I have now added “comments” links to all my blogs. This means that when you read something, you can add a comment, without having to subscribe.
------------------------------
Karl Dallas
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
REVISITED: Tony Palmer's 9-hour Wagner epic
Wagner (Tony Palmer, 1983)
Bradford’s wonderful Museum of Photography, Film and TV commemorated the twentieth anniversary of Tony Palmer’s Wagner film with an all-day showing of this innovative nine-hour biography of a composer who is still controversial and hated as much as he is loved. Wagner’s music was effectively banned in Israel until the year 2000 because of the composer’s anti-Semitic views, and it’s undoubtedly true that, in a wider sense, his ideas provided the intellectual justification for the horrors of the Holocaust.
Indeed, Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang, whose blessing made the project possible, was Hitler’s godchild.
Palmer’s epic makes no effort to disguise this unattractive aspect of his subject, and in fact his constant harping on about the way Jews were responsible for his money worries – when, in fact, many Jews helped bail him out of his self-induced penury – did get a bit wearing after over 800 minutes of it.
Though Burton was not Palmer’s first choice for the title role – he originally wanted Albert Finney for it – his larger-than-life public persona filled out the performance so that the audience brought to his picture of the tortured self-destructive artist something that another might not have been able to bring. The use of an actor in the last few years of his life – Burton died a year after its release – suited admirably the end of Wagner’s life, his ravaged face entirely appropriate to the events portrayed on screen, but added some strange discrepancies to Wagner’s earlier life as a young revolutionary in 1848 Dresden.
In fact, though the movie’s box-office must have been improved by the star-studded cast – not only Burton, but a rare occasion to see John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier on screen together, plus lesser-known stars like the Berliner Ensemble’s Ekkehardt Schall as Franz Liszt – this was very much of an ensemble piece. Burton’s all-on-one-note ranting did tend to grate after a while, and the three theatrical knights didn’t really earn their crust.
Richardson was typically wooden and Olivier did that thing with his eyes and eyebrows he made such a feature of in John Mortimer’s Voyage Around My Father, which didn’t seem to have much to do with his role as Bavaria’s chief of police, and only Gielgud seemed to get inside the skin of his character.
A stand-out performance was Lásló Gálffi as King Ludwig II, probably Wagner’s most consistent financial supporter, and of course Vanessa Redgrave, as Cosima, Wagner’s last wife. In fact, much of the pleasure of this film was in watching the individual performances of the superb cast, such as Ronald Pickup’s very believable Nietzsche, and the exquisite Marthe Keller as Mathile Wesendonck, one of Wagner’s early loves. To watch the passage of thoughts across their faces as, seemingly, nothing much was happening, was a salutary lesson in non-Method acting.
But what really made the whole thing effective was the epic scale of the piece, aided, of course, by the superb cinematography of Vittoro Storaro. Much of the action was actually filmed in the original settings, though parts of old Budapest stood in for Nineteenth Century Dresden, and the Hungarian army were marshalled for the battle scenes.
I missed the satirical possibilities of some of Wagner’s more ludicrous posturings, which one of Palmer’s early mentors, Ken Russell (Palmer was producer on Russell’s Isadora at the beginning of his movie career) would undoubtedly have made too much of.
Of course, ardent Wagnerites will be asking: what about the music? It is absolutely wonderful. Palmer tells a delightful story about how Sir Georg Solti was persuaded to conduct for a much-reduced fee on condition that his daughter appeared as one of the Wagner children, thus beginning a successful career in film for her – she is now a successful director in her own right.
Since Solti is arguably the world’s greatest Wagner conductor, the music is superb. Some purists may object to the way that Palmer has used Wagner’s leitmotif technique to associate different musical themes with different emotional moods, so it appears that the inspiration for Tristan, say, lies in Wagner’s love life, while this isn’t necessarily how artists use their personal experience in their work.
It might also be complained that this usage reduces Wagner’s monumental compositions to the status of mere incidental music, though this is unfortunately a feature of much modern film, Kubrik plundering Ligeti for 2001, for instance. At least, using Wagner’s music in a film about Wagner keeps it in context.
Filmically, it is interesting that Palmer also uses the leitmotif technique in his visuals: the Nibelungen beating out weapons on their anvils at the very beginning recurs throughout, and especially at the end, when Wagner’s words about the German nation being purified by blood and fire remind us chillingly of how exactly that prophecy was fulfilled in the Holocaust.
The movie was screened in a video version, which lost some of the definition of film, but I was surprised to find that it is apparently not available in either VHS or DVD format, though the extended length would certainly lend itself to the latter format.-Karl Dallas
(Originally published in the Morning Star newspaper.)
