Even now, Richard Wagner (1813-83) remains an enigma. His was a rags-to-riches saga with a fairy tale ending. He was loved yet hated, admired yet despised, a villain yet a hero who was worshipped, a man whose fame and exploits were the gossip of Europe. Above all, he was an incurable romantic whose love affair with Liszt's illegitimate daughter rivals that of Romeo and Juliet in excitement and drama.
But, he was also a dangerous political revolutionary whose influence penetrated the whole fabric of German society in the nineteenth century and has continued to do so ever since. He was a scoundrel, joker, philosopher, con-man, poet, refugee, virulent political orator, a legend in his own lifetime, and one of the greatest composers who has ever lived.
Only an actor of the stature of the late Richard Burton could measure up to the titanic character of Wagner and, in his last major screen appearance, he met the most artistically challenging and physically demanding assignment of his career. He captures perfectly the complex mixture of arrogance, selfishness, tenderness and obsession in Wagner's make-up.
The composer's story contains all the ingredients for a sustaining drama: a dissolute youth spent avoiding endless creditors; a tempestuous first marriage to the ambitious Minna Planer; his involvement in the Dresden political scene of the 1840s; subsequent years on the run from the German authorities; a passionate affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a generous admirer; a similarly passionate affair and a subsequent marriage to Cosima von Bülow; limitless, if not excessive, patronage by the mad, homosexual Ludwig II of Bavaria; and every obsessive artist's dream of an eloquent death in watery Venice.