The film opens with an obituary, credited to the Dresden Zeitung for 14 February 1883. In the film's telling, it announces 'a heavy and altogether unexpected bereavement' to 'musicians of every race, country, and degree': the greatest of contemporary composers, Richard Wagner, 'the second husband of Cosima Liszt', dead in Venice. A man, it says, who occupied 'a loftier station than king or Kaiser, pope or president'; no monarch was ever more enthusiastically served; the most orthodox Catholic never believed in his pontiff more implicitly than the faithful believed in their new prophet. Note the billing. The husband is identified as his wife's second husband, and the wife as her father's daughter - either the most backhanded tribute a German newspaper ever printed or the first joke of Charles Wood's screenplay, and the film declines to resolve the question. It is a fitting overture. For the next seven hours and forty-six minutes, the film negotiates, at roughly this level of irony, what the man did to deserve that station, how he paid for it, and who paid for it with him.
The occasion was the centenary. Wagner died in Venice on 13 February 1883, and Palmer's film was made in 1982/3 to mark the hundred years, an independent British production financed by a London insurance company, co-produced with Hungarofilm and Magyar Televízió, and shot - per the Irish Examiner, ahead of a screening at the Cork Film Festival - over seven months in 200 locations across Europe, many of them the actual rooms where the events happened: Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee, the Munich Residenz, and on location in Hungary, Switzerland, Siena, Venice, Vienna and Dublin. The Wagner Society of NSW, whose program notes are the fullest public account of the production, records a crew drawn from nineteen countries and the whole thing completed in under a year, with the active and continuous support of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson, who let the cameras in. Vittorio Storaro, by then the cinematographer of Apocalypse Now and Reds, shot it with Nic Knowland. The music was specially recorded for the film under Georg Solti, more or less as a favour, and has never sounded better in a film about its own composer.
Then there is the question of the title role, answered by casting the one actor who was already playing it in life. Palmer's casting rationale, delivered to Burton's face: 'Firstly, you're both called Richard; that's a good start. More importantly, you both had more women than it is sensible to have. You drank far too much. You're totally unreliable. You invent history. You have fantastic gift-of-the-gab, but in different ways you're both blessed with genius. What more reason do you want?' Burton laughed and wandered off. Palmer concedes the mistake of a 57-year-old playing the young Dresden scenes, but holds that from middle age on the performance is sensational, and that Burton - tired of being dismissed as an old drunk who had thrown his career away - saw the part as the chance to prove greatness on film at a colossal scale. He was dead by August 1984; only O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four lay ahead. Olivier, during the scenes they shared, muttered to Palmer that no other stage or screen actor could have done what he was doing in the part. Palmer himself, quoted in Melvyn Bragg's Burton biography: 'Even now - although there were criticisms - I can't think of anybody who could have brought it off better than he did.'
Burton's Wagner is also the funniest thing in the film. Wood's running gag is that Wagner converts grievance into material: told to a circle of cronies, the story of his audience with King Friedrich August II of Saxony ends with the march he played for the royal ulcerated tooth - 'and it wasn't wasted though. Later used it all in Tannhäuser.' A row with his publisher, over Tannhäuser copies pulled from the shop window and replaced by Meyerbeer, gives him the line 'Meyerbeer is a master. He sells copy on copy', delivered with the sarcasm of a man whose infamous essay on the subject was still ahead of him. Elsewhere he computes the injury arithmetically: Meyerbeer's royalties of 750,000 marks for one opera against his own 900 for the entire rights to Lohengrin. In Paris, the Jockey Club scene stages the 1861 fiasco with comic precision - 'the ballet is always placed in the second act in order that the gentlemen of the town might see it' - and Wagner's reply, 'if these gentlemen only wish to see a second act, I shall make that the best act', is the character in one line: the man who answers a commercial objection with a threat of uncompromised genius. And when the three ministers of Ludwig II's court conclude that 'he earns more than the three of us put together', the line lands with a charge its author must have counted on, because the ministers are played by Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson.
The casting carries argument throughout. Gwyneth Jones, whose Brünnhilde defined the Boulez-Chéreau centenary Ring, plays Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, wife of the first Tristan, with the tenor Peter Hofmann - Bayreuth's Parsifal of the late seventies - as her husband, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Wagner tenor Jess Thomas as Albert Niemann: the actual Wagner theatre cast as the historical Wagner theatre. William Walton plays the King of Saxony opposite his own wife as the Queen, which is what happens when Palmer has just spent two films with you. Ekkehard Schall, Brecht's son-in-law, is Liszt. László Gálffi's King Ludwig II identifies, correctly, with the swan knight - 'come to me every day, every day forever... for I am he, Lohengrin' - and the Hungarian cast supplies Bakunin, on hand in Dresden for the May Uprising.
