A life as dramatic as an opera for Wagner

NOT every life warrants a film of seven hours and 46 minutes, but not every life was as dramatic as Richard Wagner’s. The British film director, Tony Palmer, cast Richard Burton in the title role of the epic biopic, Wagner, which was shot over seven months and released in 1983. It will be screened, with two breaks, as part of this year’s Cork Film Festival.

Wagner led a picaresque life. Two hundred years after his birth, in Leipzig, Germany, he remains the most controversial opera composer, because of his anti-Semitism (possibly due to rivalry with more successful, contemporary Jewish composers, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer) and his music’s later association with Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

Wagner’s life — revolutionary politics and exile, on the run from debtors and cuckolded husbands, court intrigue, depression and dysentery, and a monumental canon of work, including the four-opera Ring cycle — is a filmmaker’s dream.