To Joy

In To Joy Bergman dedicates his full attention to a theme that will recur in smaller filmic moments throughout his career: the idea of music’s redemptive power. In a frenetic performance, actor Stig Olin plays an ambitious concert violinist of mercurial temperament who ends up sacrificing nearly everything for his career. The fact that his orchestra conductor is in turn played by Victor Sjöström, the grand old master director of the Swedish silent cinema (and Bergman’s main cinematic mentor as well), only adds to the resonances of this film as a personal parable of Bergman’s own filmmaking. Beethoven’s music, the source for the title, is equated by film’s end with the momentary but intense joy of the Swedish summer, leading Bergman biographer Peter Cowie to cull from this film an artistic manifesto of sorts: “There are brief instances in life that are of such exquisite beauty that they compensate for all the misery and unhappiness.”