Charles Vidor had completed about 15 percent of this movie when he died of a heart attack on June 4, 1959. Sir Dirk Bogarde later recalled that he was "secretly relieved" by Vidor's death, since he and his co-star, Capucine had been treated badly by the short-tempered director. Vidor would often scream at Capucine to relax, and at one point, Bogarde recalled, "shook her like a dead cat." Vidor was replaced by George Cukor, who got along much better with his stars, and was more of an "actor's director."
Dirk Bogarde went to Hollywood to start piano training and practiced 6 - 8 hours a day. He was taught the fundamentals and actual technique of playing starting with scales, double notes, Arpeggio, The music was broken up into 26 bars, necessary for him to learn approximate fingering and to be in the right general area of the keyboard.
Director George Cukor thought Patricia Morison's voice as George Sand was too feminine, so he had it dubbed (by Anna Lee).
When George Cukor arrived in Vienna to take over as director, he replaced cinematographer James Wong Howe with Charles Lang. (Howe, who retained credit as Director of Photography, later wrote that he agreed with this choice, as it wasn't really his type of movie. Lang receive no credit whatever.) Also, Cukor brought in screenwriter Walter Bernstein to do re-writes on the script. Bernstein found the original script so ridiculous that he told Cukor, "My best advice to you is to get rid of Dirk Bogarde and get Sid Caesar. Then just film it." Bernstein and Cukor worked on the script as the movie was being filmed, often completing scenes on the night before they were shot.
Charles Vidor had previously directed À Noite Sonhamos (1945), about the relationship between composer Frederic Chopin and author George Sand (played by Cornel Wilde and Merle Oberon). Franz Liszt appears as a character in the earlier movie, played by Stephen Bekassy.