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"A comic strip in 7 episodes on the life of Richard Strauss 1864-1949." Ken Russell opens with Also Sprach Zarathustra and readily settles matters with Kubrick, the composer (Christopher Gable) out of the cave and into the rocky world. "The dead end of mankind" or just a beginning, bloodied flagellators and groping nuns swirl in the woods, the bacchanalia primeval. Stroheim's Don Juan at the opera house, to be "constantly under attack" is the artist's condition. "Did I detect among these detractors the voice of the Hebrew? I did." Macbeth and Don Quixote, sundry models and guises, the creation of an ample Salome who's "too much even for the Kaiser." (The Powell-Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann is a stylistic mainstay.) Idyll and war, the swastika that crushes the plaster Madonna. Strike up the band to drown out the mutilated Jew, the "gay romp with Adolph and Eva at Berchtesgaden" here includes piggyback rides. "Of course, I never came to terms with the Nazi. It was they who came to terms with me." Russell is the manic conductor in the dream symphony, confronting both subject and audience with the folly of separating art and politics. Top-hatted critics point and chortle, the weaponized horn section has them with their heads stuck up tubas (cp. Tchaikovsky's cannonade in The Music Lovers). Old age is an unglued mask, a bit of Wellesian mimesis for the decrepit Übermensch to rip out, to the end sure of his "indefatigable desire to elevate German culture." BBC and the Strauss heirs did not receive this gladly, but Syberberg certainly did. With Judith Paris, Kenneth Colley, Vladek Sheybal, James Mellor, and Imogen Claire.
--- Fernando F. Croce |