This monumental biopic is perfectly adapted to Wagner's own pretentiousness, vanity and abominable egoism - it is as interminable as his operas, it is about nine hours long which is a bit too much and too long for a film and actually double the length of Wagner's longest opera. It is beautifully made, there is a magnificent team of all the greatest contemporary actors, but what does all that help when the subject is so utterly revolting? It is worth watching though for all those victims of Wagner, his wife, outrageously maltreated by him from the start, the king whom he ruined, his best friend Hans von Bülow whose wife he took for his own, and shame to say the biopic is rather one-sided to his favour while it omits many vital ingredients, like the anger of both Liszt and Bülow for his seduction of Bülow's wife, (Bülow actually wanted to challenge him to a deadly duel, which the film ignores,) and many other such details. Visconti's film "Ludwig" ten years earlier was more correct, and so was the Wagner film with Alan Badel "Magic Fire" (1956) which included Liszt's great anger and did not conceal the fact that Wagner was a most abominable character. This film is at least truthful enough to reveal his unbearable vanity. Fortunately there was also Verdi who was his opposite in everything, who actually admired Wagner but who Wagner despized and abused like everyone else.
