I had two surpassingly strange obsessions as a teenage music lover: Anton Bruckner and Arnold Bax. And so, it turned out, did Ken Russell. I could hardly believe it when, after making his Bruckner film in 1990, The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner – a study of the Austrian composer's obsessive compulsive disorders, monastic seclusion and infatuation with young girls – Russell made a TV film a couple of years later about Bax, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, the biggest prime-time exposure this otherwise little-known English composer is probably ever going to get.
Russell himself played Bax, and Glenda Jackson took the role of one of Bax's lovers, the pianist Harriet Cohen (in fact one of her last acting jobs before devoting her life to politics). But the scene that's burned into my brain – as I remember it – is when Russell's Bax takes another woman, a dancer called Annie (played by Russell's then wife Hetty Baynes), down to the beach for a truly extraordinary erotic rendezvous. Sitting on a deckchair on the sand, Russell/Bax puts his tone-poem about the sensual power of the sea, The Garden of Fand, on a wind-up gramophone as his paramour cavorts in the sea, becoming the sea-siren that Bax's music celebrates. At the climax of the scene, with the underscore of Bax's most passionate music, composer and consort entwine in an encouplement that was more elephantine than elegant.
The Bax film probably isn't Russell's finest about music and musicians – his Delius, Mahler, and Elgar movies take pride of place in that pantheon – but it symbolised what I liked about his films so much: that he was unafraid of celebrating his eccentric musical obsessions, and that he tried to get inside the psychological and emotional realities of the composers whose music he loved.
Mere biographical fact isn't the point in either the Bruckner or the Bax films, but they were both insightful portrayals of composers whose stories were unfamiliar to most TV audiences. And I think there was more to Russell's casting of himself as Bax than the fact they were both men of a certain age who looked like devotees of a life well, and boozily, lived. They were both eccentric auteurs, both outside the mainstream, and both fantastical dreamers.
Every composer who Russell immortalised in celluloid has reason to be grateful to him, from Wagner to Martinu, Liszt to Tchaikovsky, Bruckner to Bax.
Read music documentary maker John Bridcut's analysis of Ken Russell's film scores and join the debate.
