Lecture 21

The family of a wealthy businessman gather to celebrate his 60th birthday. During the course of the party, his eldest son presents a speech that reveals a shocking secret.

Bertram Pincus, a cranky, people-hating Manhattan dentist, develops the unwelcome ability to see dead people. Really annoying dead people. Even worse, they all want something from him, particularly Frank Herlihy, a smooth-talking ghost, who pesters him into a romantic scheme involving his widow Gwen. They are soon entangled in a hilarious predicament between the now and the hereafter!

The story about the relationship between a manic depressive man, Mr Jones, and the female doctor who takes more than a professional interest in his treatment.

Known for his mournful "Adagio for Strings," Samuel Barber was never quite fashionable. This acclaimed film is a probing exploration of his music and melancholia. Performance, oral history, musicology, and biography combine to explore the life and music of one of America’s greatest composers. Features Thomas Hampson, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and many more of the world's leading experts on Barber's music, with tributes from composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and William Schuman. The film was broadcast on PBS, and screened at nine film festivals internationally, with three best-of awards. It was named a Recording of the Year 2017 by MusicWeb International.

After the death of his mother, a man tries to discover a meaning to his life, to the universe and to rebuild a relationship with the only family he has left: his gay brother.

When Momo leaves his small home town to go to university, he is full of enthusiasm and confidence, but slowly the pressures of study and campus living begin to grind him down. Half way through his course he finds himself at a crossroads with both his relationship and studies.

A story built around the music of Oskar Merikanto, tells the love story of the poor musician Lauri Alanko and the daughter of the rich Grahn family Annina. Annina’s family doesn’t approve of the relationship, and the couple’s happiness is also threatened by Lauri’s worsening eye disease.

The ennui of a filmmaker, trapped between aspiration and reality, frames Lana Jing’s quirky, sarcastic, and cinematic-joke filled quarter-life crisis. At her lecture hall job, where aging white men wax on, self-involved, Lana accidentally frames her friend and co-worker when she destroys the only copy of an aging tech-bro’s high-profile lecture. Lana is forced to navigate stop motion animation, a secret admirer, and terrible bridge traffic to sort out a way forward to her destiny… kinda.

Famed architect Jeremy Angust is approached on his trip to the Paris Airport by a chatty girl named Texel Textor who needs a ride. He obliges and after they part ways at the airport entrance, he misses his flight. As he settles in the lounge, he encounters the mysterious young Texel again, who insists on telling her strange story — and the conversation grows stranger and more twisted until it turns sinister and deadly.

A section from the life of composer Franz Schubert as a material for a love story. Also known in English as Gently My Songs Entreat. An English version called Unfinished Symphony would follow in 1934.

American conductor John Meredith and his manager, Hank Higgins, go to Russia shortly before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Meredith falls in love with beautiful Soviet pianist Nadya Stepanova while they travel throughout the country on a 40-city tour. Along the way, they see happy, healthy, smiling, free Soviet citizens, blissfully living the Communist dream. This bliss is destroyed by the German invasion.

The staff of an American magazine based in France puts out its last issue, with stories featuring an artist sentenced to life imprisonment, student riots, and a kidnapping resolved by a chef.

Mrs. Burgess explains menstruation to her teen-aged daughter by showing her diagrams in a medical book. Her daughter-in-law Mary then tells Mrs. Burgess that she wishes that she, too, knew more about her body. She also reveals that she may be expecting a baby and is apprehensive about her safety and the changes that a new baby will bring to her life.

A South Korean art house film director is first invited to serve on the panel of a film festival, then to guest lecture at a film school.

In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency -- a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.

A struggling musician takes a job teaching music to middle school children in a rural mining town.

Ginger, an orphan, is living with her foster-uncle, Rexford Whittington, a broken-down Shakesperian actor. Although denied the love of a mother and father, Ginger looks after her uncle, gives him lectures, loves him, defends him and keeps house for him. But, through a meddling do-gooder, she is placed in the home of the Parkers, and clashes immediately with the pampered young son, Hamilton.

Claire is under the grip of a mysterious new cult called Faults. Desperate to be reunited with their daughter, Claire's parents recruit one of the world's foremost experts on mind control, Ansel Roth.

After joining the Skulls, Ryan Sommers (Robin Dunne) is warned not to betray any secrets about the organization or its high-powered members. However, when Ryan witnesses a murder within the Skulls' private chambers, he finds that the closer he gets to revealing the truth - the more dangerous life becomes.

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Lecture 5 picks up at the early twentieth century with an oncoming crisis in Western Music. As these lectures have traced the gradual increase and oversaturation of ambiguity, Bernstein now designates a point in history that took ambiguity too far.