The Best & the Worst Movies on Classical Music

You can get them glib, sensationalised or earnest, but most of all you get them inaccurate—composer biopics haven’t been Hollywood’s happy hunting ground. The need to cater to an audience unfamiliar with classical music often results in trivialising-- end result, the gibbering idiot that is called Mozart in perhaps the most famous, and definitely the most celebrated of all biopics, “Amadeus” (1980). This Oscar-winning film, works fine as a cinematic treatment of an effective (but fictionalised) stage play, the music is excellent (as it has to be) but accurate, it is not!

Then, of course, you get wishy-washy affairs like “Impromptu”: Hugh Grant plays Chopin, wish I could say more, but it’s difficult to stay awake! “ Copying Beethoven”, even if it is somewhat fictional, and more than a little laboured, is perhaps the most sincere movie about a classical composer—here poor deaf Ludwig van Beethoven is helped through the difficult birth and premiere of his immortal 9^th symphony by a young copyist and music student (who is unnecessarily gorgeous!)

Besides the composer biopic, there is the setpiece movie about the tortured genius musician: he falls ill/ gets his heart broken and then of course, comes back and plays the pants off the audience (ho hum). Witness “ Rhapsody”, “Humoresque”, “Sonata”, etc (OK, I just made up the last one). Two memorable films about real-life musicians in recent times were “ The Pianist”, the Oscar-winning biopic of Polish pianist Wladislaw Szpilman and his tortuous way through WWII and “ The Soloist” about a mentally-ill genius cellist, living the life of a hobo in LA.

Perhaps the most memorable film I have seen about classical music is “Shine”, starring Geoffrey Rush in an Oscar-winning role as David Helfgott, the Australian piano prodigy whose career was blighted by mental illness. Biographical inaccuracies aside, the acting is superb but one quibble I have is the way it demonises/ plays up the Rach 3 (Rachmaninov’s 3^rd piano concerto) as the pianistic equivalent of Mt Everest, the playing of which drives the young and lonely David crazy. Now I know I couldn’t play the solo part of this (or any) concerto to save my life, but the glib convenience which it serves (“Oh my God, not the Rach3!!!!”) is unfair to both the work and to the sad reality of Helfgott’s mental illness.

I continue to dream though, that someone somewhere is making a great film with a great cast about a great classical musician....Brahms, you say...why not?!