"What Never Was Has Ended": Bach, Bergman and the Beatles in Christopher Münch’s 'The Hours and Times'

Cenciarelli, Carlo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7162-9509 2013. "What Never Was Has Ended": Bach, Bergman and the Beatles in Christopher Münch’s 'The Hours and Times'. Music and Letters 94 (1) , pp. 119-137. 10.1093/ml/gct038

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Abstract

This article focuses on the use of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in Christopher Münch’s The Hours and Times (1991), a pioneering example of New Queer Cinema that takes as its subject matter a trip made by John Lennon and Brian Epstein to Barcelona, infusing it with homoerotic overtones. I unpick the particular cultural mediations at work in this strange assemblage of eighteenth-century keyboard music, 1960s rock icons, and late twentieth-century identity politics. This leads me to explore Glenn Gould’s post-war popularization of the Goldberg, a metaphorical connection between Bach’s music and Barcelona’s distinctive architecture, and, first and foremost, the emergence of the ‘act of listening to Bach’ as a trope in Ingmar Bergman’s cinema. I show how Münch draws on Bach, and particularly on Bergman’s use of the Goldberg Variations in The Silence (1963), to provide a reading of the Beatles’ story that attempts to be sensitive to the elusiveness of time and gender.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Music
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0027-4224
Related URLs:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ml/gct038
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2022 10:08
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/76883

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