Love, sex & intrigue in classical music on film

If you think obsessive love and steamy sex are only confined in the movies, you better think again.

They also happen in the world of classical music and thanks to sensitive filmmakers, they were also captured on film and how!

You have seen endless tributes on local icons of the arts. There is a memorial concert on a pioneer violin teacher, there is a book launching to honor a band leader and music teacher, there is a dance concert to remember a dancer and choreographer. The imminent ones get to be national figures and when they breathe their last, they are honored by state funerals with a proper tribute.

All these represent the noble and the grandeur of spirit among the artists.

But if there are the noble and selfless ones, certainly there are the vicious and selfish ones who inflict their repressed spirit on the poor pupils.

You have heard of piano teachers who would raise hell if you so much as consult another piano teacher.

Over the weekend, I saw a lot of films revolving on the life of musicians and performing artists and realized that much of reality in the arts are also captured on film.

Talk of dedicated music teachers and you will find one such hero in the film, Mr. Holland’s Opus starring Richard Dreyfuss as the music teacher. The film all at once tackles the varied life of a music teacher: His career and family life and the triumphs and tragedies of a music teacher. Quite simply, it is a story of a musician who discovers his true vocation as a music teacher. However, he has a hard time connecting with his students and doubly so as a husband and father. Like the film hero he is meant to be, the music teacher faces the opportunities, challenges, and tragedies of his life with love and commitment.

The film’s highlights are actual rehearsal and performance scenes but like it or not, the film ends up as a “tear jerker” with all the telenovela elements in it — from caring to disappointment to hope and overcoming failure.

Another film that pays tribute to music teachers is the 1991 Meryl Streep starrer, Music of the Heart directed by Wess Craven. In this film, Streep plays Roberta Guaspari, a real-life music teacher based in East Harlem, New York

But the story behind this film reflects the perfectionist in the lead actress. A second choice after Madonna backed out from the project, Streep deliberately delayed the shooting sked of the film so she could have crash violin lessons.

But if there are noble and selfless teachers, there are also the wicked and sordid ones as exemplified in the French film The Piano Teacher written and directed by Michael Haneke. The film is based on the novel Die Klavierspielerin by Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 2004.

The film is about Erika (Isabelle Huppert, the same actress who headed the Cannes jury that picked Brillante ”Dante” Mendoza as Best Director), a piano professor who still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot). On top of this, her father is a long-standing resident in a lunatic asylum. Erika is only able to “feel” by enacting cruel punishment on her students, whom she secretly detests.

Upon meeting Walter (Benoit Magimel), a good-looking 17-year-old engineering student, the piano teacher is obsessed with him and by turns tried to ruin his music career. The big surprise is that the engineering student is also a highly promising pianist and shared his teacher’s appreciation for Schumann and Schubert.

In the middle of the film, the wicked side of the teacher showed. She destroys the musical prospects of an insecure but talented girl Anna Schober, when driven by her jealousy of the girl’s contact with Walter, by hiding shards of glass inside one of her coat pockets, but is wholly sympathetic when the girl’s mother (Susanne Lothar) asks for advice on her daughter’s recuperation.

Behind her stern facade, Erika is in reality a sexually repressed woman with a long list of sadomasochistic fetishes. The film ends with the student attacking the teacher in disgust and having violent sex with her. However, the reality does not match her internalized fantasies; her father has also just died. The devastation of this reality drives Erika to stab herself after running away from a concert.

Love and lust in the local music scene finds startling equivalent in the film Meeting Venus, where a soprano (Glenn Close) falls in a love with a conductor.

An opera fan’s obsession with his favorite soprano is beautifully documented in another French film, Diva starring an honest to good black soprano, Wilhelmina Fernandez, playing the part of the soprano Cynthia Hawkins.

When not busy with his daily deliveries around Paris on his motorcycle, a postman named Jules (Frederic Andrei) spends his time fantasizing about Cynthia Hawkins (Fernandez), the stunning African-American opera singer who’s the rave of the opera scene. The young postman has such a crush on the never-recorded soprano that not only does he secretly tape her latest recital, but he even has the temerity to sneak backstage afterwards to steal the gown in which she’d just performed.

The film ends with several syndicates running after the postman and here you get a metaphor on how corporate greed meshes up the arts scene.

The music lover actually has many choices of films reflecting the actual music scene here and abroad. But the sad thing is, like actual classical concerts, the films win awards but don’t make money.

But the fact that the music scene was documented at all is reason enough to rejoice.