The Music Lovers (1971) on Netflix
Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is haunted by his mother's death and fights his homosexual urges. He marries Antonina Milyukova while Madame Nadezhda von Meck backs his work as a patron.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.2/103,557 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes59%
Trailer
Plot summary
Much of the film has no dialogue, and the story arrives through memories, dreams and imagined scenes built on his music. As a boy in Russia he watches his mother die, held under scalding water meant to cure her cholera, and the sight stays with him. He works at making his name as a composer and conductor, and Madame Nadezhda von Meck becomes his patron. In one sequence he and his patron catch sight of one another at a distance as her carriage moves through woodland. He fights his homosexual urges, and his longing for Count Anton Chiluvsky troubles his marriage to Antonina Milyukova, described as nymphomaniacal, whom he cannot satisfy.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Music Lovers (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ken Russell claimed he only got United Artists to finance The Music Lovers by telling them it was a story about a homosexual who fell in love with a nymphomaniac, saying otherwise it might never have been financed.
- Ken Russell offered the two leads in The Music Lovers to Glenda Jackson and Alan Bates, his stars from Women in Love; both accepted, but Bates changed his mind, which Russell blamed on Bates fearing that two sexually deviant parts in a row would hurt his image.
- Richard Chamberlain was cast as Tchaikovsky after Ken Russell changed his mind about him; Russell said he nearly had a heart attack when Chamberlain's name was suggested, having only seen him as a bland TV doctor, and was won over by his performance in The Portrait of a Lady and his piano playing.
- Glenda Jackson said that when the filmmakers asked the Russian embassy about insane asylums in Tchaikovsky's Russia, they were told they were all wonderful, so the asylum scenes were made out of Ken Russell's imagination.
SPOILER
In The Music Lovers Tchaikovsky's wife Nina loses her mind and is put in an insane asylum, but in real life she was not institutionalised until after the composer's death.
