THE MUSIC LOVERS
Brett Darling on The Pathetic Crescendo: rhythm, time and subjectivity, in Ken Russell’s Tchaikovsky biopic.
Last Wednesday, we screened Crimes of Passion at The Cinema Museum. The room was packed, and we sold out of the issue’s initial print run. Thanks to everyone who attended for making it such an enjoyable evening. If you would like to get your hands on a copy, do let us know.
This week on Cinema Year Zero, we will be publishing the final three essays that make up VOLUME 20: Ken Russell’s History of the World.
Today, Brett Darling underpins the entire Russell corpus with a theory of rhythm, via 1971’s The Music Lovers.
Brett Darling
It really is too easy to take pleasure in disliking biopics. One of those enjoyable, bad habits for which, I suspect, I shouldn’t be proud. Like bulk buying all of a fun-fair vendor’s novelty balloons only to carry out a mass popping, the forgettable, Alexander (2004) — pop!, the throwaway, Back to Black (2024) — pop!, the criminally light, Diana (2013) — pop-pop-pop! — but if that really is my idea of a good time, the essayist in me is doomed to remain dissatisfied — balloons, after all, were only ever supposed to be fun.
No one could claim Ken Russell wasn't having fun when he made, The Music Lovers (1971). His depiction of Tchaikovsky’s life (as portrayed by Richard Chamberlain) all but removes the intellectual fig leaf of realism behind which the truth has been free to change costume, according to the tastes of the times. While Russell’s horror show of misogyny, homophobia, and portrayal of disability, steps well into the grotesque, The Music Lovers aspires to a rhythm which moves beyond those signs typically associated with the biopic. Born on wilder winds, and lacking any neat bows that would contain the chaotic energy of the composer’s life, during its most unstable moments, Russell’s film brings into question notions of subjectivity that a more palatable film might otherwise have missed.
If what we love can frustrate us, according to psychotherapist and essayist, Adam Phillips, then the opposite is also the case — what we hate (and I do hate this genre, very much), we secretly wish to love. Russell, at least, had no issue in taking aim at the concept of truthful representation in the biopic: “Great heroes are the stuff of myth and legend, not facts.” It wasn’t a pin he aimed at the genre, but rather, a cannon trained on the very process of subjectification.
Russell spoke of seeking in The Music Lovers, the sense of a person, rather than a portrayal of facts. Never mind that to sell the film he described it salaciously as a ‘homosexual married to a nymphomaniac’. Russell knew better than anyone that United Artists, aware of the desire for titillating, daring or controversially sexualised themes by the post-sexual-liberation audience, would never have gone near the subject of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and wife Antonina Miliukova’s supposed nymphomania (Glenda Jackson) without a certain sordid, pornographic tone.
Russell seeks, over anything rationally relatable, or realistically representable, subjectivity, in all of its fantastical implications. If there can be a defence for the offensive lack of nuance as it pursues this aim, it would be that the sense of a subject which Russell had in mind, obscures even our sense of poor taste.
Henri Meschonnic, in his Critique du Rythme (1982) offers a conception to help make sense of those subjective moments. His view of rhythm is, importantly, not unifying, in the boots marching on the ground sense, but more fundamentally anterior to the process of composition in art, or subject formation, in life. Rhythm, in this sense, comes before words for the poet, notation for the composer, or storyboarding for the filmmaker, opening the space for subjectivity to arrive. It is into this rhythm that Russell stumbles, as he seeks the sense of the composer similarly staggering through his life.
From the outset, opening on Moscow in the midst of a winter romp, the action races away from the viewer. The camera pans through a chaotic throng, snow covered, then torchlit, as performers, soldiers, and peasants carry out a debauch from day into night — in one moment, beneath a dancer’s stage, a woman is force-fed alcohol while simultaneously being assaulted by a gang of soldiers — the film’s subject lurches on, from scene to scene, with his lover, arm in arm, until the two finally collapse, drunk, into a four poster bed. Even when the next morning arrives, with the composer’s brother chastising his lack of discretion, it is only a short moment before the race is on again, as the party make their way to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s most recent concerto. Indeed, when the rich Madame Von Meck arrives to see her soon-to-be great love on stage, the footman proclaims that Rubinstein begs his apologies, “but the concert has already commenced”. These lines could be intended for the viewer, such is the quick-paced, disorientating portrayal into which we have been thrown.
