Starring: Stephen Fry
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 89 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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Anybody who watches ABC television knows Stephen Fry, the actor and author, just as everybody who listens to music knows about the composer Richard Wagner. Put these two charismatic personalities together and what you have is an entertaining, informative documentary that exposes not only Fry’s formidable intellect and capacity to articulate exactly what he feels, but what it is about Wagner’s music that makes it so thrillingly magical and troubling.
In Wagner and Me, Fry the self-confessed Wagner ‘tragic’ travels to Bayreuth in southern Germany, and becomes a very large fly on the wall as hundreds of singers and musicians rehearse in Wagner’s specially built concert house in preparation for the annual festival of the Maestro’s monumental four opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal.
Up close, and dressed in black with red bodices, the singers playing the Valkyries (female goddesses) only have to open their mouths and the stupendous sounds they emit transports the viewer instantly to both Scandinavian mythology and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
And as the viewer creeps with Fry into the stalls of Wagner’s unique theatre to witness another practice session, it’s hard to know what is more enthralling to watch: the singers rehearsing under the baton of a famous conductor, or Fry’s face registering excitement and wonderment as he follows in the musical steps of the Master and finds himself within cooee of his own Holy Grail.
Wagner’s music dominates the soundtrack, as Fry whispers and points to costumes and players, interviews key figures in the festival (including Eva Wagner-Pasquier, Wagner’s great-granddaughter), and on Wagner’s own 1876 Steinway piano, explores the mystery of the famous ‘Tristan’ chord from the love duet in Act 2 of Tristan and Isolde.
As background to understanding the operas performed annually in Bayreuth, Fry takes the viewer to the Swiss Alps, where destitute and homeless after participating in the failed 1848 revolution in Germany, Wagner responded to the landscape by conceiving the idea of a music drama based on the German gods that would speak directly to the people, both musically and politically.
We explore the fantastical castles of Wagner’s patron and financial saviour, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and in the legendary Mariinsky (Kirov) Theatre in St Petersburg, listen while conductor Valery Gergiev explains to Fry the reason for Wagner’s extraordinary success in Russia in 1863.
But nothing in Wagner and Me is as fascinating, perhaps, as watching Fry wrestle with his conscience as he struggles to reconcile his adoration of Wagner the incomparable composer, with Wagner the anti-Semite, whose operas inspired not only Hitler’s belief in an Aryan master race, but the dictator’s love for pomp and pageantry.
Fry states early in the film that he is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust. Coming to Bayreuth for him is a dream come true. But his love of Wagner’s music is also a passion Fry admits ruefully, that he shares with ‘him’, meaning Hitler, as if he doesn’t dare mention the name.
Fry explores the way Wagner used anti-Semitism to fuel his creative genius, and compares this to the way that Hitler used anti-Semitism to fuel his bottomless hunger to rule the world. In his dilemma as to whether or not he should go to Bayreuth and attend a performance of the Ring cycle, Fry turns for guidance to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the celebrated English cellist who as a young girl played in the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz.
Fry’s decision to follow his heart may be controversial. But without his opting for the music over the man, music lovers would be deprived of an illuminating, insightful exegesis of one of the most influential composers in history.
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