This is a worthy, efficiently directed and well acted biopic but deadly dull despite being a heavily fictionalised account often bordering on old-fashioned melodrama. It concentrates, as the title implies, almost exclusively on the love affairs of the composer, which resemble the love affairs of almost anyone else in his situation (privileged but socially subordinate), and, although Fritz Kortner certainly looks the part, we get very little sense of the greatness of the artist. It was not the first major biopic of a composer that had been produced in the German-speaking world and the earlier film, Richard Wagner 1913, directed by Carl Froelich, is actually a great deal better.
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