Poorly composed fan doco
The Age
Thursday March 3, 2011
WAGNER AND ME (G) Rating: 2/5 Selected cinemas (89 minutes) AT LEAST the title of this wildly disappointing Stephen Fry documentary a longer version of a TV show is accurate enough. Wagner and Me is a fan-boy story. Fry is a hardcore Wagnerite and has been since childhood, and he cheerfully plays up the notion of excessive devotion. But he does the subject of his passion no favours; this lightweight work is unlikely to win any converts to his cause.It is all swoon and no substance, even when Fry is trying to grapple with a significant question: how to reconcile Wagner's musical achievements with his strong anti-Semitism and the way in which his work was incorporated into Nazi mythology.Some of Fry's ancestors died in the Holocaust can he go to a performance at Bayreuth, to the heart of the Wagner cult, in the footsteps of Hitler, the composer's most notorious admirer? Visiting the site of the Nuremberg rally, Fry hesitates. But the answer is a foregone conclusion, he ignores Bayreuth and its contested family legacy, and the matters he canvasses the operas, Wagner's history, new attitudes to the work are swamped in gush.
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