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How Wagner has inspired film

In 1940, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow invited film director Sergei Eisenstein to stage Richard Wagner’s Die Walkure. He eagerly accepted the new challenge, as it presented him with an opportunity to apply Wagner’s ideas of combining theatre, music, literature and myth in one medium, which concurred with his own vision of film as synthesis.

Eisenstein wanted “The Ride of the Valkyries” to “envelop the entire audience via a system of loudspeakers reverberating as if in flight from the rear of the stage to the back of the auditorium and back. And roll around the auditorium, up the steps and along the aisles and corridors. But I was not able to overcome the traditions of the opera theatre!”

According to American director and screenwriter Harmony Korine: “If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.”

It could be argued that if film resembles any other art form, it is closer to opera than theatre or literature; of the operatic composers, Wagner could lay claim to being the most “cinematic.” For example, in the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the theatre built by Wagner specifically to present “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” a hidden orchestra was conceived so that the music could be heard like a soundtrack. Wagner also had all the house lights turned off, unusually for the 1870s. In addition, an illusion was created by a dual proscenium which, according to Wagner, “allows the performers to appear enlarged and on a superhuman scale” — the theatrical equivalent of the close-up.

A multitude of film scores rely on Wagnerian leitmotifs — a musical phrase, associated with some particular character or idea — and the edited flow of images could be likened to Wagner’s “continuous melody.” More comparisons could be made between Wagner and film, and there have been learned treatises on the influence of Wagner on movies from Fritz Lang’s early epics, Die Nibelungen and The Testament of Dr Mabuse, to Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. However, though bleeding chunks of his music have been heard in hundreds of movies, particularly the over(mis)used “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the composer has been rather ill-served by the cinema. But, as Mark Twain once quipped, “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” In films, at least.

Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours has a famous conductor (Rex Harrison) imagining, while conducting three different works, three different ways of taking revenge on his wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. The nature of his imaginings is dictated by that of the music: during Wagner’s reconciliation theme from Tannhauser, he fantasises about forgiving his wife and allowing her to run off with her young lover.

Naturally, Hollywood, always deeply suspicious of “high art,” would mostly caricature Wagner’s work. As Hollywood musicals have been an antidote to solemnity, classical music could only be swallowed if the pill was sugared. This has led to some weird incongruities, such as the famed Norwegian dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad being introduced by Bob Hope in The Big Broadcast of 1938, and then superbly delivering Brunhilde’s battle cry from Die Walkure. No wonder audiences were confused and didn’t know whether or not to laugh.

The apotheosis of Wagner in American movies came with Chuck Jones’ animated short What’s Opera, Doc? featuring Elmer Fudd as Siegfried in hapless pursuit of Bugs Bunny. “Kill the wabbit!” sings Elmer, until he sets eyes on the beautiful Bugs in drag as Brunhilde. They sing a love duet.

Wagner’s life has been treated in a serious manner on film, however, despite some unintentional laughs. The first biopic, Carl Froelich’s The Life of Richard Wagner, appeared as early as 1913. One of the true rarities in the Wagner on Screen season at the BFI, it starred Italian composer Giuseppe Becce, who also scored the music.

In the major biopics, for some reason, this most German of composers has been portrayed by some of the most British of actors: Alan Badel, Richard Burton, and Trevor Howard. Badel played him as a bored sybarite in the kitsch Magic Fire, in which the music was “arranged” by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who managed to reduce the Ring Cycle to four minutes, and who decided to appear in the film as the conductor Hans Richter “to protect Wagner,” as he claimed. Both Howard and Burton (in Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig, 1972, and Tony Palmer’s 300-minute Wagner, 1983) played the composer as a petulant genius.

It was inevitable that Syberberg, the chronicler of the German soul, should tackle Wagner’s last opera, the synthesis of the composer’s own religious and mystic beliefs. While demystifying Wagner’s work, Parsifal (1982) also presents it as an unassailable masterpiece. The action takes place on and around a gigantic death mask of Wagner, and embraces a wide range of startling images, associations and techniques — long takes, back projection, puppets and tableaux vivants. The most daring device has Parsifal played both by a boy, who represents the “fool,” and a girl, an asexual symbol of purity whom he becomes after Kundry’s kiss. This splendidly sung and acted celebration is the most personal and imaginative of opera films. Whether Wagner would have approved is another matter.

What these films reveal is that, unlike the more monomorphic view of, say, Beethoven or Verdi, Wagner — the most revered, reviled, complex and misunderstood of composers — is many different things to many different people. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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