Rated: M
Directed and Edited by: Janine Hosking
Produced by: Janine Hosking, Katey Grusovin, Trish Lake
Music Performed by: Geoffrey Tozer
Featuring: The Honourable Paul Keating, Richard Gill AO
I don’t know about you, but for me a film titled, The Eulogy does not sound like easy viewing. In this instance, though, the story behind the eulogy is so improbable that it has been described as sounding like, ‘A Story someone might have made up in a pub’.
The documentary opens as ex-prime minister Paul Keating delivers a fiery eulogy hailing classical pianist Geoffrey Tozer the musical prodigy Australia shunned. Keating is incensed and his eulogy is both an ode to the soaring beauty of Tozer’s music and an excoriating rebuke to a mediocre and mean-spirited arts establishment who shut him out. Keating lashes out at them as, ‘A cottage industry in nastiness’.
If Tozer was the extraordinary talent described by his peer, internationally lauded concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein, ‘Possibly the finest pianist of the twentieth century’, why has his memory been virtually expunged from the national consciousness? Music educator and conductor Richard Gill AO has set himself a mission to find out. Was Tozer a prodigy? And if he was, Gill asks:
‘What. Went. Wrong?’
The first hint that Tozer might be the virtuoso that Keating claims is a cutaway to a concert pianist in the opening scenes: fingers dance so lightly across the keys, releasing a rapturous cascade of music. Gill’s students listening in, describe the subtlety of the touch, every note in the performance ‘en pointe’, but none recognise the musician.
Gill’s search for the life story of this neglected artist begins in a trim and freshly painted backyard shed, a miniature museum as part of Tozer’s estate, filled with letters, journals, drawings and photographs. While, at the same time as he sifts through the artefacts, Gill also ponders the nature of genius. Speaking to his students, he notes: ‘Originally prodigy was linked to omens and the foretelling of monstrous events, but now it has come to mean a special gift.’
Certainly, Tozer’s genius was not difficult to identify in his early years. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest ever recipient ever of the Winston Churchill Fellowship and he made his debut on the international stage at the age of fifteen, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 15 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Although, by the time he was thirty two, Tozer was eking out an existence by teaching part-time at St Edmunds College in Canberra.
It was there that Paul Keating met and befriended him. Keating was at the St Edmunds Christmas recital to watch his son, but Tozer’s performance stole his breath away. Their meeting, the beginning of an enduring friendship, would eventually see a, ‘Prime Minister so passionately avenge the death of a musician’.
Not only does, The Eulogy offer a unique glimpse into the genesis of prodigy, Richard Gill’s quest contains all the ingredients of a decent mystery story, with Tozer’s playing a sublime counterpoint and his, Medtner Concerto Number One an epiphany for the senses.