Inspiration
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The film was inspired by one of Antonio Stradivari's violins, the Red Mendelssohn (1721), which is currently played by Elizabeth Pitcairn, heiress to the PPG fortune, whose grandfather purchased it for her 16th birthday for $1.7 million at auction at Christie's London. She is one of the few soloists who performs the Red Violin Chaconne composed for the film by John Corigliano. The notion that the violin is red because it is painted with the blood of the maker's wife, who died during childbirth, is a creation of the filmmaker. It is called "The Red Mendelssohn" because of a unique red stripe on its top right side, but how the stripe came about is unknown.
The film's poster was inspired by Man Ray's picture, the Violon d'Ingres.
Read more about this topic: The Red Violin
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)