Wagner: The Movie

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:46 AM Eastern on 26 Mar. See below.]

Wagner-hater, Ms. Opera Chic, has some choice words about the four-hour cut version of the 1982, nine-hour, made-for-TV epic, Wagner, starring Richard Burton in the title role, and with a slew of first-rank actors such as Vanessa Redgrave, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir John Gielgud, and Sir Larry Himself in supporting roles, and some even choicer if largely disproportionate and at times misguided words about Wagner himself.

When I purchased a VHS copy of this Tony Palmer-directed, nine-hour mini-series I watched it in its entirety. It was my first experience of this, um, epic, and what a colossal drag it was; a wanton squandering of time, money, and talent. Worse than a mere drag, actually. An aggravating bore, if I may be permitted the almost oxymoron.

From the film's look its budget must have been huge. It was visually gorgeous throughout, and the production values were of the same caliber as a theatrical film. The actors, too, all did a first-rate job — that is, given the positively dreadful — and I do mean dreadful — script they had to work with. Beyond that, there's nothing good to say about this film. Palmer's repeated cutting in of visually effective but totally irrelevant "moments" was more than merely annoying. It was damaging in the extreme. Ditto the mostly irrelevant music track, all of it taken from Wagner's own works which was damaging not only in its irrelevance to what was happening on-screen, but damaging due the unavoidable and at-odds associations one could not help but make with what the music means or has to do with in the works from which it was taken.

My sense of the thing is that intelligent editing (Palmer was the film's editor as well) could have done much to save the film from being the bloated, boring, impossibly confusing and disjointed thing that it is. But even given intelligent editing, nothing could have saved this film from its arrantly vapid script. Apart from its amateurishness, it missed just about all there was to miss of central importance to a reasonable understanding of Wagner the transcendent genius and, to a lesser degree, of Wagner the man.

Bloody shame.

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Update (1:46 AM Eastern on 26 Mar): Just for the record...

I'm not quite sure what possessed me, but I just watched the tape of Wagner again — all nine grueling hours of it — and it's even more dreadful than I remembered it from the first — and last — time I watched it.

In the comments section of the above linked post on Opera Chic, I remarked in contradiction to the comment of another commenter that it was my recollection there was little representation of Wagner's anti-Semitism in the film. I was a bit off. There was no representation of Wagner's anti-Semitism in the film beyond three or four en passant, one-word remarks by Wagner such as could have come from any German of the time, and, at the end of the film, a good-natured(!), joking(!!) reference to Wagner's wanting the great conductor Hermann Levi, a practicing Jew and the son of a rabbi, to undergo baptism before conducting Parsifal.

So much for the accuracy of this ostensible TV biopic which had a number of other inaccuracies as well, and a few flat-out inventions throughout its length.