After more than two decades in the limelight in Britain, Stephen Fry is something of a national treasure, a status which his new film, Wagner & Me, will do nothing to derail.
Fry, although part-Jewish, gay and quite possibly Britain’s luvviest luvvie, is also a swooning devotee of Richard Wagner, famed composer, white supremacist and favorite of Hitler. Can one really appreciate great art by morally questionable people? Or does such enthusiam make one an apologist for their fouler aspects? How to separate the two? Such is the problem that director Patrick McGrady tackles with the help of Fry, for whom squaring the Nazi poster boy with his wondrous music has been a lifelong challenge – one he confronts by traveling to the Wagnerian mecca of Bayreuth to talk with classic-music experts and Holocaust survivors. But while the documentary offers some insights into the pervertion of art for ideological purposes, too much of it simply finds Fry standing in dumbfounded awe of the holy sites that populate his journey.
Tracing the creation of masterpieces like “Parsifal” and the “Ring” cycle, Fry explores Wagner’s virulent anti-Semitism and Hitler’s co-optation of his music during the Third Reich. In the process he alternates between aesthetic rapture and moral repulsion.
The film is framed by the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, an event so popular that reservations are often booked seven years in advance. Mr. Fry, a thoughtful, genial presence, watches rehearsals for a production of the “Ring” cycle; talks to a great-granddaughter of the composer; and recounts the origin of Festspielhaus, the theater built for Wagner’s operas by his patron King Ludwig II. “Before I take my seat in the festival house,” Mr. Fry says, “I need to feel sure I’m doing the right thing.”
Mr. Fry follows the composer’s path to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland; the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg; and the Villa Wesendonck in Zurich (where he watches a lovely performance of Wagner’s “Träume”). The director, Patrick McGrady, gracefully alternates interviews and biographical passages with stirring lyrical musical sequences.
Wagner envisioned an opera audience devoid of class divisions and had a utopian desire to combine disciplines into a total work of art, a gesamtkunstwerk. This idealism sharply contrasted with his prejudice, manifested in an 1850 screed he wrote called “Jewishness in Music,” which castigated Jews as unfit for the art form. As explanation (if not absolution), Mr. Fry cites Wagner’s resentment of the Jewish composers Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, both superstars in his day.
But the Wagner scholar Chris Walton suggests that just because Wagner may have been “a nasty little anti-Semite doesn’t mean that his music is not as supreme as it is. ”
Hitler — who was embraced by Wagner’s relatives and became a Bayreuth patron as chancellor — would whistle tunes from “Die Meistersinger” to his guests. But Mr. Fry, though circumspect, will not be swayed by the associations.
“I’m afraid Hitler and Nazism have stained Wagner,” he says dolefully. “For some people that stain ruins the whole work; for others, it is just something you have to face up to.”
Wagner & Me opens on Friday New York, no Los Angeles date has yet been scheduled.
Wagner & Me. Directed by Patrick McGrady; narrated by Stephen Fry. Released by First Run Features. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. This film is not rated.