What distinguishes the film from every other composer biopic is that it does not flinch from the ugliest material, or treat it as a footnote. The antisemitism is staged as integral: the Dresden speeches, incitement delivered through the Sermon on the Mount until the crowd chants 'cut it off'; the late monologue - 'I finished with Bismarck when he actually gave German Jews equal citizenship with the rest of us', Levi 'should have been baptized', 'three Jews working on Parsifal'; even the letter to Nietzsche's physician, advising vegetables and cold-water plunges for headaches the composer had diagnosed as rooted lower down. And against all that, Wood gives Nietzsche (a wonderful Ronald Pickup, by the Examiner's account) the film's thesis, a warning that reaches past 1883 to the century to come: 'You know what this age, brought about by war and the yearnings of power, is in the market for? Music, war, death, ecstasy, torment, bangs and crashes, floods and conflagrations... Such a soup will feed criminals as well as genius. You're dangerous. You're a dangerous man, Wagner. You talk of gods, but you know there is no God but Wagner, yet you have the power to convince fools they might become gods." Most biopics end where their subject ends. This one is aimed at what came after. And for which Wagner is still blamed, but then, the mind often seeks a single target, whether one man or a group - to cover for a mass psychosis or a well-trodden path of manipulated prejudice.
The ending, then, does not comfort. Ludwig walks into the lake, 'arms up, drowning, seeking redemption', three years on. The narrator observes that 'Cosima held the dead body of Wagner for 25 hours, so I am told, but herself lived on for another 47 years' - the arithmetic exact, she died in 1930 - 'while the theatre, the temple on the hill outside Bayreuth like that other hill outside that other city so long ago. A temporary structure still temporary, still there.' A fair account of a theatre built for one festival that never stopped. The film's last word is 'forever'.
The versions are their own small saga, and worth knowing before you press play. Palmer's original cut ran 7 hours 46 minutes; television wanted something shorter, and a five-hour edit appeared in which whole characters quietly evaporated; the film was then broadcast in ten episodes between 3 October and 11 December 1983, clocking almost nine hours, with the structural oddity that only the first episode carries opening credits and only the tenth closing credits. America got a truncated version just over four hours, padded with narration to fill the narrative holes, on PBS in 1986; the New York Times called it 'pretentious kitsch' and a 'colossal disaster', which tells you what happens to this film when the film is no longer in it. In 2011 the full original was restored across three DVDs in widescreen, Limelight interviewing Palmer for the occasion, and what is posted on the Tony Palmer Collection channel - and found below - is that full-length original - the version with the characters in it. A.C.H. Smith novelised Wood's screenplay; the translations appeared in Germany and Italy, where the film was serialised on television, but the book went unpublished in English for thirty years, until 2012. Smith recalls Wood's advice on the way in: 'Take outrageous liberties. I did.' Below you can find an excerpt.
As for reception, the European press was rapturous. Opera News placed it alongside Gandhi, Reds and Gance's Napoléon and called it one of the most beautifully photographed motion pictures in history. Die Welt found 'an absolute bulls-eye' bound for 'a triumphant procession around the world'; Der Spiegel, a monumental film; the Sunday Times, 'a British Film of glory'; the Guardian's Edward Greenfield declared Burton 'the very embodiment of Wagner'. The Los Angeles Times, per Palmer's own biography, called it one of the most beautiful films ever made. The New York Times took the opposite view of a different cut. Both reactions are on record, and it says something about the film that neither seems entirely mad.
The Ring asks four evenings of its devotees. At seven hours and forty-six minutes, Palmer and Wood's film is the cheaper habit, and it has more jokes, which Wagner would have taken badly. The Cork festival once ran the whole thing in a single morning with two intervals; you can spread it over evenings instead, which is roughly the tempo the tetralogy taught us anyway. Nobody has made that film again, for the obvious reason that nobody else could get Burton, Solti, Storaro and the Wagner family into the same room.