Bradford’s wonderful Museum of Photography, Film and TV commemorated the twentieth anniversary of Tony Palmer’s Wagner film with an all-day showing of this innovative nine-hour biography of a composer who is still controversial and hated as much as he is loved. Wagner’s music was effectively banned in Israel until the year 2000 because of the composer’s anti-Semitic views, and it’s undoubtedly true that, in a wider sense, his ideas provided the intellectual justification for the horrors of the Holocaust.
Indeed, Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang, whose blessing made the project possible, was Hitler’s godchild.
Palmer’s epic makes no effort to disguise this unattractive aspect of his subject, and in fact his constant harping on about the way Jews were responsible for his money worries – when, in fact, many Jews helped bail him out of his self-induced penury – did get a bit wearing after over 800 minutes of it.
Though Burton was not Palmer’s first choice for the title role – he originally wanted Albert Finney for it – his larger-than-life public persona filled out the performance so that the audience brought to his picture of the tortured self-destructive artist something that another might not have been able to bring. The use of an actor in the last few years of his life – Burton died a year after its release – suited admirably the end of Wagner’s life, his ravaged face entirely appropriate to the events portrayed on screen, but added some strange discrepancies to Wagner’s earlier life as a young revolutionary in 1848 Dresden.
In fact, though the movie’s box-office must have been improved by the star-studded cast – not only Burton, but a rare occasion to see John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier on screen together, plus lesser-known stars like the Berliner Ensemble’s Ekkehardt Schall as Franz Liszt – this was very much of an ensemble piece. Burton’s all-on-one-note ranting did tend to grate after a while, and the three theatrical knights didn’t really earn their crust.
Richardson was typically wooden and Olivier did that thing with his eyes and eyebrows he made such a feature of in John Mortimer’s Voyage Around My Father, which didn’t seem to have much to do with his role as Bavaria’s chief of police, and only Gielgud seemed to get inside the skin of his character.
A stand-out performance was Lásló Gálffi as King Ludwig II, probably Wagner’s most consistent financial supporter, and of course Vanessa Redgrave, as Cosima, Wagner’s last wife. In fact, much of the pleasure of this film was in watching the individual performances of the superb cast, such as Ronald Pickup’s very believable Nietzsche, and the exquisite Marthe Keller as Mathile Wesendonck, one of Wagner’s early loves. To watch the passage of thoughts across their faces as, seemingly, nothing much was happening, was a salutary lesson in non-Method acting.
But what really made the whole thing effective was the epic scale of the piece, aided, of course, by the superb cinematography of Vittoro Storaro. Much of the action was actually filmed in the original settings, though parts of old Budapest stood in for Nineteenth Century Dresden, and the Hungarian army were marshalled for the battle scenes.
I missed the satirical possibilities of some of Wagner’s more ludicrous posturings, which one of Palmer’s early mentors, Ken Russell (Palmer was producer on Russell’s Isadora at the beginning of his movie career) would undoubtedly have made too much of.
Of course, ardent Wagnerites will be asking: what about the music? It is absolutely wonderful. Palmer tells a delightful story about how Sir Georg Solti was persuaded to conduct for a much-reduced fee on condition that his daughter appeared as one of the Wagner children, thus beginning a successful career in film for her – she is now a successful director in her own right.
Since Solti is arguably the world’s greatest Wagner conductor, the music is superb. Some purists may object to the way that Palmer has used Wagner’s leitmotif technique to associate different musical themes with different emotional moods, so it appears that the inspiration for Tristan, say, lies in Wagner’s love life, while this isn’t necessarily how artists use their personal experience in their work.
It might also be complained that this usage reduces Wagner’s monumental compositions to the status of mere incidental music, though this is unfortunately a feature of much modern film, Kubrik plundering Ligeti for 2001, for instance. At least, using Wagner’s music in a film about Wagner keeps it in context.
Filmically, it is interesting that Palmer also uses the leitmotif technique in his visuals: the Nibelungen beating out weapons on their anvils at the very beginning recurs throughout, and especially at the end, when Wagner’s words about the German nation being purified by blood and fire remind us chillingly of how exactly that prophecy was fulfilled in the Holocaust.
The movie was screened in a video version, which lost some of the definition of film, but I was surprised to find that it is apparently not available in either VHS or DVD format, though the extended length would certainly lend itself to the latter format.-Karl Dallas
(Originally published in the Morning Star newspaper.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
About Me
- Karl
- I am posting here chapters from my unpublished 1989 novel about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, set in modern times. The Roman soldiers carry sub-machine guns, the birth takes place in a car park shed, and Judas is a terrorist. At the moment, chapters are displayed in the order they are posted, but in due course, they will appear in the order they appear in the book.