Like many American teens of the 1970s, I met Richard Wagner at the movies, when Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the war-happy cavalry man in Apocalypse Now, plays “Ride of the Valkyries” over his helicopter radio during an assault on a Viet Cong village. “It scares the shit out of the slopes,” Kilgore informs Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). “My boys love it!” The swirling strings and valiant horns are the perfect accompaniment as the helicopter formation descends and the Americans machine-gun the villagers. The sequence was fairly novel then for the way the characters consciously appropriate music as their own personal soundtrack, putting themselves in a movie. By choosing Wagner, director Francis Ford Coppola was clearly linking Kilgore to Hitler, who famously embraced the composer as a symbol of Aryan supremacy. Yet I hummed “Ride of the Valkyries” all the way home.
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Such is the hook of Wagner & Me, a 2010 documentary that makes its Chicago premiere this week at Gene Siskel Film Center. British actor Stephen Fry (Gosford Park, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) sets out on an extended pilgrimage to learn about his musical idol, covering the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany, and making side trips to the composer’s haunts in Switzerland and Saint Petersburg. The ultimate Wagner fanboy, he trembles with excitement as he visits the glorious homes and theaters where the master once worked. At the same time, though, Fry is a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust, and as he explains at the outset, he needs to come to terms with the fact that Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite and a hero of the Nazis. The movie is a sustained attempt to separate Wagner from his music, which proves easier for Fry than separating himself from it.
In 1864 Wagner was miraculously rescued from debtors’ prison by young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who adored Wagner’s music, placed the Munich Court Opera at his service, and gave him everything he needed to stage his works. By 1876, when Wagner was 63, the composer had persuaded Ludwig to build a festival center in the town of Bayreuth that would be wholly dedicated to Wagner’s music; it opened with the first complete performance of the Ring Cycle. At the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Fry gleefully watches a rehearsal of Die Walkure in which black-clad women wear red plastic corsets with clear fins attached in back. Later he attends another Ring rehearsal at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg (where Wagner once conducted) and witnesses a surreal spectacle in which darkened dancers with long, white, fluorescent hair are lowered to the bottom of a giant, blue-lit stage.
Directed by Patrick McGrady