For Meschonnic, rhythm comes before the metrical application of time used in measuring the unifying beat. Just as for Virginia Woolf, the wave of the mind was that which arrived before the words themselves, for Meschonnic, ‘rhythm forms a mould,’ into which the words, or indeed images, are allowed to flow. Subjectivity, in this sense, arrives, always in the form of a discourse, rather than out of the experience of a subject who can exist independently of a system of language.
“The internal relationship between rhythm and sense ruins sense as unity, as totality. It shifts language towards discourse.”
If the biopic sought to place its subject in a recognisably constructed history, then, the paradox would be — following Meschonnic — the portrayal of a subject ripped from the very time in which they lived, removed from their rhythm, however disharmonious, in order to show a fixed, superficial reality we can all accept and understand. Russell, in his fantasy and dream sequences, underpinned by Tchaikovsky’s scores, stays true to this radical concept of the subject and time, which refuses such a reduction, and in doing so achieves a rhythm far closer to the confused process of subject formation than the genre typically allows.
Beneath the sound of Piano Concerto No. 1, the first vision the composer dreams up is one of idyllic country life. These future imaginings move like a carousel, allowing for the composer’s being to peer from one room to the next, finding himself playing a piano alongside his sister in a supposed family home. And yet the over-exaggerated, slow motion movements of these phantoms, seen from this unfixed perspective, borders on the absurd, as they mimic what might be considered to be a normal life. Drinking a cool glass of water — a movement which mirrors his final disastrous act at the end of the film — Tchaikovsky refreshes himself after working alongside peasants to bring in the harvest. All of this, however, has the stand-in feel of a mannequin placed outside of time, posing for the camera, his smile remaining closer to that of a wax work. As the camera pans from field, to porch, to lake-side, all the way to manor-house fireworks and streamer-strewn success, we are refused a steady perspective from which to understand.
It is the structure of these repetitions, patterns and motifs which point to Russell’s favour for rhythm over “real”. By the time we arrive at the composition of the opera Eugene Onegin, the letter being written by Nina, his soon to be disastrous match, and that of Tatyana, the character in the composition, are entirely interwoven. This being Russell, we are not merely dealing with a drab case of life imitating art. The two stories are not running in time, but crashing together, overlapping, and spinning in a dangerous orbit, rendering any binary division between the ‘interrupting’ fantasy and the ‘stable’ reality null and void.
On starting out with my funfair analogy, I might have done well to recognise that a film is not like a balloon, but rather, happens over time. What Deleuze termed the time-image. The balloon is not what goes pop, then, but what inevitably drifts out of our reach. This being a film about music, following the bizarre framework already described, the action reaches a crescendo in which Tchaikovsky finally takes up the position of conducting his own life. This street scene, alongside the spectacle of the cannons blowing off the heads of those gazes ignored throughout the film — the queer gaze, the female gaze, the puer-aeternus — raises the stakes, but never abandons that primacy of rhythm, an untranslatable process of subjectivity, in favour of a completed, narrative arch.
In Meschonnic’s conception, a crescendo would never be anything like resolution, but would instead resemble something more pathetic, discursive to the end. Having watched the conductor hounded, gabbed, twisted and turned, leaping from one blast after the next, our hero, coming into step, clutches at the air strewn with streamers, above the thronging movement of a world suddenly at his feet. Any stability we might find, though, is short lived. The living, breathing, soon to be cholera-infected human being, our grand subject, evades the snow coated stone sculpture, which is all that remains of him when the music comes to an end. Offensive and obscene, if Russell’s portrait avoids the superficial, it is as a hero always driven on to his next position, straddling still more openings as he struggles to maintain his conductor’s pose — with two hands clinging to the reins of an out-of-control horse. In this same position, we too are dragged out into the void by Russell’s film, one it would have been foolish to reduce to the metre counted out by the conductor's baton—let alone to the point of a pin.