Fran Magazine: Issue #6

Classical Music (MOVIE?) Hour (again)

This is Fran Magazine by Fran Hoepfner. This issue, on Ken Russell’s Tchaikovsky movie The Music Lovers, is for paid subscribers only. It is $40 for a calendar year or $5. Or you can continue to read the free issues every other week. As a reminder, this is the last week you can submit a letter to the editor (comments, thoughts, questions, concerns, complaints) to be published in next Tuesday’s free issue.

Behind the music

Let me explain the train of thought that brought me to the topic of this week’s issue of Fran Magazine. Everyone is always demanding a look inside the process and routines of geniuses, and lucky for you, I’m willing to be transparent about it.

Over the weekend, I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which I didn’t particularly like, which stars a woefully miscast Bradley Cooper. Real Coopheads (Stan-ley Coopers? I don’t even like him that much) are holding our collective breath for his next film that, like A Star is Born (2018), Cooper is writing and directing and starring in. This next film, shooting this spring and hopefully out next year, is, of course, Maestro, a biopic (?) of Leonard Bernstein. Now, here at Fran Magazine, we love Leonard Bernstein, we’re obsessed with him, we love the Young People’s Concerts, we love him getting frustrated with Jose Carreras, we love Seiji Ozawa talking about Lenny, and so on!

I’m nervous and anxious for Maestro, also knowing how it turns out won’t really matter in the grand scheme of my life, but I have great affection for Bernstein and have since I was a kid, and we also don’t get a lot of classical music movies. We have Amadeus, sure, and though The Piano Teacher is about a dozen things before it’s about classical music, it’s still very much about classical music. We have whatever Mozart in the Jungle is (I still have never seen a second of this show, but I remember someone asking me back in 2015 if my Awl column was in association with it), but it’s a relatively esoteric topic. We’ve more recently had an opera movie than we have had a classical music movie? And yet we have at least six living Batmans.