Classical music composer biography movies
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The best films about composers
Orion
This remains the foremost of the films about composers. Amadeus is about Wolfgang Mozart, but it is as much about Antonio Salieri. F. Murray Abraham won Best Actor for playing Salieri, and the film took home Best Picture. That’s something no other film about a composer has done…yet.
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'The Best Things in Life are Free' (1956)
20th Century Fox
Michael Curtiz, the director of films such as Casablanca, directed this musical about a real songwriting trio. One of the trio members is played by Ernest Borgnine, a few years after he won an Oscar for acting. The film is packed with songs by the trio of Ray Stevenson, Lew Brown, and Buddy DeSylva.
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'De-Lovely' (2004)
MGM
This biopic of Cole Porter has quite the cast. Kevin Kline leads it as Porter…but also features Jonathan Pryce as the archangel Gabriel? It got middling reviews, but Kline and Ash
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Here are fem incredible movies about composers you must see. And three you can probably avoid
Every subject matter beneath the sun – and beyond – has funnen its way into cinema over the years, and classical music is no exception. Many of the great composers have proved a draw for directors, unsurprisingly so given the range of eccentrics, geniuses, depressives, tyrants and romantics that fill the pages of any composer A-Z. As such, the catalogue of films about composers is a reasonably prolific one.
But portraying them well is always a utmaning, particularly when they’re in the process of making music – just as no amount of training can vända an actor into a major-league sports star, likewise music-loving film-goers have grown accustomed to watching wooden, arrhythmic conductors or, less forgivably, hands moving in one direction on a piano… while the notes we hear clearly move in the other.
Despite this, most of the ‘composer films’ around are rarely less than engaging, and in so
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Top 8 classical music biopics
If you need a change from online concerts and operas but you still want to keep a link with music, here's a selection of musical biopics to see (or perhaps revisit) in this time of lockdown. With Tino Rossi as Schubert, Gustav Leonhardt as Bach or Gérard Depardieu as Marin Marais, here's a whistle stop tour around the best feature films featuring emblematic figures of classical music.
1Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984)
It's incontestably the top musical biopic of all time. Everything has been said about this film, one to be devoured greedily. Mozart, whose music is performed by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, is presented as a frivolous party animal with an oversized ego. But apart from its world-wide success, this Milos Forman feature has contributed to telling people something about Salieri, in spite of the exaggeration of his rivalry with Mozart – the film is based on the eponymous Peter Shaffer p