The Piano in the Movies

The genius of Tom Stoppard's film, Shakespeare in Love, is that it lets us in on the game, on the writing, the acting. We watch the audience watching the actors. We watch the lovers watching the roles they play. We watch the suitor watching his lost love love. We see the play through the eyes of the gangster money-lender, the nervous theater-owner, even the Queen of England. Their joy becomes ours. The film Shine revealed the stresses placed on musicians and humanized the struggle to master the impossible masterpieces. Amadeus not only humanized Mozart, the former province of the haughty, but exposed people to his music outside of the stultifying concert environment. The corny films of the 40's and 50's, such as Carnegie Hall, A Song To Remember (Cornel Wilde IS Chopin), Song Without End (Dirk Bogarde IS Liszt), Song of Love (Katherine Hepburn is maybe Clara Schumann), Song of Norway (Norway is Grieg), Rhapsody in Blue (Robert Alda is Gershwin, Levant is Levant), Humoresque (Levant is Levant), An American in Paris (Gene Kelly and Levant as artists) idolized musicians, preaching to the converted, immigrant European audiences hungry for the culture they had to flee.

    The Sixties saw the troubled pianist in Frank Perry's David and Lisa, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, and DeBroca's wonderful Le Cavaleur. And then there are the inexplicable and ineffable miracles: Diva (gangsters kill for an opera singer's master tapes, every soprano's fantasy), Impromptu (a witty romp in which Liszt and Chopin lay waste to music patrons on their summer vacation), and Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, the transcendent example of what a great director can do with a great composer. No one has done for the piano yet what The Red Violin did for the violin, unless it is The World of Henry Orient, which is I think Peter Sellars' best movie.