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In composer biopics, listening to music is as important a feature as composing and performing; it fulfils a multitude of narrative functions and deeply affects the films’ ideological construction of music. The chapter discusses twenty-six scenes from sixteen biopics about “classical” composers to map typical (and some untypical) ways of intradiegetic listening to music, differentiating between types of listeners (“general listeners,” mostly in concert settings; listeners with a personal relationship to the protagonists; other musicians as expert witnesses; the composers themselves) and different narrative functions and structures, such as different types of focalization. It also discusses basic features of the relationship between the extrafictional listening of audiences in the cinema to such intradiegetic listeners, as a springboard for further study of listening in musician biopics.

Der Artikel widmet sich erzahltheoretischen Perspektiven auf Musik im Film, die in der Forschung der letzten 30 Jahre eine grose, aber unsystematische Rolle gespielt haben. Um einen systematischeren Zugang zu gewinnen, fragt der Artikel zuerst, was es uberhaupt heist, eine Geschichte zu erzahlen, arbeitet dann sechs Spezifika des Geschichtenerzahlens im Film heraus (das Verhaltnis von Narration und Monstration; impersonale Erzahlung; externe Fokalisierung als Grundeinstellung; die Illusion von Unmittelbarkeit; das Verhaltnis von Kontinuitat und Diskontinuitat; das Mehrkanalige des Mediums) und untersucht dann in der Hauptsache, welche Rollen Musik im Rahmen dieser sechs Eigenarten filmischen Erzahlens spielen kann.

This article looks at the use of pre-existing pop songs in romantic comedies by production company Working Title (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary, Love Actually, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) and shows how, especially in Love Actually and the two Bridget Jones films, the characters themselves, but by implication and filmic design also the films, make use of these songs and ridicule them at the same time. This self-reflexive use of music is discussed on the background of the films' construction of Englishness, but also set in the context of the history of romantic comedies and their uses of self-reflexivity.

Composer biopics have received scant attention both from musical reception history and from film musicology, though they clearly are key sources for the popular reception of composers, and often are also laboratories for the use of pre-existing music in film. Composer biopics re-invent their subjects in the stories they tell; but they also re-invent them through their music – music which in such films is usually both part of the story told and of its telling. This article takes seven Mozart biopics from between 1940 and 2006 as examples of such musical (re)inventions, and studies typical techniques and effects of using Mozart's music to score stories of his life. The use of pre-existing pieces both as diegetic and nondiegetic music, and crucially in the transition from one to the other, is shown as a central aspect of the way the films capitalise on existing Mozart myths and feed them back into their own (re)constructions of Mozart, in the process becoming drivers in a (vicious or virtuous) circle.

Peter Thomas has managed to juxtapose the visual experience with equally strong acoustic effects. In his Astronautic sound1 he combines the rhythms of utopian technology with the romantic flair of a melodious music for the fairytales of the day after tomorrow.2

Just over 14 years went by between the end of the First World War and the Nazis' seizure of power, a short span for the high cultural repute Weimar culture has been accorded in twentieth-century popular and academic imagination – a repute particularly relevant to Berlin, which is still deriving much of its fragile self-confidence from that mythical decade. Opera is part and parcel of these images, but in a limited sense: we think of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the Golden Boys of the Golden Twenties, of Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) or Paul Hindemith's Neues vom Tage (1929); we think of the Kroll Opera and its controversial productions under the musical direction of Otto Klemperer; we think of a pointedly urban, sassy modernity. But it may be the range of personalities and events rather than any couleur locale that made Berlin such a musical hotbed at the time. There was the premiere of Alban Berg's Wozzeck in 1925; there were the antagonistic figures of Ferruccio Busoni and Hans Pfitzner, both teaching masterclasses at the Academy of Music since 1920; there was their superior, Academy director Franz Schreker, who had come from Vienna in the same year; there was Hindemith, who joined the Academy as a professor in 1927; there was Alexander Zemlinsky, who came from Prague in the same year to conduct at the Kroll Opera and taught from 1931 to 1933 at the Academy of Arts – composers with wildly different approaches to opera, embodying a disintegration of stylistic common ground that is the main characteristic of twentieth-century music.