False Notes

By S. K.

The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name is allowed to shriek and bluster in The Music Lovers. The lovers are Muscovite aesthetes and neurasthenics; the music is supplied by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a doubly tragic figure. In 19th century Russia, where homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment, the composer sought to "cure" himself by marriage. Instead, he became party to an unconsummated charade. But his encounters with other men left him with ineradicable self-disgust.

Seventy-seven years have passed since Tchaikovsky's death. In this epoch of emancipated morality, it would be reasonable to expect that his life would be reviewed with fresh empathy. But no; the same malignant attitudinizing that might have been applied decades ago is still at work.

Rug Scratching. Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) is first observed in the bed of his lover, Count Anton Chiluvsky. As played by Christopher Gable, the count is a vaudevillain complete with waxed mustache and leer. Tchaikovsky, fleeing from scandal, marries the nymphomaniacal Nina Ivanovna (Glenda Jackson). The outcome is nearly homicidal. (One night, wrote the tormented composer, "I was within a hairbreadth of succumbing to that blind, unreasoning, diseased loathing that ends in murder.") Tchaikovsky suffers a series of breakdowns. Nina ends her life in a sanitarium, hopelessly insane.

As the madwoman, Glenda Jackson does not damage her reputation so much as caricature it. In Women in Love she was the feminine soul brought beyond the melting point. Here again she writhes in agonies of longing, but her yowling and rug scratching are more reminiscent of feline heat than feminine misery. As for the composer. Chamberlain has the appearance and emotional range of an Aubrey Beardsley faun. After he gambols through the woods, one expects to find tiny cloven hoofprints.

Smirking Androgynes. But the cast has little significance in The Music Lovers. Its arch tableaux, its unstable amalgam of life and art, make it a director's picture. In Women in Love, Ken Russell turned D.H. Lawrence into tinted steam. In The Music Lovers, he makes Tchaikovsky step to the Dance of the Sugarplum Inverts. Women are thoughtless children or carnivores. Men are smirking androgynes or long-faced straight men like Modeste, Peter's brother. A classic exchange has Peter saying, "Sixth Symphony, Opus 74. It's too cold." Replies Modeste: "I'll give you a title--'The Pathetic.' "

Attempting to reveal pyschology through music, Director Russell makes every character grotesque, every bar of music programmatic. Ballets are transformed into pastoral scenes, concertos into imaginary duels. In a crescendo of vulgarity, the 1812 Overture becomes, in Tchaikovsky's beleaguered brain, an execution. Each cannon shot lops off the head of a tormentor: sister (Sabina Maydelle), patron, lover.

No matter how miserable his actual life, the classical composer tends to suffer in a new way on film. Cornel Wilde as Chopin in A Song to Remember; Stewart Granger as Paganini in The Magic Bow; Toralv Maurstad as Grieg in Song of Norway--all were grotesque travesties. Thus The Music Lovers is merely the latest entry in the continuing series Great Lives Trivialized.

S.K.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.