Music History

The Red Violin and Music History

The movie, ‘ The Red Violin’, takes us though the history of music. It starts out in 1681 in Cremona during the Baroque era. The violin then travels to Vienna in 1793, the beginning of the Classical era. The story continues in Oxford, in the late 1890’s, where a talented composer owns the red violin. The violin is then in Shanghai during the Chinese Communist party movement which forbids Western music. The story ends in Montreal, during an auction for the red violin, in which a man switches the violin with a copy to give the original to his daughter as a gift. The plot of the movie takes us through what we learned about the history of music as well.

The story begins in Cremona, where a violinmaker and his wife are expecting a child. Bussotti had made many violins, but only considers this one (the one he’s making for his future son) a masterpiece. Anna, his wife, and the child die in childbirth because of her age, and Bussotti is extremely distraught. Bussotti uses his wife’s blood in the varnish to paint the violin giving it its red color. This compares a lot to what we read about Stradivarius violins and the amount of emotion and the dedication a violinmaker can put into a violin and make it a masterpiece.

The red violin is then donated to a German orphanage where a child prodigy is given the violin and impresses the monks enough to get a violin instructor, Poussin to come and adopt him. Poussin needs the child to make money because him and his wife are not well off financially, so he puts an enormous amount of pressure on the boy and has the boy, Weiss practice his piece slowly to then increase the tempo and play extremely fast. The strict amount of work that Poussin puts on the child leads to a heart defect and eventually leads to his death during the audition of a lifetime. This story reminds me a lot of what we learned about Mozart and how his father made him travel Europe as a child prodigy and how he eventually became one of the greatest classical musicians. The child played classical music very well, and the piece he played was very proper and orderly.

The violin ends up with grave-robber gypsies but Frederick Pope offers a place for the gypsies to live to own the violin. He is one of the greatest composers of his time, but he needs sex to inspire his compositions. This definitely brings in the era of Romanticism and ironically, the romance of Frederick and Victoria is the main idea of this part of the film. When Victoria is in Russia getting inspiration for her novel, Frederick cheats on her with a gypsy and Victoria returns and blames the violin for ruining their relationship and making Frederick cheat. These ideas are totally coinciding with the Romantic era of music.

Next, the red violin ends up in Shanghai in the late 1960’s during the Communist Party Revolution. It is forbidden for foreign ideology and western music to be used. Xiang, one of the party members, goes to get rid of the red violin, a gift from her mother, but wanting to prove her loyalty to the State gives it to a man named Chou. We learned a lot about the Cultural Revolution reading Listen to This, and about how communism affected classical music in China. The instruments used in Chinese classical music are different, however, and the musicians only use 5 notes instead of 7.

The final part of ‘The Red Violin’ shows a man named Duval who is an appraiser and restorer to antique instruments. Duval tries to play it off that the violin is not worth much even though he knows it is worth over a million dollars, but doesn’t believe other people can appreciate it like himself so switches it with a copy and then takes the expensive red violin as a gift to his daughter. This is the rebirth of the red violin.

So throughout watching ‘The Red Violin’ I learned a lot about music history and could compare it to what we learned in Listen to This. Violinmaking and the baroque era were the main focus of the beginning of the movie. The violin then was owned by a child prodigy who died from the stress, unlike the real child prodigy Mozart, and Beethoven. The composer Frederick Pope and his need for sex to inspire music showed the Romantic era of music. We also learned about the Communist Cultural Revolution and how western music was forbidden and the stresses it led to. ‘The Red Violin’ matched what we have been learning about music history and put it in a more emotional and real aspect with the fictional story.