The Prelude

Anna's great ambitions to make a musical career as a violinist have come to nothing, but as a teacher at a music high school, with a reasonably harmonious marriage, a lover and a well-bred son, she has settled well into her life. However, all this is called into question when, with great ambition and increasing obsession, she takes the, in her eyes, extremely talented 12-year-old Alexander under her wing to prepare him for an exam. She spends more and more time with the boy and begins to neglect her family for him. Soon, Anna's shifting priorities bring her marriage into crisis, and tensions between Anna and her lover, the cellist Christian, grow as she seems to do everything in her power to give her protégé Alexander the career she herself was denied. On the day of the exam, disaster strikes...