomas Mann's writer to a composer modeled on Mahler. I have not yet seen Visconti's Ludwig, about Wagner's royal patron.

Fellini's "Orchestra Rehearsal."

Jane Campion's The Piano, and there's also a film called The Pianist.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is quite good.

Farinelli is a fanciful biopic about the great castrato. I don't believe the operation was performed on the star.

There is a film called The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach which I have not seen.

Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants is not really about classical music, but a Schubert moment musicale plays an important part in the relationship between the two schoolboys.

Five Easy Pieces is partly about classical music, considering that the Jack Nicholson character (Bobby Eroica Dupea) was a failed classical pianist before becoming an alienated youth.

Satyajit Ray's The Music Room, a great film in my opinion, is about Indian classical music, the endeavors of an insolvent but music-loving aristocrat to keep presenting classical concerts in a world of encroaching modernization.

Last but hardly least: the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera!

(And I stop here.)

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

A Late Quartet, one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's last films, unfortunately not very good.

I rather liked it, though it could have been better.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is quite good.

Agreed.

There is a film called The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach which I have not seen.

I haven't seen it either, but I think this is the one that stars Gustav Leonhardt as JSB. That piques my interest.

One not yet mentioned:

Testimony, directed by Tony Palmer, with Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich (1988)

Though based on a dubious source, this is an interesting take on the life of DSCH: notable for Kingsley's performance, and the elegant B&W photography which evokes classic films of the period.

[(poco) Sforzando]

And how could I forget Mike Leigh's "Topsy Turvy," his marvelous biopic about the genesis of G+S's "The Mikado." (There was also a biopic many years back called "The Great G+S," starring Robert Morley as G and Maurice Evans as S - fun in a kind of campy way.)

Not to mention some of the best Looney Tunes cartoons like "What's Opera, Doc?" - with Elmer Fudd's immortal "Kill the Wabbit!" line sung to the Ride of the Valkyries.

And Depardieu père et fils in "Tous les Matins du Monde," a fictional biopic about Marin Marais.

[Jo498]

"Copying Beethoven" is terrible, I dis-recommend it. I am not sure if I ever saw "Immortal beloved" from the '90s, probably not good either. Also stay away from "Spring symphony" (starring Kinsky's daughter Nastassia and German pop singer Herbert Groenemeyer as Clara and Robert Schumann), although this might mercifully be hard to find anyway.
It's been almost 20 years, but I rather liked "Tous le matins du monde" about Marais and St Colombe.

Fitzcarraldo is good, I don't know the film on Paganini with Kinsky.

Also not bad: "Taking sides" about Furtwängler and his "de-nazification"

[Mirror Image]

Does anyone know a good documentary of Strauss on DVD?

[Drasko]

There is the Ken Russell's BBC film, Dance of the Seven Veils, but I doubt it'll be on DVD anytime soon since the Strauss estate have forbidden the use of the music. Can be seen on youtube though.

http://www.youtube.com/v/u7r2JHq7LMs

[Mirror Image]

There is the Ken Russell's BBC film, Dance of the Seven Veils, but I doubt it'll be on DVD anytime soon since the Strauss estate have forbidden the use of the music. Can be seen on youtube though.

http://www.youtube.com/v/u7r2JHq7LMs

Thanks, but I'm not really looking for a 'biopic' but more along the lines of an actual documentary. Would love it if Bridcut did one on Strauss.