It was a long holiday and a good time to watch films with classical music figuring in some parts of the musical scoring.
A cineaste notes that Dead Poets Society, A Clockwork Orange, and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit have one thing in common. Beethoven’s Ode To Joy can be heard in all of them.
In the French film Diva, the Catalani aria Ebben? neandro lontana (from La Wally) is practically the film’s centerpiece and it highlighted the “love affair” between a Black American diva (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez ) and a young French postman (Frédéric Andréi). Soprano Nelly Miricioiu sang the aria in her last performance at the Ayala Museum.
In another film, Black Swan, which is about a ballerina, the music of Tchaikovsky is prominent and the film won for actress Natalie Portman the Oscar best actress trophy.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now partly shot in the Philippines used Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre.
On the other hand, the film impact of Shine and Hilary & Jackie was revealing even among non-music aficionados. Perhaps one way to improve music education in this country is to expose both young and adult audiences to quality films revolving around the life of musicians.
If the themes of love, intrigue, and obsession are common, they are even more pronounced in the musical world.
Competition between voice teachers and their pupils reached absurd, if, comic, proportions in the Belgian film, The Music Teacher, directed by Gerard Corbiau. The battle of tenors in the film reminded me of real-life rivalry between sopranos who had the same colorful teacher.
Stage actress Baby Barredo—who once figured in the Pergolesi opera, La Serva Padrona—once told me that the reason she bolted the opera world and jumped into the theater without regrets was because she couldn’t stand the intrigues on the opera scene.
The subject of illicit love and labor unrest in the orchestra world were given satiric expression in Meeting Venus.
In the Regal Film Laro Sa Baga based on the novel of Edgardo Reyes, Chito Rono unmasked a matron’s artistic pretense by showing her making love to her favorite portrait painter (played by Carlos Morales) with Puccini’s Un bel di (from Madama Butterfly) playing in the background.
One fine film that didn’t quite make it to Manila was Music of the Heart about a violinist (Meryl Streep) who bravely introduced classical music to the public schools of Harlem where black parents didn’t want their children to “waste their time on the music of dead white men” (this line reminded me of what I heard in my island province when I brought classical artists in the island: what we need in our place are piggery projects and abaca livelihood projects – not classical music).
If Shine showcased the immense power of the piano, Hilary & Jackie certainly scored a lot of musical points for the relatively unpopular cello.
In Shine, Geoffrey Rush who played the role of the Australian piano prodigy, David Helfgott, won the Oscar for best actor and Emily Watson, who played the cellist, was nominated for the Oscar after an earlier Oscar nomination for another film, Breaking the Waves.
Anand Tucker’s Hilary & Jackie is about two musically gifted sisters, one a flutist played by Rachel Griffiths and the other, Jacqueline Du Pre, the celebrated English cellist, played in the movie by Emily Watson.
The movie has enough informative concert scenes to make the viewer curious about this musical instrument called the cello. There is one backstage scene after Du Pre’s Wigmore Hall debut when a rich admirer gifted her with a Stradivarius Davidoff (1712) cello, which costs more than a million US dollars.
The film also allowed non-music lovers to realize that the cello—though not as popular as the piano and the violin—is gaining more acceptance in the performances of Filipino cellists like Wilfredo Pasamba (he organized an all-cello ensemble at St. Scholastica’s College and is, in fact, the first cello graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, the first Filipina piano graduate of which was Rowena Arrieta), Ramon Bolipata, Renato Lucas and that brilliant scholar from the Philippine High School for the Arts, Victor Michael Coo, who won rousing cheers for his cello debut with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra under Rodel Colmenar.
Siegfred Helm, an authority on the cello, once commented that on the whole, Jacqueline Du Pre belongs to the distinguished group of Pablo Casals and Rostropovich who could make their instruments “sing.”
Dame Margot Fonteyn, also a frequent Manila visitor, was also portrayed in Hilary & Jackie as the one who gave Du Pre temporary shelter before her death in 1987.
The movie was based on the book, A Genius in the Family, written by Du Pre’s sister and brother, Hilary and Piers du Pre. Reviewer Michael Hartgraves (an avowed Du Pre-cello fan) writes, “This book could tarnish one’s image of Jacqueline Du Pre. There are family secrets that you may find painful to read. Think of how painful they must have been to write. Think of how painful they must have been to experience.”
In the movie, the most shocking sequence seen by Manila audiences was how Hilary, shared her husband with sister, Jackie, out of love.
But the most touching message of the film is the question: is there life after concertizing?
Jacqueline Du Pre-was a highly revered, world famous musician. But as the film showed, she was miserable in private life because she also longed for moments that have nothing to do with music – like loving moments with her sister, Hilary, and romping in the fields with her nephews and nieces. When Jackie noted that her sister was happy even without music because of a loving, caring husband, she wanted to share her happiness to the extent of asking her sister that her husband make love to her as well.
Even with audience adulation. Du Pre-was asking her equally famous husband and conductor, Daniel Barenboim: Will you still love me even if I stop playing well?
Of course, the most riveting element of the story is the overwhelming friendship of the two sisters even as, later, they would find themselves rivals in the field of music. She won acclaim as a cellist. The other didn’t do as well as a flutist. When Hilary told her sister, she is getting married, the following conversation ensued:
Jackie: Why are you marrying him? You don’t have to. You can have men and not be tied to them. Just use contraceptives (shows one to her). So, why are you marrying him?
Hilary: Because he makes me feel special?
After a pregnant pause, came the reply.
Jackie: The truth is, you are not special.
At some point in Du Pre’s career, she thought that music was unreal – that pianos and cellos are mere props for fame-and-fortune obsessed people. As Du Pre-once intimated with Rostropovich after the end of her master class in Moscow: “I’ve never been a career demon. I love playing cello, playing to the people, but I’ve never wanted to do it every day and every hour of my life.”
Will a film on musicians become a possibility in this country in the future:
The late filmmaker Marilou Diaz-Abaya, who cried after watching Hilary & Jackie in Germany, once told me one of the film projects she would like to do would likely revolve around the story of young musicians. One of the few ideas in her drawing board was a story about gifted children.
Said Abaya, “I am actually looking at the little lives at the National Arts Center in Mt. Makiling and I am asking the question: what is sacrifice in the altar of art when you have a special child?”
At one point in the mid-80s while Cecile Licad was making waves with her Rachmaninoff concerto, Abaya tried it but it was a case of too-much-too-soon. “We have to convince our producers that audiences would be interested in such a film,” she said.
Why would she do it at all?
The parting shot: “Because I am a frustrated musician and that’s the reason why I am finicky with the music in my films.”
But will the composite lives of Cecile Licad, Lea Salonga, Lisa Macuja Elizalde, Otoniel Gonzaga, Conchita Gaston and Zeneida Amador make sense to moviegoers of this generation?
With the relatively good acceptance of Shine and Hilary & Jackie, Abaya’s dream picture might yet come true in the hands of the new generation of filmmakers.