What a ravishing, punch-drunk experience watching The Music Lovers is. It glories in music and its fleeting visual and emotional associations, and it wallows in the precious despondencies of the soul, which may be the famous “Russian soul”.
At any rate, it feels bracingly contemporary over 30 years later (or 130, as the case may be). It’s got neurosis, nymphomania, repressed homosexuality, outright madness, and the most dangerous condition of all: celebrity. This is all rendered dizzying by the most powerful drug of all: music.
From one point of view, The Music Lover‘s closeted hero, referred to as Peter Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain, ahem), had an enviably charmed life as a talented man given the freedom and space to create masterpieces (which he did) by an understanding fairy godmother. She is a Countess who carries on a correspondence with him and offers the use of a “summer cottage” big enough to billet a platoon.
From another point of view, it was one damn thing after another. The Music Lovers includes a spectacular wreck of a marriage to the crazy nympho who fails to “cure” him. This character is played by Glenda Jackson; the parallax of her gaze is capable of cutting glass.
Ken Russell‘s films have often been accused of extravagance (as though that’s a bad thing) in the sense of leaving “realism” and sense behind, but Melvyn Bragg’s screenplay follows the biographical program of the composer’s life pretty closely, at least if the Encyclopedia Britannica is any confirmation. Some things get left out, of course, but all the juicy stuff here seems as true as possible.
The Music Lovers is fast, funny, always visual, always musical, and always melodramatic in the literal sense. Finally available letterboxed as part of MGM Limited Editions’ on-demand service, this film is ready to be inhaled or injected.