When Leipzig pianist Kyra Steckeweh realized that her repertoire almost exclusively consisted of music composed by men, she began searching for pieces written by female composers. Her research in archives, libraries, and publishing houses quickly brought to light a variety of remarkable piano pieces that have been buried in history and rarely performed.
As Tobias, a young director, supposes that his girl-friend Ellen had an affair with his brother Markus, front man of "Hansen", one year ago, he decides to shoot a documentary about the band's next tour. When Ellen joins the project, everybody's emotions boil over, although they are observed all the time.
This documentary captures the overflowing energy and activity of one today's greatest composers, Philip Glass, and allows us to follow him from New York to London and from Paris to Boston. He speaks about his beginnings, his moving to Paris for two years of intensive study with Nadia Boulanger, his meeting with Indian musician Ravi Shankar and director Robert Wilson, who had a deep influence on his career. The film also shows him at work on the last details of his opera The Sound of a Voice, directed by Robert Woodruff and conducted by Alan Johnson. Éric Darmon's camera, with its poetic shots and original framings, takes us for a musical journey into seven months of the life of the composer who, rising from the underground scene of the seventies, brought on a revolution in modern theater.
Disciplined Italian composer Antonia Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Viennese composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Fifty years after his death, this musical and psychological portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams explores the passions that drove a giant of 20th-century English music.
Director helmut Dietls and Patric Susskinds illustrate a legendary story of two lovers who cant keep themselves away from death.
In 1965, passionate musician Glenn Holland takes a day job as a high school music teacher, convinced it's just a small obstacle on the road to his true calling: writing a historic opus. As the decades roll by with the composition unwritten but generations of students inspired through his teaching, Holland must redefine his life's purpose.
Lyla and Louis, a singer and a musician, fall in love, but are soon compelled to separate. Lyla is forced to give up her newborn but unknown to her, he grows up to become a musical genius.
Young Stanzi who is visiting Vienna helps a young corporal and musician to become famous for his marching song "Die Deutschmeister".
The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.
‘La course à l’abîme’ is a depiction of the final ride into hell from ‘La Damnation de Faust’ (1846) by Hector Berlioz.
A vacuum repairman moonlights as a street musician and hopes for his big break. One day a Czech immigrant, who earns a living selling flowers, approaches him with the news that she is also an aspiring singer-songwriter. The pair decide to collaborate, and the songs that they compose reflect the story of their blossoming love.
The lives of two struggling musicians, who happen to be brothers, inevitably change when they team up with a beautiful, up-and-coming singer.
An old timbal performer in a puppet theater has a secret past.
A successful songwriter, dazzled by high society, falls for a society girl who is just playing around.
A chronicle of the life of infamous classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven and his painful struggle with hearing loss. Following Beethoven's death in 1827, his assistant, Schindler, searches for an elusive woman referred to in the composer's love letters as "immortal beloved." As Schindler solves the mystery, a series of flashbacks reveal Beethoven's transformation from passionate young man to troubled musical genius.
A short documentary on Jerome Kern and the making of Till the Clouds Roll By.
A documentary by Tony Palmer on English composer Sir William Walton (1902–1983), made shortly before his death. The film includes the only full-length interview ever recorded with Walton. Filmed at his home on Ischia and in Oxford, London & Oldham, it includes contributions from Laurence Olivier, Sacheverell Sitwell and Lady Susana Walton. Specially performed extracts of his music are conducted by Simon Rattle in his first substantial contribution to television when he was in his early 20s, with Simon Preston, Julian Bream, Yvonne Kenny, Yehudi Menuhin, Iona Brown, John Shirley-Quirk, Elgar Howarth & Ralph Kirshbaum, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford & Los Paraguayos.
The heartbreaking but hopeful tale of Danny Kenny and Peggy Nash, two sweethearts who meet and struggle through their impoverished lives in New York City. When Peggy, hoping for something better in life for both of them, breaks off her engagement to Danny, he sets out to be a championship boxer, while she becomes a dancer paired with a sleazy partner. Will tragedy reunite the former lovers?
Could a brilliant composer's music actually be killing his loved ones? Eliseo can't help but believe it when his younger sister dies tragically and then his pianist Georgina suddenly dies on the piano. Completely traumatized, Eliseo is taken to a mental hospital where he can find escape only through music.
A composer goes to Devil's Island for killing his wife's lover, then writes an opera about it.