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Despite his conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’), Richard Wagner died shortly before the inception of cinema, thus ensuring that any future Gesamtkunstwerks would have at least one more art form to potentially incorporate than he ever did. While many a film score’s use of leitmotifs would eventually grow out of his wake, cinematic adaptations of Wagner musikdramas (or, for that matter, any opera) are rarer on the ground. Attending the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival may be out of reach for most people reading this description, but Spectacle is pleased to offer a chance to see two rarely-screened Wagner kino adaptations. A one-time film director adapts the first mature Wagner work in Joachim Herz’s 1964 East German production of THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, and an arthouse legend adapts the last in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1982 West German production of PARSIFAL. Despite the contrasts, both utilize all the possibilities of cinema to create Gesamtkunstwerks for a post-Wagner world - right down to both needing to reckon with how his anti-Semitism had influenced the Nazis. Channel your inner Ludwig II and be a patron of Wagner’s arts this August at Spectacle.
Special thanks to Ruben Schwaben (DEFA Film Library) and Viviana Kammel (Filmgalerie 451).