The musical legacy of Ken Russell: composers' marble busts made flesh and blood

Robert Powell as Mahler in Ken Russell's 1974 film. Photograph: Alamy

The wild visual imagination of Ken Russell brought classical music to a whole new audience, and made his name notorious in respectable musical circles. His feature films about composers went straight for the jugular – sometimes almost literally, as in his blood-soaked Mahler. He loved the music, but he also loved the sex. He sold the idea of The Music Lovers on the basis that it was a story about a nymphomaniac who fell in love with a homosexual, and sure enough the film opens in a bedroom, with an unbridled romp between Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky and Christopher Gable as his lover.

 The Music Lovers (1970). Photograph: Rex Features

His films on Liszt, Debussy, Richard Strauss and Wagner all involved sexual fantasy, to the dismay and outrage of people who took the music rather more seriously. Each one made headlines, usually for the wrong reasons, and took liberties with the facts, and it was often hard to disentangle the musical message of his films from the scandal. Russell relished the fuss. He was set on turning composers' marble busts into flesh and blood, and paved the way for Peter Shaffer's Amadeus.
People sometimes look back wistfully to Russell's early work at the BBC, where he first made his name, under the fond illusion that, when he was making films for Monitor, he had not yet gone off the rails. His 1968 Delius film Song of Summer (in my view the best composer film he ever made) featured Max Adrian as the blind and paralysed composer, with Gable again as his gawky amanuensis, Eric Fenby. Even here there were telltale flashes of sexual fascination, with clerical groping in the church, or the supposition that Delius's wife had a lesbian relationship with Ida Gerhardi. But the sombre outcome of Delius's tertiary syphilis for some reason steered Russell away from the raunchy sex life that Delius had had as a younger man. Perhaps the ageing Fenby kept Russell's eye on the music.
Russell had first made his name six years earlier, with a drama-documentary on a composer who was then very much out of fashion: Edward Elgar. Narrated and supervised by the great Huw Wheldon, and produced by Humphrey Burton, this film quickly achieved iconic status and is still rightly regarded as a benchmark for any director who aspires to follow Russell in the music film world. Even here, though, Russell resisted the facts getting in the way of his visual imagination. There was no sex in his Elgar: with what we know now, perhaps there should have been. But he clearly relished the idea that Elgar spent some of his apprentice years as the conductor of the wind band at the Worcestershire County Asylum at Powick. So he created a typically grotesque sequence showing the players rehearsing with wild, distorted facial expressions (itself a convenient misconception of a mental hospital). He must surely have been aware that the original players were the asylum attendants, not its inmates.
Yet the opening scene, in which the boy Elgar rides a white pony on the Malvern Hills to the strains of the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, caught the imagination of a whole generation. It had little basis in fact, but it embodied the exhilaration of an English composer who broke free from the constraints of the Victorian oratorio and found his own musical language. When I embarked on my own film about Elgar two years ago, I found myself near the British Camp on the Malvern Hills, and was caught in Russell's spell. I felt compelled to re-create his vision of the boy on the white horse. As well as being a cinematographic feat at that time, in the way he filmed it, the combination of image and music was magical: indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, more than any other single factor, it triggered the Elgar revival, which has continued unabated to this day.