The Music Lovers The Music Lovers The Music Lovers is a 1971 British drama film directed by Ken Russell. The screenplay by Melvyn Bragg, based on "Beloved Friend", a collection of personal correspondence edited by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, focuses on the life and career of 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It was one of the director's biographical films about classical composers, which include "Elgar" (1962), "Delius: Song of Summer" (1968), "Mahler" (1974) and "Lisztomania" (1975), made from an often idiosyncratic standpoint. Much of the film is without dialogue and the story is presented in flashbacks, nightmares, and fantasy
Lisztomania a much stronger term in the 1840s, whereas in the 20th century "mania" could refer to something as mild as a new fashion craze. Lisztomania was considered by some a genuine contagious medical condition and critics recommended measures to immunize the public. Some critics of the day thought that Lisztomania, or "Liszt fever" as it was sometimes called, was mainly a reflection of the attitudes of Berliners and Northern Germans and that Southern German cities would not have such episodes of Lisztomania because of the difference in constitutions of the populace. As one report stated in a Munich paper in