The best films about composers

This remains the foremost of the films about composers. Amadeus is about Wolfgang Mozart, but it is as much about Antonio Salieri. F. Murray Abraham won Best Actor for playing Salieri, and the film took home Best Picture. That’s something no other film about a composer has done…yet.

Michael Curtiz, the director of films such as Casablanca, directed this musical about a real songwriting trio. One of the trio members is played by Ernest Borgnine, a few years after he won an Oscar for acting. The film is packed with songs by the trio of Ray Stevenson, Lew Brown, and Buddy DeSylva.

This biopic of Cole Porter has quite the cast. Kevin Kline leads it as Porter…but also features Jonathan Pryce as the archangel Gabriel? It got middling reviews, but Kline and Ashley Judd got Golden Globes nominations, and the movie also won an AARP Movies for Grownups Award.

This Pre-Code Hollywood film is a bit of movie history. Why? Because it is the first movie to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together. They would become film royalty as a duo. However, neither of them is the star, and the lead role, the composer in the story, is played by Gene Raymond.

Gus Kahn became rich as a composer in the 1900s before losing it all in the stock market crash of 1929. This biopic features Danny Thomas as Gus and Doris Day as his wife, Grace. It also happens to be directed by Curtiz, as apparently he had a thing for making movies about composers.

This film is almost like Citizen Kane by way of Beethoven. The composer, not the giant dog that tormented Charles Grodin. Beethoven’s life is told in flashbacks, with Gary Oldman playing the legendary composer. Maybe you were made to watch this movie in a music class in the 1990s.

The author George Sand — the masculine pseudonym of Amantine Dupin — is the main character in Impromptu . However, the film is about her romantic pursuit of the composer Frederic Chopin. This is a romantic Eurocentric film from the 1990s, so you’d better believe that Chopin is played by Hugh Grant!

Sure, you could do a by-the-numbers biopic of Franz Liszt. Or, you could do what Ken Russell did and make a surreal film and cast a rock star in the lead. The same year he directed Tommy , Russell cast Roger Daltrey as Lizst. This movie is notable for featuring multiple composers in it beyond Liszt. Also, Ringo Starr was the Pope.

After years of playing gangsters, James Cagney went against form to stay as George Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. The film was a huge hit and a great success for Cagney. He won Best Actor for playing Cohan, showing that the gangster could be a song-and-dance man.

George Gershwin died tragically in 1937 at 38. This meant a few of his contemporaries could be in this biopic of him. That includes Al Jolson and Oscar Levant, the latter of whom dubbed all of Robert Alda’s piano playing in the role of Gershwin.

Not one, not two, but three German composers feature in Song of Love. The film focuses on a love triangle between Robert and Clara Schumann, as well as Johannes Brahms. Song of Love has quite the cast going for it, from Robert Walker to Paul Henreid to Katharine Hepburn.

This is not the best-known or best Billy Wilder film, but he rarely missteps. Also, Dean Martin is the lead in this silly sex comedy — a realm he was comfortable with. Ira Gershwin, George’s brother, resurrected a few unfinished songs that were included in the film. It was received as salacious in 1964 but is tame by current standards.

If Amadeus is the defining film about a real composer, Mr. Holland’s Opus is the defining film about a fictional composer. Maybe that’s because it is kind of a funny name to use as a reference. However, the movie also stars Richard Dreyfuss, nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards.

This is another Ken Russell film, and we could have included more. All in all, the music-loving director made five biopics about composers. Although, this film about Pyotr Tchaikovsky is a biopic in the loosest sense. Mainly, Russell uses the Russian composer’s music to soundtrack a weird little film. None other than Roger Ebert called it “an involved and garish private fantasy.”

This was the first biopic of Cole Porter, and this one was more of a commercial hit than De-Lovely. It also had a notable star. Cary Grant played Porter. Also, once again, Curtiz directed. Of course, this was 1946, so the story of Porter’s life had to be fairly fictionalized, partly because they could not comment on his sexuality in the movie.

Even if you aren’t a big fan of musicals or operas, you likely know the names Gilbert and Sullivan. Mike Leigh fictionalized a stretch of their lives for Topsy-Turvy. The story focuses on 15 months of their lives leading up to the debut of their opera, The Mikado. While the movie was a critical darling and got a lot of award love, it was a bit of a commercial flop.

This movie about Rogers and Hart is sort of the inverse of Flying Down to Rio. That was the first Astaire and Rogers movie. This was the final pairing of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. This film is loaded with notable names of the era, including guest appearances from Lena Horne, Mel Torme, and Gene Kelly.

Before it was an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Phantom of the Opera was adapted to screen multiple times. He even became a Universal monster. However, did you know the Phantom was also a violinist and a composer? And that Franz Lizst is a character in this particular adaptation? Claude Rains plays the Phantom in this adaptation, the only Universal monster movie to get Oscar nominations.

This is not a movie about a composer, but we decided to sneak it in here at the end. Saving Mr. Banks is about Walt Disney trying to get P.L. Travers to let him produce a movie version of Mary Poppins. Two of the key characters are the Sherman brothers, composers and songwriters responsible for many Disney songs (and also “It’s a Small World,” so it’s OK to hate them if you want).

A composer making a movie about a composer? It happened! Using his Hamilton cache, Lin-Manuel Miranda made his directorial film debut with Tick, Tick…Boom! The film is about composer Jonathan Larson, best known for his musical Rent . Andrew Garfield played Larson and got an Oscar nomination for it.