Music & Letters, Vol. 94 No. 1, ß The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/ml/gct038, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org ‘WHAT NEVER WAS HAS ENDED’: BACH, BERGMAN, AND THE BEATLES IN CHRISTOPHER MU « NCH’S ‘THE HOURS AND TIMES’ BY CARLO CENCIARELLI* This is very melancholic music ... it is not quite the Beatles, is it? CHRISTOPHER MU « NCH’S The Hours and Times (1991) is a strange rock biopic. It writes against the overwhelmingly heterosexual credentials of the Beatles by imagining an at- traction between John Lennon and their manager Brian Epstein; it models parts of its scenario on Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963); and it ignores completely the Beatles’ music, featuring instead a flamenco guitar solo and Bach’s Goldberg Variations , the latter motivated by the use of the Goldberg in Bergman’s film. In what follows I explore two aspects of this peculiar assemblage. I will suggest that The Hours and Times can tell us something about the afterlife of Bach, in particular the role of Bergman in shaping his music’s cinematic appropriation. And I aim to show how Bach, via Bergman, becomes enmeshed in the strategies of appropriation and revision of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’, becoming part of the film’s reinvention of the Beatles story. Uncovering this particular intricate strand in the cultural meaning of the Goldberg Variations has broader musicological implications. It means engaging with the specific patterns that regulate the cinema as a context for musical reception, excavating Bach’s screen history and tracing his role in the densely intertextual nature of contemporary film. This takes us beyond the familiar tropes of Bach’s popular reception. The Hours and Times acts as a reminder that the appropriation of Western art music is a complex, composite phenomenon, offering an opportunity to think through less explored ramifications in Bach’s late twentieth-century meanings. THE TIMES OF NEW QUEER CINEMA The label New Queer Cinema indicates a corpus of American independent films produced in the early nineties by queer-identified directors: a corpus sharing a defiant attitude to the representation of non-straight sexual identities. Mu« nch’s The Hours and Times was greeted by critics as one of the cornerstones of this ‘queer new wave’, serving as a paradigm of its themes, strategies, and political aims. 1 In accordance with *Royal Holloway, University of London. Email: carlo.cenciarelli@rhul.ac.uk. Thanks go to Jane Brandon, Matthew Head, Miguel Mera, Roger Parker, and FloraWillson for their comments on various drafts of this article, and to the AHRC for funding my Ph.D. research into the cinematic appropriation of Bach’s music (Ref. 2006/126695/ King’s College London). The epigraph is from David Angus (actor impersonating Brian Epstein in The Hours and Times) commenting on the presence of Bach in the film. Audio commentary to the VDI Entertainment DVD of The Hours and Times, VDI0011. 1 The term New Queer Cinema was coined by film critic Ruby Rich. See Ruby Rich, ‘New Queer Cinema’, in Michele Aaron (ed.), New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh, 2004), 15^35. Rich identified the ‘four 119 by guest on May 31, 2013 http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from