The Music Lovers

“The music lover. He had a love of life. But was torn by it. He reached out for the sensual. And was burned by it. His genius demanded a price. And he paid it.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) is a celebrated composer and teacher in nineteenth-century Russia who is struggling against his own desires. He marries Nina Milyukova (Glenda Jackson), a young woman he cannot satisfy, and the union is a bad idea from the first. Ken Russell takes Tchaikovsky's letters as his source and treats the music as the only place a man like this can say what he feels.