Wahnderful Tchaikovsky

Ah, to sit in bed late at night, eat crackers and cheese, drink beer and watch on TV those old movies about composers! Cornel Wilde as Chopin murmuring sweet note-things to Merle Oberon as George Sand in A Song to Remember. How (munch) romantic! Dirk Bogarde as Liszt tirelessly flailing away at the old 88 in Song Without End. Good (crunch) show!

A man who really understands such musical attractions is Composer Dimitri Tiomkin. He was born near St. Petersburg and still, at 70, sounds like the quintessential Russian from Central Casting. "Ah! I am so wahnderful to see you," goes his standard greeting. Tiomkin is a true child of Hollywood. In 39 years there, he has written 125 film scores and won four Oscars. Versatile above all, Tiomkin has composed musical scores ranging from the lonely harmonica of High Noon to what sounded like a 4,000-piece ensemble in Giant.

A Little Help. Tiomkin has now finished his most ambitious project yet--a $2,000,000 biography of Tchaikovsky filmed mostly in Moscow and Leningrad with top Russian music, dance and cinema talent, all paid for by the Soviet government. Tiomkin is the movie's executive producer. Fittingly, too, for no one appreciates--or has borrowed from--Tchaikovsky more. "I am adapting so many years Tchaikovsky in my pictures," he explains modestly, "I think it is time to do something for him."

Accordingly, Tiomkin is paying his fellow Russian the ultimate compliment: for the musical interludes between performances of Tchaikovsky concertos, symphonies and stage works, Tiomkin composed the score himself (with help from the master's melodies, naturally).

Tchaikovsky, as the film will be called, does not have the field to itself. United Artists is coming up fast with a second entry in the Tchaikovsky sweepstakes. The Lonely Heart, the work of English Director Ken Russell (Billion Dollar Brain, Women in Love), offers Richard Chamberlain in the title role and asks the Cinefreudian question: Was Tchaikovsky really a homosexual?

The answer is yes, and that positively sets Tiomkin's E string to twittering. "I think United Artists thought maybe we were doing little bit dull musical, maybe Romberg-style fictionalized soaper, and decided 'Ah! Here is story about homosexual. We can make money on something where is publicity already done.' "

Even thus threatened, Tiomkin stands firm in the camp of cinema nonverite. "We're not doing an etude of complex homosexualist for small audience," he says. "We're aiming at a mass audience. We want to give a little bit picture of the man, to give overall feeling that's very melodious."

Disastrous Marriage. The Russell-United Artists version of the truth, largely supported by scholars, is that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality caused him ceaseless anguish and prevented the consummation of any close relationships with women. One scene in Russell's The Lonely Heart shows Tchaikovsky and the rich dilettante Vladimir Shilovsky in bed together. The film suggests that Shilovsky's possessiveness and vanity drove the composer into his disastrous marriage with the neurotic (and eventually mad) Antonina Milyukova.

So intensely did Tchaikovsky throw himself into composition that when he died at the age of 53 he had produced a total of 325 hours of music. For The Lonely Heart, Composer-Conductor Andre Previn drew heavily upon that reserve--and it is pure Tchaikovsky. Dimitri used what he calls "Tchaikovsky's basic architecture"--with embellishments by Tiomkin. Still, the score is essentially Tchaikovsky--so much so that Dimitri, with unwonted modesty, lists himself in the credits as "adapter," not "composer."

Tchaikovsky once wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meek: "A creative artist leads a double life, one part of it being human, the other artistic. They do not always coincide." They still don't. The real question is which Tchaikovsky will turn up on the Late Show (munch, crunch) ten years from now.

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