Wagner And Me

Documentary

Antidote Films / Pinnacle Films

R4 DVD

I approached this film with trepidation. I am not an opera fan – large people screeching and groaning through unintelligible songs don’t do it for me. Neither am I a Steven Fry fan. His delivery is pompous and annoying, much like Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson but without the style, class and fast cars. I was forcibly subjected to Torture By Wagner in high school music classes and that put me off classical music for a long time.

Through this enlightening documentary I have now changed my opinions somewhat. Steven Fry avoids pomposity this time as he narrates the story and lets his love for Wagner and his works show through. There is something quite persuasive about listening to an expert discussing a topic he loves – he can impart his enthusiasm to a listener far better than an ordinary lecturer (or music teacher) could. As Fry takes us through Wagner’s life he doesn’t gloss over the nasty bits, either. Wagner was a small ugly womaniser, a parasite on rich men, and seems to have been filled with a sense of his own importance. As Fry takes us through some of his scores (of his music, not his women) I can’t help but admire the skill of a man who can take a complex organism like an orchestra, add singers, combine them all in his mind, plot the music for each instrument and produce some of the great classic works of music. His patron, King Ludwig of Bavaria, must have been pleased. The Ring Cycle, regarded as his greatest work, runs for around eighteen hours but took nearly twenty years to write. Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal are other Wagner favourites.

Wagner’s most unfortunate characteristic was his vicious anti-Semitism. This made him highly acceptable later to the Nazi Party and they used his rousing music for their great rallies and parades. Hitler was such an admirer that he had his sculptor make a bust of Wagner for the Bayreuth concert hall which Wagner had commissioned. This use of his music is still controversial today and most of his works are presented in a modernised style to overcome any hint of Naziism.

Wagner intended his work to be more than an opera or a symphonic piece. His operas were based on the Greek tragedies he admired – a combination of music, drama, song and stage acting. The massive machinery behind and under the Bayreuth stage for moving scenery and equipment shows how much the presentation counted in his work. He didn’t just use painted backdrops, his scenery was multi-level. This really gave the singers a number of stages to work on and made the presentations larger than life, or at least larger than anything seen before.

Bayreuth holds an annual Wagner festival and this is the culmination of Fry’s presentation. By this point in the documentary I could see the attraction that Wagner’s work had. Each festival must be a major part of a music lover’s life, as it is for Fry.

I still haven’t changed my opinions entirely, but at least I now better understand Richard Wagner and his success.

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