Ken Russell – The Music Lover – Music & Images – The Art Of Britain’s Greatest Filmmaker
Ken Russell never needed defending from the idea that he leaned too heavily on classical music. The accusation always said more about the accusers than about him. They were the sort of people who treated classical music like a fragile heirloom, something to be dusted and admired rather than handled. Russell was never going to handle anything gently. He listened to the music as if it were alive and then filmed the life he heard in it. That was the real shock – not the nudity, not the hysteria, not the colour. The shock was that he treated the canon as something with a heartbeat.
He understood the music with a kind of instinct that critics found unnerving. Russell didn’t demand his critics explained to him what he was ‘really’ doing. He trusted the music to carry its own meaning, and he trusted the audience to feel it. That confidence and trust are rare, and it unsettled people who liked their art mediated. It unnerved people who want the director to stand at the front of the room with a pointer and a list of approved interpretations.
The early films show this most clearly. Elgar, Debussy, Delius. These weren’t reverent portraits; they were attempts to get inside the music and see what it was hiding. Russell listened to Elgar’s Second Symphony and heard a world on the brink of collapse. He listened to the early works and heard something more complicated than pastoral nostalgia and whimsy. He listened to the man’s contradictions and let them shape the film. The booklet’s description of Elgar’s life as a mixture of landscapes, newsreels, and private longing is exactly the territory Russell worked in. He followed the music’s currents and let them take him where they wanted.
Debussy gave him a different kind of weather. The sleeve notes quote Russell saying that Debussy’s music evaporates the moment you try to explain it. He knew better than to explain; he let the music drift through the film like mist. He let it behave the way Debussy wrote it, with a kind of sensual indifference to clarity. The film lets Debussy set the temperature and works from there.
Delius is even more revealing. Eric Fenby’s recollection in the booklet of walking onto the set and hearing Max Adrian speak with the exact cadence of the man he knew is the sort of moment that tells you everything about Russell’s method. He listened for the emotional truth and built the film around it. The music in ‘Song of Summer’ isn’t background, it’s memory. It’s the thing that keeps pulling Fenby back into the past, whether he wants to go there or not.
As Russell moved into the larger, more operatic films, the same instinct carried through. ‘The Music Lovers’ isn’t a biography of Tchaikovsky, it’s a portrait of a man whose inner life is louder than anything happening around him. The music becomes the pressure he lives under, with Russell letting the orchestra speak the things Tchaikovsky can’t. Critics complained about excess, as if Tchaikovsky had ever been a composer of restraint, which speaks volumes about how much the critics were blagging it about music, let alone film.
Mahler takes this further, with Russell using the symphonies as a map of the composer’s psyche. He isn’t interested in the official story, he’s digging into the mental turmoil and anguish. He’s interested in the way Mahler’s music tries to contain the whole world and then buckles under the weight of it. The booklet’s assertion about the film being a total statement rather than a tidy biography is exactly right. Russell wasn’t aiming to give you a potted bio, he was stretching the flayed skin out so he could wear it.
‘Savage Messiah’ shows the same instinct in a different register. Russell talks in the booklet about Gaudier’s life as proof that art is hard work, misery, and the occasional moment of transcendence. The music he uses there isn’t ornamental – Scriabin’s feverish harmonies and Debussy’s drifting lines are part of the argument. They show the intensity Gaudier lived with and the cost of creation. They show the way art can consume a person long before it rewards them.
There’s also a whole strand of Russell’s musical thinking that sits outside this collection, and it follows the same instincts even when the material shifts. ‘The Devils’ is the clearest example. Peter Maxwell Davies gives the film a sound that feels carved out of stone and bone, something ritualistic and abrasive, and Russell treats it as the film’s nervous system rather than its soundtrack. ‘Gothic’ goes in the opposite direction with its synths and electronic pulses, yet it’s driven by the same belief that music should unsettle the air around the characters. ‘Tommy’ and ‘Lisztomania’ take the idea further by letting rock music behave with the same unruly force as Mahler or Tchaikovsky. Russell never changed his approach. He simply changed the instruments. Whether it was The Who, Maxwell Davies, or a bank of 80s electronics, he used music as a way of getting under the skin of the story. The style shifts, but the mentality doesn’t. He always wanted the music to be the thing that told the truth first.
The idea that he relied too heavily on classical music also ignores the way he used popular music with the same intensity. ‘Women in Love’ has that fragile recording of ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ drifting through it like a ghost of the Edwardian world that’s about to vanish. ‘Gothic’ uses synths and sound design to create a sense of dread that has nothing to do with the concert hall. Russell wasn’t a purist, and despite the accusations, ee wasn’t a snob. He used whatever music told the truth.
The booklet, intentionally or not, keeps circling the same point. Russell trusted the music because he understood it, and that understanding ran deeper than style or period. You can feel it in the way the Elgar pages lean into instinct, in the way the Debussy section talks about sensuality without trying to pin anything down, in the way the Delius material keeps drifting back to memory and the strange pull it has on people who think they’ve moved on. ‘Savage Messiah’ brings in the grind and cost of creation, while the Mahler pages dig into the psychological weather that sits behind the symphonies. Taken together, the tone isn’t that of a director sheltering behind the music. It’s someone using it to get at the things people rarely say out loud, the things that sit under the surface and shape everything anyway.
Russell approached music as a living force, something capable of embarrassment, revelation, and the occasional slap. His films behave accordingly. They fidget, they flare up, they refuse to sit still, and they trust the audience to feel their way through without being nudged or instructed. That confidence in the viewer, and in the music, is what gives the work its charge.
Does this work as an album? By which I mean, can you listen to this and instantly see the film in your mind? For me, no. I went back and watched the films, and the music works perfectly, but I don’t now, for whatever reason, instantly hear Mahler and associate it with Russell’s film in the same way that Beethoven might make me think of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. This is more than likely my failing and in no way diminishes how this set lands the logic of his choices, even if it often tied his critics in knots.
Daz Lawrence
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