The orphanage orchestra that plays a pop tune for the Pope in “Gloria”

Classical music is often thought to have little place in today’s arts and culture scene, but filmmakers at the Berlinale can’t seem to get enough of it. Three films at this year’s festival have classical music as central plot elements, and two of the three are competing for the main Golden Bear gong.

In German director Matthias Glasner’s competition film “Sterben” (Dying), among the favourites to win the top prize, the emotionally detached conductor Tom Lunies (Lars Eidinger) is dealing with his ageing parents, one of whom is incontinent and the other of whom has dementia. His former wife is having a baby by a new lover but wants Tom to be the co-parent.

He also is having a difficult time rehearsing with a youth orchestra a new work by his depressive composer friend Bernard (Robert Gwisdek) who variously wants to revise the piece, scrap major elements or withdraw it altogether. “The whole thing is a huge banality,” one of Tom’s acquaintances tells him.

In the midst of this, Tom reconnects with his semi-estranged sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), a functioning alcoholic, amateur singer and dental assistant who is having an affair with her employer, Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld). Tom gives her tickets for the long-awaited premiere of Bernard’s piece, also called “Sterben”, at Berlin’s Philharmonie concert hall. Shortly after the piece begins, Ellen erupts in a fit of coughing and vomits on other patrons, causing a show-stopping disruption to rival Cate Blanchett’s violent attack on a conductor replacing her for a performance in the same concert hall in “Tár” (2022).

Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s “Seven Veils”, shown out of competition, focuses on theatre director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried ) as she revives a production of Richard Strauss’s steamy opera “Salome” that had been created by a former director who recently died and with whom she once had an affair.

In the opera, Herod, king of the Jews, lusts after his step-daughter Salome, and makes a devil’s bargain with her to dance the erotic “Dance of the Seven Veils”. She consents on condition she be granted one wish. That wish turns out to be the severed head of John the Baptist, who has refused her advances while he was alive, but whose bloody head she can kiss after his death.

The opera’s plot revives unpleasant memories for Jeanine of her own father’s out-of-line attentions to her as a child. He would take her to the woods and film her dancing, sitting on a swing or eating tangerines. The resulting home movies have the look of kiddie porn.

Jeanine tries to revise the opera as she sees fit, particularly by introducing some details she recalls from the films her father made of her, but she meets fierce resistance from the opera management team, headed by the former director’s widow.

To top it off, the German baritone who sings the role of John the Baptist (Michael Kupfer Radecky) makes a non-consensual pass at the young woman heading the opera company’s props department — casting a shadow over the production.

In the Italian-Swiss film “Gloria”, directed by Margherita Vicario, scullery maid Teresa (Galatea Bellugi) leads a rebellion by members of an all-female orchestra and choir in a girls’ orphanage near Venice in the early 19^th century. The choirmaster has a mental block when called upon to write a new piece for a visit by the Pope so the girls take over and produce what sounds more like a modern pop tune than a baroque mass. The rollicking finale should go down well with modern audiences but in the film the girls are all excommunicated.

So why is classical music seemingly having a moment, after already getting a lot of exposure in “Tár” and Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” bio-pic about conductor Leonard Bernstein?

“The experience of seeing live, symphonies and a live opera are transformative,” Egoyan said at a press conference. “And especially at this time, it’s amazing, that human beings can just do something together, which is so beautiful…And so I think a lot of the younger people are actually connecting to the phenomenon of live music, live classical music.”

Of course, the music in all three films is recorded so Canadian soprano Ambur Braid, who sings the role of Salome in Egoyan’s film, suggested a next step for anyone who wants their classical music straight up..

“The beauty of opera is the unamplified voices,” she said. “We can just go direct into that (the listener’s) bone structure in order to make you cry and do all sorts of fun things.”

By Michael Roddy