HITTING THE RIGHT NOTE Janine Hosking’s The Eulogy and the Perils of Praise
It feels like there’s more than one legacy at stake in The Eulogy (2018), Janine Hosking’s documentary about Geoffrey Tozer. Most immediately, the film aims to bring the life, work and legacy of the Australian pianist and composer – whom it largely presents as being unfairly neglected by the local arts scene despite his numerous accomplishments – back into the public consciousness. But The Eulogy also draws heavily on the connection of former prime minister Paul Keating to Tozer, particularly in the form of the titular forty-five-minute eulogy that he delivered at Tozer’s funeral in October 2009.1 Added to this is the on-screen guiding presence of celebrated Australian conductor and music educator Richard Gill, who died in October 2018.
Hosking explicitly asks us to consider the question ‘What went wrong?’ with regard to Tozer’s life and career; after all, he was, Keating reminds us, ‘quickly dubbed a “musical genius” by Australia’s foremost musicians’ as a young boy. Yet we’re also left to ponder for ourselves the associated question of exactly how and why we should value someone like Tozer, who was certainly an extraordinarily talented artist. And we’re left to ponder for ourselves exactly how and why we should value the music he created – a question that we may delude ourselves, when we’re not directly faced with it, into thinking is obvious.
The elusiveness of grasping