- Limelight, July 2011 - "Palmer talks Wagner"
- Melvyn Bragg, Rich! The Life of Richard Burton, p. 464
- John C. Tibbetts, All My Loving? The Films of Tony Palmer
- A.C.H. Smith, Wagner - the novelisation, English edition 2012
- Palmer's own site - the filmography of a man who has filmed more musicians than anyone alive, and the reviews page where the press clippings live
- The DVD shop - the 2011 restoration, and the six-disc box set that adds Domingo's Parsifal, The Wagner Family and the 1913 silent biopic, with its original Giuseppe Becce score
- A.C.H. Smith's page - buy the novelisation from the author himself, a tenner plus post, and read his account of Wood's editorial advice
- The Wagner Society of NSW program notes - still the fullest public account of the production, and the source for Solti conducting "more or less as a favour"
- The Irish Examiner - Palmer on the casting, the Olivier anecdote, and why Burton took it
- The New York Times, 1986 - the PBS hatchet job, "pretentious kitsch", kept here for balance and because even its rage describes the film accurately: there is nothing else like it on American television
Excerpt from Wagner The Novel: A. C. Smith
Wagner was listening with pleasure to the Dante Symphony, but on the farther side of the piano Minna was unable to concentrate on the music. She was preoccupied with Karl Ritter, who had sat next to her throughout the recital glaring with unrelenting hatred at the pianist. He had made no secret of his grievances. 'My dear Frau Wagner,' he murmured to her, 'I will demand and receive an apology from that man.'
'Karl,' Minna whispered, 'you must not act so. Liszt is the mildest, the gentlest of men. He would not dream of insulting you. You must have been mistaken.'
Karl was not to be deflected. 'I was not mistaken. He called me a baboon. I have communicated the dreadful humiliation to my mother. Baboon face...' Karl snarled quietly.
The Dante Symphony was nearing its end. Anxious to prevent a scene, Minna tried another tack. 'Karl, surely - a moment of ill humour, it isn't as important as all that, surely not?'
'It is,' Karl answered, suddenly having to shout above the applause. 'It is, it is!'
Wagner had risen from his chair, clapping warmly, and was coming across to speak to Minna.
'It is,' Karl insisted, 'Frau Wagner, I am about to marry. I cannot be treated in such a way.'
'Marry?' Wagner asked in surprise, having overheard Karl's shout. 'Are you absolutely convinced that that would be wise, Ritter?'
Karl gasped, 'Ohhh!', and stormed away to the far side of the ballroom, his jaw quivering.
Mathilde had addressed the gathering, with the announcement that by telegraph from Weimar a poem had been received. It had been written in honour of Liszt's birthday, and would be read to them now by one of Zürich's own foremost poets, Georg Herwegh. While the latter's natural baritone modulated unsurely into a poetry-reading tenor, Minna was whispering urgently to her husband. 'Karl is really most upset, Richard.'
'Is he?' Wagner was not listening to Minna, nor to the poem. He was looking at Mathilde Wesendonck, who had just spoken so charmingly to them all.
'It's most unfortunate, most,' Minna was whispering. 'You see, when he was a boy - he explained this to me - he was teased mercilessly about his appearance, and the most wounding taunt of all used to be "baboon face."'
'Did it?' Wagner was still not listening.
'So you can see why Liszt has...'
Minna was cut short by another burst of applause, for the end of the poem. Wagner led the clapping, beaming as he did so at Mathilde, and at Otto beside her, whom he caught stifling a yawn. A buxom, golden-haired soprano, Frau Heim, was standing beside Liszt at the piano, with a manuscript in her hand. The fond look on her face was for Wagner, who was to join her in a recital performance of a passage he had recently sketched for the Valkyrie. As he turned to join Frau Heim, Wagner muttered to Minna, 'The young fool isn't going to mount an exhibition of his foolishness, is he?'
Minna shrugged, with dismay. How was she to know? Also, she would have liked to say under different circumstances, she had noticed the fluttering eyelashes that Frau Heim directed at her husband, but whether their welcome was more than musical, how was she to know?
To turn his music for him, Liszt had Hans von Bülow at his side. Wagner had the greatest confidence in Bülow; not only was he a protégé of Liszt, and affianced to Liszt's daughter Cosima, but the fine young fellow had made himself a virtual outcast from the musical world of Berlin through his passionate championing of Wagner's music. Again and again, in articles entitled, 'Art and Revolution' or 'The Art-Work of the Future', he had assailed with unhoneyed words the aunties, the dotard critics, whose delusion it was that Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn had ever written a note worth hearing. He had arrived in Zürich with the news that the battle was raging ever hotter. Wagner had a warm pat on the shoulder for Bülow as Liszt led them into the Valkyrie.
