Ken Russell

And you’re like…

jukeboxgarcia:

76. The Music Lovers: *** 1/2

(via jukeboxgarcia-deactivated201106)

mothlightmagazine:

By Daniel Dawson.

A few years before Russell’s television biopic Delius: A Song of Summerairedhe had already planned to tackle a portrait of the life of the composer but, having written a treatment, found it to be ‘a rather boring story’ concluding too that his music ‘though it has moments of great beauty, is second-rate’. It was not until Russell read Eric Fenby’s memoir Delius as I Knew Him that he chose to return to the composer and portray not his life, but his final years leading up to his death. Immediately, one is presented not with an examination of the stylistic influence upon the director but instead with the connection that Russell experiences with Fenby’s story. This personal experience has just as much to play in the creation and conception of Russell’s composer pieces, and most of his other works, as the style of the music does. It is the trials of these composers (Delius’ blindness and paralysis, Mahler’s tempestuous relationship with his wife, Tchaikovsky’s repressed homosexuality) which affect the style of their music so much and Russell understands that to present one the other must follow. This essay will attempt to prove this theory through the examination of three of Russell’s composer pieces; Delius: A Song of Summer, Mahler and The Music Lovers.

Within a decade of A Song of Summer Russell had certainly paid no heed to Delius’ above advice having committed himself to depicting the lives of these ‘immortals’, which is an ironic description of his subjects (like Delius, both Mahler and Tchaikovsky died notably painful deaths). Russell delves deep into the flaws of his composers in order to explain their works. His passion for their music inspired a need to depict its creation. It was his work for Monitor, a BBC documentary series that focused on the arts, which versed him in the methods that he would continue to use throughout his career. Russell became a renowned controversialist for his depictions of his subjects, and for the last twenty years of his career he has been virtually unbankable. His avant-garde approach to televised documentary filmmaking reached its peak with The Dance of the Seven Veils, his final film for the BBC; a banned biopic of Richard Strauss. Through each of his subjects Russell finds a spiritual connection between them and his Romantic inner self often using the plight of his subjects as a means of reflecting his own anxieties. If he found Delius to be a second-rate musician then he despised Strauss and used his final BBC production to exaggerate his disillusionment with the new documentary system through his detestable subject. ‘All his [Russell’s] bitterness was poured out on Richard Strauss’, Russell hated Strauss’s claims that he was apolitical whilst snuggling up to the Nazis (he was appointed President of the Reichsmusikkammer) not to mention his narcissistic symphonies written about himself, and this bitterness expressed Russell’s irritation ‘with the romantic haze that had fallen over dramatised TV documentary since his defection to the cinema’. The film serves to ‘emphasise Russell’s discomfort at working with the loose but nevertheless restrictive BBC structure’ It is unsurprising then that Dance of the Seven Veils was not only prefaced with a disclaimer but shown only once on British television. Primarily, this is due to the Strauss estate’s withdrawal of copyright leaving Russell without an integral soundtrack for his film but secondly too, it must at least be suggested, because of the comparisons drawn between the BBC and the NSDAP. 

Before delving further into the structure of A Song of Summer it is important to draw comparisons between these two very different approaches to biopic and adaptation, without want of focusing too heavily on Dance of the Seven Veils, in order to explore the effect that the style and the subject matter has upon the films in question. With A Song of Summer often described as one of the greatest documentaries ever made and Dance of the Seven Veils being Russell’s final film for the BBC after he became disenamoured with the state of the televised documentaries, it would seem appropriate to analyse these two together .

According to Joseph Gomez, speaking of Delius: A Song of Summer, ‘the film depends first and foremost on Fenby’s memoir and one must begin any analysis of the film with the consideration of the book’. Promisingly, this suggests an influence upon the film away from style but instead on the subject of Fenby’s relationship with the dying composer. As previously mentioned, Russell was relatively disinterested with early ideas surrounding Delius as a subject but after having read Delius as I knew him he realised that the story he really wanted to tell was that of Eric Fenby’s sacrifice and selflessness as Delius’s amanuensis.  Thus early investigation leads to the belief that subject takes precedent over a stylistic influence from the eponymous composer.

