Rock on, Shostakovich, Handel, Ravel: lives of great composers hit the screens
Dalya Alberge www.theguardian.com dalya-alberge
Torment, rebellion and tragedy are major themes as a rash of new biopics highlight the achievements and challenges of the musically gifted
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the Guardian
After the recent success of biopics about pop and rock legends including Elvis, Freddie Mercury and Bob Marley, film-makers are now finding inspiration in the troubled and tragic lives of classical music’s greatest composers.

Almost 40 years after Miloš For­man’s Amadeus won eight Oscars, a remake of the fictionalised Mozart drama about genius and jealousy is planned as a major television series starring Paul Bettany. Meanwhile feature films are being made about Dmitri Shostakovich, George Frideric Han­del, Richard Wagner and Joseph Bologne. Boléro, a film about French composer Maurice Ravel, had its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year.

The projects follow the Oscar-nominated Maestro, released 18 months ago, in which Bradley Cooper portrayed Leonard Bernstein, the composer and conductor.

Christopher Hampton, who won Oscars for Dangerous Liaisons and The Father, has written the screenplay for a new feature film about Shostakovich. Asked why so many film-makers are now looking at the lives of classical composers, he said: “Maybe the film Maestro fed into this a bit. Maybe it made people think you can make such films.

“Financiers are naturally suspicious about anything to do with art. But composers often do lead very interesting lives. It’s not like writing about writers, which is really difficult, as you watch them with a pen and a bit of paper.”

Hampton has written the screenplay for The Noise of Time, based on Julian Barnes’s novel, a fictionalised retelling of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin that was described by the Observer as a “masterpiece”. Its story brings out the torment experienced by Shostakovich who, like all Soviet composers, was required to compose music that embraced the ideals of patriotism for ‘Mother Russia’. With the state watching his every move, he fell foul of the regime.

He said: “The unique thing about him was that he … chose to stay, rather than becoming an émigré like all the rest of them. So the story is about an artist trying to work out ways to maintain his integrity while doing what he was told.”

Hampton, who is rehearsing his latest play, Visit From An Unknown Woman, an adaptation of a Stefan Zweig short story, which will have its English-language premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in north London later this month added: “[Shostakovich] was the adored wunderkind of Russia but, after the act II interval of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – which had been a huge success – he looked up at the box and Stalin and the politburo had not come back. Three days later, he was denounced in Pravda.

“The rest of his life was a misery … They wouldn’t even give him enough paper. Composers used to have to be issued composition paper from the composers’ union. He turned up one year and they gave him a tenth of what [he] was used to.”

The film, directed by Jan Komasa, will reflect that, despite tragedy and oppression, Shostakovich could never suppress his humour, Hampton said. “He used to make a toast every New Year’s Eve saying: let’s drink in the hope that things will not get better.” August Diehl, whose acclaimed films include Terrence Malick’s wartime drama A Hidden Life, has been cast as the composer. Andrea Riseborough, who received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of an alcoholic single mother in To Leslie, will play his wife, Nita.

A film about Handel, entitled The King of Covent Garden, will star Oscar-winner Sir Anthony Hopkins as the German-born son of a surgeon who became a British citizen in 1727, and is scheduled for release late next year.

Its story is set during the period that he worked on his choral master­piece Messiah. The film-makers describe it as “a powerfully majestic celebration of genius breaking all the rules”.

The Ravel film, Boléro, has been sold to 20 countries, while a UK distributor is yet to be found. Warner Classics has released an album of its soundtrack. It is directed and co-written by Anne Fontaine, with Raphaël Personnaz portraying Ravel and cele­brated French pianist Alexandre Tharaud playing “Ravel’s hands” and the piano parts heard in the film.

Fontaine wanted to discover Ravel through his “bewitching” 1928 composition Boléro. The composer himself once said: “I have composed only one masterpiece, and that is Boléro; unfortunately, it is devoid of music.”

Fontaine said: “How can we not feel empathy with this character who dislikes his own creation?”

While Sky is adapting Peter Shaf­fer’s award-winning stage play Ama­deus into a series starring Will Sharpe as Mozart and Paul Bettany as his fierce rival Salieri, US film-maker Solomon J LeFlore is developing a major movie about their contemporary, Joseph Bologne, who was born into slavery and went on to become a violin virtuoso and composer.

The son of a plantation owner and a teenage Senegalese enslaved woman, Bologne became a composer in Marie Antoinette’s court, wrote symphonies, concertos and string quartets – many lost during the French Revolution – and was described by the former US president John Adams as “the most accomplished man in Europe”. The film, Le Chevalier: Beauty and Betrayal, portrays him as a “transformational renaissance man and abolitionist, whose story is of such importance today, but whose name has long been neglected in western classical music tradition”, LeFlore said.

In the forthcoming Wagner in Ven­ice, writer-director Daniel Graham fictionalises the composer’s final months in his beloved Venice with his wife, Cosima, and her father, Franz Liszt.

Graham said: “It’s certainly true that we’re in the middle of a period of great interest in biopics of artists and musicians. Their lives defy the norm, exceed the possible, and therefore appeal to an audience wanting to celebrate this.”