In 1981 New York City, violinist Roberta Guaspari has recently divorced her U.S. Navy officer husband Charles Demetras, who has instead decided to pursue a romantic relationship with a friend of hers named Lana Holden. Encouraged by her mother Assunta to return to the workforce for the sake of her two sons Alexi and Nicholas, Guaspari attempts to rebuild her life and reconnects with a former classmate named Brian Turner while working as a gift-wrapper at a department store; recalling her childhood love for playing the violin, he arranges for her to be introduced to Janet Williams, the head teacher and principal of East Harlem's Central Park East School. Despite having little experience in actual music teaching, she accepts a substitute violin teaching position at Central Park East, even supplying 50 child-size violins she purchased while living in Greece, where her husband was based. With a combination of her toughness and determination, she inspires a group of children, and their initially skeptical parents. The program slowly develops and attracts publicity, eventually expanding to Central Park East II and River East Schools.
Ten years later, the Central Park East, Central Park East II and River East School string programs work with the New York City Board of Education to help eliminate funding for the programs, which leads to Guaspari's early dismissal. Determined to fight the budget cuts, she enlists the support of former pupils, parents and teachers, and over the next two years, she plans a benefit concert, Fiddlefest, to raise money so that the program can continue. However, a few weeks before the concert, and with all participants furiously rehearsing, they lose the venue. However, Arnold Steinhardt, a violinist in the Guarneri Quartet and the husband of a publicist friend, enlists the support of other well-known musicians, including Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman. They arrange for the concert to be mounted at Carnegie Hall. On the day of Fiddlefest, Guaspari and her students perform with Perlman, Steinhardt, Stern, Mark O'Connor, Michael Tree, Charles Veal Jr., Karen Briggs, Sandra Park, Diane Monroe, and Joshua Bell, increasing donations and making the event a massive success.
The epilogue explains that following the events of the film, the $250,000 in proceeds from the concert supported Guaspari's program for three years, during which she and her supporters continued to fund her work through benefit concerts and donations to their private foundation, the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music; Community School District 4 assisted as permitted by its limited resources. Eventually, her violin program was officially reinstated during the production of the film. In addition, she still teaches in East Harlem, where she lives with her daughter Sophia, whom she adopted from El Salvador in 1991. Her eldest son Nicholas has become a professional cellist in a graduate music program, and her youngest son Alexi has been accepted to medical school. Opus 118, which hopes to expand its outreach to more children, remains dependent on the generosity of its donors.
Roberta Guaspari and the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music was featured in the 1995 documentary film Small Wonders, which was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. After seeing Small Wonders, Wes Craven, known for his work on horror films, was inspired to make a full-length film about Guaspari. Immediately following a phenomenally successful preview screening of Scream, Miramax co-founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein offered him a three-picture deal via Dimension Films; two of the films would be in the horror genre, while the third film would be a "petticoat film", a costume drama for which the Weinsteins were known at the time. Craven, both a former teacher and a fan of classical music, chose to pursue Music of the Heart as his "petticoat film", explaining, "It’s sort of a culmination of almost 30 years trying to do something outside of the genre. Not because I don’t like the genre, but because I’m a person … an artist who wants to do a lot of different things. Just never before has that opportunity been presented."[2]
Madonna was originally signed to play the role of Guaspari, but left the project before filming began, citing "creative differences" with Craven. When she left, Madonna had already studied for many months to play the violin.[3] Meryl Streep, who replaced Madonna at the last minute at Craven's insistence, learned to play Bach's Concerto for 2 Violins for the film;[4][5] given six weeks of preparation in order to play the violin, she described, "I had to beg them to give me some more time for the violin part of it." Aside from having the daunting task of learning the violin while acting like a professional, she also found the burden of playing a real person to be particularly challenging, explaining, "Playing a real person carries with it a whole other set of responsibilities than you would have when creating a fictional character. So, I did as much research as I could and then I just sort of threw it away because I can’t think of the real Roberta. I had to make it our Roberta, our movie Roberta. The real woman is a sizable phenomenon of energy, inspiration, hard work, irascibility. I tried to capture little parts of her and put it together in the film."[6]
Critical reception
The film received an overall mixed reception, though many reviews tended to be slightly positive. Most critics applauded Meryl Streep's portrayal of Roberta Guaspari. The film has a 64% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes based on 91 critical reviews; the consensus explains, "Meryl Streep's depiction of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things transcends, inspires, and entertains."[7]CinemaScore reported that audiences gave the film a rare "A+" grade.
Critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution concluded that "There are more challenging movies around. More original ones, too. But "Music of the Heart" gets the job done, efficiently and entertainingly."[8]
Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that "Meryl Streep is known for her mastery of accents; she may be the most versatile speaker in the movies. Here you might think she has no accent, unless you've heard her real speaking voice; then you realize that Guaspari's speaking style is no less a particular achievement than Streep's other accents. This is not Streep's voice, but someone else's - with a certain flat quality, as if later education and refinement came after a somewhat unsophisticated childhood."[9]
Steve Rosen said that "The key to Meryl Streep's fine performance is that she makes Guaspari unheroically ordinary. Ultimately that makes her even more extraordinary."[10]