Russell’s main reason behind portraying Richard Strauss’s life was as an attack both on the composer’s false claims of apoliticism during the years of the Nazi regime and this idea ‘that you could just dress people up in old clothes and it would suddenly be “real”’.  At one point in the film he takes this idea and applies it to his protagonist by placing a mask ‘of subservient old age’ on Strauss for the duration of his time in England after the war. It is in this mask that Strauss recounts his side of the story, proclaiming innocence and ignorance to the Final Solution. This notion that Strauss’s lies can be taken as sacrosanct whilst he wears what are effectively ‘old clothes’ is what connects the modern documentary to the composer in Russell’s eyes.  However, in Dance of the Seven Veils it is obvious that both form and content are connected. Russell evokes Strauss’s ‘bombastic’ music and uses it to soundtrack the composer’s egocentricity. Russell was also criticised for the dialogue that he gave to his protagonist but the director insists that any lines spoken by Strauss in Dance of the Seven Veils are verbatim of the composer’s own words. This is why Russell controversially credits Richard Strauss as one of three writers of the film. It is David A. Cook who notes ‘as in all of his [Russell’s] best work […] the line between reality and fantasy is not simply blurred, but destroyed’. This is a severe, and unfortunately frequent, misinterpretation of Ken Russell’s approach. In the same breath as his above criticism on the modern documentary, the director continues:

I wanted to dress people up in clothes and do it in a totally unreal way, but make it more real than ever.

It is Cook’s opinion that shall be applied and scrutinised in relation to the films under analysis in this essay as it is often the avant-garde style of Russell’s documentaries and biopics that led him to become victim to heavy criticism. Russell’s attempts to make his films ‘more real than ever’ are misunderstood solely because of his unconventional use of symbolism within biopics sacrificing detailed realism for a more exciting representation of events. It is important to address Dance of the Seven Veils in relation to the three films in focus because it documents Russell’s transition from documentary to cinema, it is preemptive of Mahler and The Music Lovers and it is one of the first examples of his work to explore reality through fantasy.

                Song of Summer is Russell’s most faithful adaptation despite a few minor changes from the original text. As previously mentioned, his connection to Delius was not through the composer’s music but instead the story of his final years with Eric Fenby as his amanuensis and this is heavily focused upon within the film. There is a tradition of the Russell biopic to present the subject through the relationships of the protagonists and how their work is affected by these bonds and never more prominently than in Song of Summer.  It is here that that the composer’s life is witnessed both by Delius himself and those around him, namely Fenby and Delius’ wife, Jelka. It is this connection between the three of them and the ultimate sacrifice of Fenby’s own aspirations that inspired Russell to make this film.

                Eric Fenby, a quiet, devout Catholic Yorkshire man became Delius’ amanuensis after writing to him offering to help him in finishing his work, which, since the onset of blindness and paralysis, he had been unable to complete. Fenby’s only experience in composition had improvising on the piano at the local cinema to Laurel and Hardy films. His five years working with Delius both created and destroyed him and Delius’ final pieces  can be claimed to belong as much to Fenby as they do to Delius himself. Fenby’s command of the work of other composers was so great that he gathered praised not only from Delius, but also Sir Thomas Beecham and even one of favourites, Elgar, who ‘adored the youngster’ claiming ‘”[t]he way that boy plays my concerto is amazing”’. Effectively, it was the isolation of Grez-sur-Loing and the length of time spent with Delius that left him consumed solely by the man’s music and unable to connect with his friends back in England leading to a nervous breakdown. 

                With such a sensitive subject Russell understood the need for decorum knowing that the use of fantastic symbolism or metaphor, the kind of which we see in his aforementioned later films, was unnecessary. This is not to say that Russell shies away from the use of metaphor in Song of Summer. In fact, as Gomez makes clear,  Russell uses the ‘physical paralysis of Delius […] to suggest the effect of the Grez experience on Fenby’s psychological condition.’ Russell combines the two subjects, using one to expose the other, thus presenting the true story behind the film (the idea of which, using metaphor, symbolism and/or allegory to depict true events, will be explored in finer detail later in the essay). Here the style of the film is essentially determined by the character. As Russell states:

Each film should have its own style, a style demanded by the subject […] On Song of Summer, for instance, we shot the film with very high contrast. Delius was a hard character who talked in very black and white terms. Everything was good or everything was bad so the environment had to be contrasty.                                                        

Russell’s use of contrast depicts Delius schizophrenically. In one scene the ailing musician, his wife and Eric are seated listening to a recording of Delius’ The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet. Delius is positioned in such a way that the half of his body is consumed by darkness. This contrast, combined with the music presents a dual personality within Delius. There is Delius the Man and Delius the Composer, which is very important to the film in the same way that it is important in Fenby’s memoir.