While he sings, knowing it so well, Wagner has time to keep an eye on the audience. He notes Wesendonck stifling another yawn, thereby attracting a cross glance from his wife Mathilde, and rallying his attention to look up at the performers, where he meets Wagner's basilisk eye, and confusedly lowers his gaze again. Near the Wesendoncks are an older couple, also patrons of the arts, but who seem to have no difficulty in listening to the art they patronize: Doctor Wille, whose views on politics are as pugnacious as his scarred face testifies his private life has been, and Frau Wille, irredeemably plain, but an intelligent and cultivated hostess of the salon. She is a particular friend of the striking figure leaning on the end of the piano and smoking a cheroot, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, thin and thirtyish, Liszt's mistress but not to be his wife unless the Vatican grants the Prince a dissolution. People have remarked that the Prince, having been married to Princess Carolyne, is no stranger to dissolution already, but people will always make remarks of that sort at the sight of a blue stocking. With an encouraging glance at Frau Heim, in her aureole of golden hair, Wagner sounds the Motive of Renunciation, Zum letzten Mal letz' as mich heut mit des Lebewohles letzteng Kuss, and notes Mathilde's rapt expression, and also Karl Ritter edging toward the piano, where Liszt has the look on his face of a man who would by now be playing with his eyes closed in ecstasy had he performed this music just once before in his life.
The moment they finished there was a burst of applause and bravos. Karl had seen his chance, but the most admirable Bülow had seen Karl even more quickly, had intercepted his lurching grievance, and was firmly leading Karl away. Wagner, under congratulations from Doctor and Frau Wille, had beady eyes. He was watching the idiot Ritter, who appeared to be safe for the moment in Bülow's hands, and he was watching Mathilde, whose opinion would be relishable. She, slowly followed by Wesendonck, had engaged Liszt and the Princess Carolyne in an earnest conversation, from which she hoped to draw cultural sustenance more substantial and worldly than the common fare in Zürich.
'Heine?' She picked a name, hoping that Liszt, with his urbanity, would make her a meal of it.
But Liszt, who had had a tiring day, looked along his fine nose at Mathilde, and merely repeated, 'Heine?'
Mathilde had to explain herself. 'Has the poet Heine, the great German poet Heinrich Heine...'
'Madam,' Liszt began politely, 'I am aware...'
'Heine?' Princess Carolyne exclaimed.
'Heine,' Mathilde persevered, knowing that she would not forgive herself if she let this opportunity slip for want of a predicate, 'has Heine been of any influence in Herr Wagner's...'
'Wagner?' Princess Carolyne shrieked at the stupidity of this woman. 'It is the birthday of Liszt!' She snorted and sucked at her cheroot. 'Heine... Wagner...'
Wishing to extricate the poor creature, of a type he had suffered after thousands of recitals, Liszt made use of consummate mendacity. 'I have the highest regard for the poet...'
Princess Carolyne puffed smoke. 'We think very little of the poet Heine.' Why should she bother to explain to this pretentious housewife that the poet Heine in his guise of musical critic had practised upon Liszt a version of simony, showing him the manuscript of a spiteful review and, upon receiving no bribe, increasing its spite for publication?
Over her lovely shoulder, Mathilde cast an agonised look at her husband. He wisely refused to be drawn into the circle of hell she had made for herself. He stroked his beard, and pretended to be interested in the piano.
Wagner had decided that he must urgently settle Ritter's hash. Crossing the crowded room, accepting homage piecemeal, he reached the epicene booby. 'Karl, you must not make a scene. Look, I will undertake to speak to Liszt and make your feelings known to him. I'm sure he will wish to express his regret for them, in his own way, by letter perhaps, mmm?'
Karl was primed. 'I shall demand an apology now. If he refuses, you will not get another pfennig from my mother.'
Wagner put his hand on Karl's shoulder, and looked at him painedly. 'Wait,' he said. He crossed the floor again, to where Mathilde was still struggling to make a conversation with Liszt and the Princess. The great pianist's nostrils were quivering. 'Why do you keep on about Heine?' he complained. 'I don't want to talk about Heine.'
'But surely,' Mathilde plunged on, 'his name will be inscribed in the temple of immortality?'
'I suppose it will be,' Liszt snickered, 'in mud.'
Bowing to Liszt and the inevitable, Mathilde left, followed by Wesendonck. Wagner watched her go, then drew Liszt aside to whisper in his ear. Princess Carolyne also inclined her head to hear what Wagner had to say. She was not in favour of secrets.
Karl, slowly approaching, watched the scene with satisfaction. Minna, too, sighed with relief when she saw Liszt nod, and Wagner look up and beckon Karl.
As Karl drew near, Princess Carolyne shook her head in puzzlement. 'Are we not making too much of it?'’ she asked Liszt quite loudly. 'After all, the boy does look very like a baboon, does he not?'
Karl turned away, with a twitching face, and hastened to leave the ballroom. At the door, a footman handed him a commemorative medallion with a portrait of Liszt on it.
