Vojtěch Dyk: Last News

The Czech composer who inspired Mozart is the subject of Il Boemo, a handsome period biopic that premiered in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Written and directed by Petr Vaclav (Marian), it’s an entertaining insight into Josef Mysliveček’s music and his hedonistic lifestyle, with an operatic running time of 140 minutes. While the film is mostly in Italian, it’s the Czech entry for the International Feature race at the Academy Awards and should attract an audience of mature music lovers.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the height of his career, Czech-born composer Josef Mysliveček was the most prolific and sought-after figure in Italian opera, bound for immortal celebrity. Nearly three centuries later, his name isn’t forgotten to classical music scholars, but neither does it have anything approaching household status; the facts and records of his personal life, meanwhile, have largely been lost to history. Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic “Il Boemo” seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.