Of all the arts, music, specifically classical music, has been least properly served on film. Remember, if you can bear to, Robert Alda as Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Cornel Wilde as Chopin in A Song To Remember (1946), Katherine Hepburn, Robert Walker, and Paul Hendreid as Clara and Robert Schumann, and Brahms in Song of Love (1947), or Dirk Bogarde as Liszt in Song Without End (1960). Hollywood has always equated long-hair music with ennui, even if such biographic subjects as Liszt and Schumann were half-mad.
Then along came Ken Russell in the 70's, who saw to it that no one would think classical composers dull any more. They certainly didn't after Richard Chamberlain's delirious Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers (1970), or Robert Powell's tortured Mahler (1974), or Roger Daltrey portraying Liszt as the Pop of pop in Lisztomania (1975). Describe Russell as you will--and many have called him outrageous, hysterical, misguided, and disgusting--he did succeed in turning around the movie audience's preconceptions about classical music a full 360 degrees.
There is also the recent Milos Forman film Amadeus, with Tom Hulce as the eponymous composer. Yet Amadeus is more an exercise in arch literary tone. At the heart of both the play and the film there is a self-congratulatory disdain for the composer, shown to be a nasty, childish egomaniac--a mere vessel for God's sounds. That's a rather romantic (and totally unoriginal) view of classical composers.
For one thing, it is extraordinarily difficult to portray the hard work that goes into composing--the hours of working over sheets of music, the endless reconsiderations, the brick walls that suddenly appear. So for the film producer the more efficacious way to get at the process of being a musical artist is through the performer--a pianist or a singer--and the performer's relationship to his art.
Enjoyably Shameless
It also often makes for a much more entertaining movie: Think of James Mason rapping (at least metaphorically) the knuckles of his piano protege Ann Todd in The Seventh Veil (1945); or as recent as last year when Shirley MacLaine was all-got-up in an enjoyably shameless performance as Madame Sousatzka, the eccentric piano teacher. Both The Seventh Veil and Madame Sousatzka had as their subject an operative cliché--the tyranny of art and its custodians--but they were more about the kitsch fantasies of movie audiences.
Finally a film has come along that explores the relationship between music and those who profess it. The Music Teacher, the feature-film directing debut of Gerard Corbiau, a Belgian who has made television documentaries about Adolphe Sax (the inventor of the saxophone) and Igor Stravinsky, is to my mind the most sober film made about the subject. But that is not to suggest that the film is dull; it is, instead, studied and graceful, filled with a reticent passion that creates tensions everywhere.
Appropriately enough, The Music Teacher opens with an audience applauding inside an opulent London theater at the turn of the century. The great singer Joachim Dallyrac (the Belgian bass-baritone Jose Van Dam) and his accompanist and companion Estelle (Sylvie Fennec) bow and accept the applause. You can almost feel the love emanating from that
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