KEN RUSSELL PRESENTS!

Delius: A Moment with Venus

AND

Elgar: The Erotic Variations

and his new exhibition of photographs - Lost London Rediscovered is showing at Proud Galleries

Ken Russell is one of the most original, vibrant and groundbreaking film and television directors of the recent era. His finest films such as Women in Love, The Music Lovers and The Devils are milestones in film history. A true visionary, Russell’s work – invariably involving a very liberal treatment of sexuality – has always struggled with censorship and controversy. Although he is remembered for the rock opera Tommy and recently directed an innovative production of ‘Madam Butterfly’, Russell started out making drama documentaries on the lives of the great composers for the BBC series Monitor in the late 1950s and early 60s. Classical music remains a passion and for the first time in these ‘novel-biographies’ he focuses a literary lens on the private lives of Beethoven, Brahms, Elgar and Delius – with no holds barred!

Admirers of Frederick Delius will be aware of Ken Russell's award-winning BBC dramatised documentary on the composer, A Song of Summer. Delius: A Moment with Venus offers a completely different approach in an attempt to convey something of the cantankerous composer's highly colourful life. Containing both real and speculative facts about Delius, the novel is also based on the private recollections of Russell's friend the late Eric Fenby. As Delius's loyal assistant Fenby sacrificed his composing career in order to further that of a talent he felt was far greater than his own. Much of this material may be new to readers, including the fact that Frederick Delius, a Yorkshireman, was actually baptised 'Fritz'.

Ken Russell's drama-documentary for the BBC arts programme Monitor bought Edward Elgar to the attention of thousands of viewers who until then had been totally unaware of his genius. Before the great Elgar revival, most critics had contrived to belittle his unique spirit, compassion and ability to capture the notion of 'Great Britishness'. The BBC account was a straightforward cradle-to-grave affair. The director followed it forty years later with a South Bank Show film that incorporated music associated with his wife and their friends. By their nature, the television films were highly pictorial with little opportunity to explore below the surface of a complex man with the persona of a Colonel Blimp and the passion of a Don Juan. In Elgar: The Erotic Variations, Ken Russell takes the opportunity to examine more closely the private man, revealed here in his long-time relationship with his mistress and muse Rosa Burley.

‘Russell’s investigative method is charmingly random and he prizes humorous controversy over verifiable truths. Were the opening chords of the Fifth Symphony prompted by a summons from fate? No, says Beethoven, it was the rent-collector at the door.

Russell grants himself the same poetic licence in his novella about Brahms’s affair with Clara Schumann. We first meet Brahms as an acolyte of Robert Schumann who hails the young prodigy in a news-paper review. ‘Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!’ Not that this deters Schumann from obliging Brahms to safeguard his litter of children while he and Clara go off to promote their musical careers. Then Robert abruptly goes mad and is bundled off to a clinic at Endenich where quack doctors try to cure his madness by rubbing his genitals in the guts of a freshly bisected lamb.

This scene is so bizarre and gruesomely hilarious that it seems pointless to question its validity. After Schumann’s death Brahms is free to consummate his love for Clara, but their affair is soon supplanted by Brahms’s desire for her young daughter, Elise.

The same pattern is followed by Elgar in The Erotic Variations. Having married a starchy minor aristocrat, he pursues a bevy of younger muses while propelling himself up the professional ladder and emerging as a pompous establishment grandee. At lunch with Frederick Delius, Elgar proposes a toast to English music. ‘What’s that?’ says Delius. ‘I’ve never heard any.’

Though blind and paralysed Delius is far more eccentric and likeable than Elgar. Living in exile in provincial France, the demanding composer keeps a gong at his side to summon footmen or dutiful womenfolk. Despite his immobility he even goes mountaineering, hoisted towards the summit by cursing admirers. Among these is Percy Grainger, who revives a rumour that Delius once seduced a 12-year-old girl who later died in childbirth. No evidence is given. ‘Maybe it’s true,’ shrugs Grainger, ‘maybe it’s just a vicious slur.’

Russell’s purpose in writing these saucy tales is not merely to assemble a slush pile of tittle-tattle but also to establish a genealogy of inspiration and to demonstrate that sex is one of the pre-eminent spurs to creativity. Yet one can’t entirely suppress the suspicion that Russell’s art is a substitute for action and that these sex-crammed fictions are a displacement activity for a director who in his 80th year bears a powerful resemblance to Old Father Saturn and who himself may be just as randy as his priapic batonistas.’ – Spectator