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The Music Master was based on the barnstorming David Belasco-David Warfield play of the same name. Alec B. Francis assumes the old Warfield role as Anton Von Barwig, an elderly musician eking out a meager existence in a Bohemian artists' colony. Years earlier, a cad had run off with Von Barwig's wife and destroyed his happy home. Before the inevitable "reunion" with the man who ruined his life, the old man contents himself by living vicariously through the successes of his prize pupils. Critics in 1927 complained that many of the dramatic highlights of the original play were treated in an offhand fashion, but director Allan Dwan was merely trying to make the property more cinematic by removing its marathon dialogue passages (which wouldn't have worked as well in a silent picture, anyway). Featured in the cast in a peripheral role was Helen Chandler, later the enigmatic leading lady of such talkies as Dracula and The Last Flight.