Fenby is often critical of Delius in his book, sometimes in terms of his personal opinions and sometimes in terms of his music which both, according to Fenby, correlate. This idea of Delius as the man and Delius the composer arises from Fenby’s devout Catholicism and Delius’ atheism. Fenby’s religion is indisputably more subtle at face value in Russell’s film than it is in the book as Fenby’s Christian beliefs are only present for a fraction of the film. However, in Delius as I knew him Fenby’s praise of God is a recurrent and predominant theme and is used to criticise Delius’ work as in Fenby’s eyes ‘music is of all the arts the one and only art that can give expression to the mystery of heavenly things’ and the amanuensis certainly believed that if Delius was a man of faith then he would have excelled in creating music so heavenly that it would ‘demand rare qualities in the mind and disposition in the soul of the creator’. Instead Delius was drawn to the philosophy and atheism of Nietzsche whilst maintaining the same pagan attitudes of his youth. He bore a great love for nature into which he would often retire for weeks in his earlier years and this pantheism can be found immediately by their titles. Song of Summer, Song of Sunset, Summer Garden, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring etc. Delius obviously shared a Wordsworthian affinity with nature.

On one hand, Russell’s own connection with this Romanticism creates a pathway of mutual interest between Delius and himself allowing the director to understand what should be the appropriate style of the film. However, Russell’s connection is closer to Fenby and their shared Catholicism. Ken Russell describes Song of Summer as being:

[T]he most Catholic film I’ve ever done. Fenby was a newly converted catholic when he volunteered to help Delius and he sacrificed himself, his life and his future for an ideal and a talent he thought greater than his own. Sacrifice is the central pivot of the Catholic faith and one of the best things about it […] that is the story of Song of Summer: how a man sacrificed himself for another. He [Fenby] feels he could have been a great composer today if Delius hadn’t sapped his talent and his life.

By analysing A Song of Summer as a Catholic film it becomes apparent that the story is as much about the distance between the two protagonists as it is about their fusion and how essentially they were brought together by a higher purpose; the need to finish the last works of a genius. On his first tour of the house, Fenby is guided through the rooms laden with the nude art of Edward Munch. This art, combined with the stories told by the composer about his time spent in Florida as they listen to a record of The Revelers’ Ol’ Man River, is as far as Russell goes into alluding to the story he previously rejected about Delius’ youth but what creates a powerful and preemptive sense of the composer’s personality is a quick glimpse of a framed sketch of Delius’ great inspirer, Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche is important to Fenby’s story because of the clashes that arose from his philosophy, adopted by Delius, with Fenby’s devout faith. Yet this musical connection surpasses the fickle jibes inflicted upon Fenby for his belief as without his amanuensis the composer would be helpless. Fenby draws on this dependence up until the very end of his memoir in his description of the events preceding Delius’ death and how he ‘prayed that God would forgive us our sins and receive his soul’. 

With A Song of Summer the viewer at least can see that the style has not entirely been determined or influenced by the  composer’s works. Though throughout his life Delius maintained a strong distaste for English music, his own works have often been thought to bear the qualities of the English pastoral. This adds to the idea of contrast in the film and the director’s occasional use of landscape refers back to the supposed style of the composer. Interestingly, Fenby claims that Delius’ music ‘has no style. […] No music is more difficult to interpret convincingly, or requires more rehearsal, than the music of Delius, and no music sounds duller when it is badly played.’ With this in mind it seems appropriate that Russell should avoid addressing the Delius-Fenby story through the composer’s music and instead focus on detailing the events of the composer’s final years accurately and respectfully.

This is an extract from an essay by Daniel Dawson on the effects of the styles of Russell’s chosen composers upon his approach to the biopic. Daniel Dawson is happy, his signed Ken Russell Delius: Song of Summer arrived with the post this morning.