Impromptu: Love, God, and Chopin
As audiences eagerly await the opportunity to see “Maestro,” the upcoming Bernstein biopic in theaters, Ken decides to explore some other iconic classical music films.
Julian Sands and Hugh Grant portraying Liszt and Chopin in the 1991 film “Impromptu” (Hemdale Film Corporation)
I had hoped to blog a review of “Maestro,” the new Leonard Bernstein bioflick referenced in the previous blog, but it while it opened on the coasts Nov. 22, it won’t open here in Phoenix where I live until Dec. 1, so it must wait.
The movie got me thinking of some of the truly great movies of the past with historical or fictional classical musicians as their protagonists. The first to come to mind was “Impromptu,” the 1991 speculative story about George Sand’s obsession with Chopin. The characters are real – in addition to Chopin (played by High Grant) and George (Judy Davis), there are Chopin’s colleague Franz Liszt (Julian Sands), the poet Alfred de Musset (Mandy Patinkin), the painter Delacroix (Ralph Brown) and a slew of nobles, including the Comtesse d’Agoult (Bernadette Peters) and the Duchess d’Antan (Emma Thompson, on one of her earliest film roles).
It’s directed by James Lapine, who just a few years previous had directed Patinkin and Peters in the Stephen Sondheim musical, “Sunday in the Park with George,” another speculative piece about an artist, this time of the visual sort: Georges Seurat. Lapine also wrote the script for “Sunday,” but the author of the screenplay for “Impromptu” was Lapine’s wife, Sarah Kernochan. Kernochan’s previous experience was largely in documentary film, but in “Impromptu” she expanded easily into the balance of fact and fiction that makes for a good film script. Furthermore, she addresses the intoxicating blend of materialism and metaphysics that characterized the early 19th century. Everyone is apparently sleeping with everyone else at one time or another, but behind the pleasure impulse lies a barely hidden longing for the sudden absence of God (which is openly talked about) to be replaced by sexual love and, especially, art.
The story: George Sand, nee Aurora, is a woman in the man’s world of novel authorship. Given to falling madly in and out of love, George is overwhelmed by Chopin upon hearing him play, but the composer is elusive. (We won’t see Grant as Chopin until 27 minutes into the film.) She at last arranges to get invited to a rich noble family’s retreat where she has heard Chopin will be present. Kernochan’s script plays out the Old World vs. the New in the form of the tense relationship between the aristocracy and the Romantic artists they patronize. The New Yorker critic who reviewed “Impromptu” said the characters came off as cartoons, but cartoons that spoke the meaning of the age. That gets the feeling of it right.
It’s a film well worth the time of any musician, and along the way you get to hear a lot of Chopin’s music, a bit of Liszt’s, and – in a scene of pure, music-making joy – a portion of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 played in Czerny’s piano 4-hand arrangement by Chopin and Liszt. The opening theme of Chopin’s G-minor Ballade dominates much of the movie’s soundtrack, but the canniest use of Chopin’s music, to me, comes near the end, during a montage of Chopin and George together in various romantic scenes. It’s accompanied by the restrained beauty of a lesser-known Chopin Nocturne, Op. 15, No. 1 in F major -- a perfect accompaniment that is lovely and sincere, never cloying. Anything more heart-on-sleeve would’ve reduced the montage to sheer corniness.
“Impromptu” stands near the pinnacle of movies about classical musicians. Of course, the pinnacle itself is occupied by “Amadeus” (1984), the multiple-Oscar-winning adaptation of the play about Mozart and his nemesis, Salieri. That one is so well-known that we’ll pass on blogging about it. But while we wait for ”Maestro,” we’ll comment on another classical-music movie or two in upcoming entries. Warning: Not all of them are as worthy as “Impromptu.”
- Kenneth LaFave, 2023