Wagner Nights

I have started watching, belatedly, Tony Palmer’s nine-hour biography of Wagner, filmed thirty years ago and now reissued, which I have received as a birthday present from my son Nicolas.

With Richard Burton (a year before his death) in the title role, it looks like an attempt to remake Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon, which had one virtue that  Palmer’s Wagner does not have - it was a silent movie. That Wagner was a great composer but a nasty, offensive, belligerent  man is not something I would dispute. Indeed he was a model - there have been various others - of the great genius who failed to be  a great man.

Deliberately or not, Palmer’s film makes this point strenuously, depicting, with Burton’s abrasive support, Wagner as hectoring, hostile, garrulous, and insufferably bellicose - no wonder Hitler admired him.

Yet the film, despite the uproar and gunfire of its opening episode in Dresden, is riveting in its way, and I am continuing to watch it. Whether or not you like the gravel-voiced Burton as the anti-hero, it has a terrific cast, including Vanessa Redgrave as Cosima, even if some of the senior actors (Sir John Gieldud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Ralph Richardson) have minor roles. All the same there are some nice cameos, including Ronald Pickup as Nietzsche, Joan Plowright as Mrs Turner, Wagner’s Scottish patron in Bordeaux, and Sir William Walton as King Frederick Augustus of Saxony,  who all claim the attention.

What I am less enthusiastic about is some of the handling of the music which, though conducted by Sir Georg Solti, focuses too much on sinister and loud passages of The Ring and brassy excerpts from other operas. But the scenery, specially in Switzerland, is wonderful. I am still glued to the screen, though tempted to wear ear-plugs, ang shall have more to say in a later blog.
11 November 2014