Pitching my Wagner movie in my pyjamas

A movie with a Wagner theme. Not the story of the composer's life. British director Tony Palmer took that on over a decade ago with mixed results. (How can a film on such a flawed, complicated genius be anything other than flawed and complicated?)

No, I want to adapt a big, funny love story about a bass-baritone who longs to sing the great role of Wotan, and find true love in the process. Forgive the Hollywood logline but I've been practising those all week and that's the best I can do. I had a script, I had a one page synopsis but the biggest hurdle turned out to be reducing a 480 page novel that had become a 120 page script and gone on to be a two paragraph synopsis into less than 25 words.

And I'm doing it with that nagging sense that anyone who looks at this will snigger - Wagner? Opera? Not a hope in hell. I like to respond that "Amadeus" took on Mozart and Salieri (who?) and swept the Oscars. Or that a movie about a band of geriatric musicians in Cuba packed them in across the planet.

But Wagner? Oh my, the associations are so toxic. My bass-baritone, Leo, knows that. So do the musicians he works with. In the original novel, he says to his new love, Rose: "I think it would have been very difficult to have been a singer when he was alive, to know that he was such an obnoxious man and yet to want to be part of that extraordinary music. It's easier now that he is dust." So "now that he is dust," I want to pitch my "wildly romantic, acerbically funny" (said the book blurb) story to movie producers.

I know that with its mix of big romance and daffy English eccentrics, I'm putting a foot in Merchant-Ivory country (think "Howards End" or "Room with a View".) And with the "ordinary woman meets world's greatest singer", I'm on "Notting Hill" territory.

I've got snow, I've got great love and I've got that glorious final scene of Die Walkure when Wotan bids farewell to Brunnhilde. I believe that if that theme weaves in and out of the story, people who fear Wagner as "heavy", "difficult" etc will discover the ecstasy that this music induces in people. National Review editor, Jay Nordlinger, called that passage the greatest piece of music ever written.

I recall a Covent Garden Ring with Haitink conducting in the Gotz Friedrich production. James Morris sang Wotan. There's a passage just after "freier als ich der gott," where the music leads us into a rapture that does not quite relate to the dramatic action or lyrics. But by then we don't care. On that day (it was a general rehearsal) I walked out the Royal Opera House not quite sure that my feet were anywhere near the ground. I wasn't alone. A couple of flute players from the orchestra wanted to go for a drink but both said they needed to be pulled off the ceiling before they could make it to the pub.Next thing I knew it was 3 hours later and I was in the coffee shop at the Royal Festival Hall - with no real idea how I got there. Wagner will do that. It scares some people because he reaches down and unleashes very deep emotions.


And that's what I want to put into my story but by making my protagonist a wise compassionate man, perhaps I can move Wagner away from a lot of the ugliness that has surrounded him.

Still, pitching this movie is not going to be easy. So when an email dropped into my inbox from Virtual Pitch Fest last week suggesting that I "pitch in my pyjamas" I couldn't resist. For a small fee, with the low dollar, I can pitch a dozen producers, agents and managers in Hollywood -all from the comfort of wherever my laptop has landed. I don't own pyjamas but I donned my red fleece dressing gown, my free towelling slippers from some hotel or the other, poured a glass of wine and here, looking out on the daffodils in Ealing, West London, began pitching. It's 5 am in Los Angeles. I suppose some hyper-active loony is headed for the gym but in theory, the 'Coast' is still deep in slumber. We'll see what they have to say.

Cosima Wagner's Diaries - Richard Wagner preferred blondes

Cosima Wagner's diaries are an intimidating read. In their original form they comprised 21 notebooks - kept in a Munich bank vault for years then transported to Bayreuth under police escort on 12 March 1974. Over a million words record what her beloved Richard ate and drank, when and where he walked, when he worked, what he said, when he dreamed and what he thought. And this was a man who had an opinion, alas, on everything.

The diaries stop dead when he died of a heart attack in Venice on February 13th 1883. Cosima held the dead Wagner in her arms for 24 hours. Then she accompanied the body back to Bayreuth for burial. She would live on for another 44 years but she never wrote another word.

Unconditional love of another human being does not make for happiness. Cosima adores her man but oh my she suffers. She has serious problems with her sight - not easy for a dedicated writer, and she longs endlessly and often rather casually for death. She suffers but very ambiguously from her man's infidelities - cryptic mentions are made of her own unhappiness during his dalliance with novelist Judith Gautier. At the end she suspected a liaison with Parsifal flower girl, Carrie Pringle.

But there is a surprisingly cosy side to the Wagners' life. They dance around the Christmas tree, gossip over coffee at lunch. She is awoken one night by "Richard in a purple night shirt, wandering around looking for his cheque book." He brings in a hairdresser to dye her hair blonde. Cosima comments that she is happy to go grey but Richard likes her blonde.

Wagner often travels by train and, compulsive communicator that he was, sends telegrams from every railway station. So, in the 19th century, instant communication almost rivalled today's emails. Imagine if this man had been around today. We'd have all been trembling as we opened Outlook Express. "Oh blimey! More spam from Richard!"

Wagner, King Ludwig and Bavaria

Wagner had, unsurprisingly, immense physical energy and, like his predecessors Beethoven and Schubert, he spent many hours hiking in the woods and mountains of his native Germany. Later, when he was based in Switzerland he walked the Alps with Frederick Nietzche.

In The Ring of the Nibelung, he takes us through the forests, along the rivers and up to otherwordly summits to which both his imagination and his immense physical stamina had led him. He has a festival dedicated entirely to his work in Bayreuth which nestles in the gentle hills not far from Nuremberg. But a traveller in search of the natural world that inspired The Ring, Lohengrin, Tannhauser and Tristan will also find it in the land and castles of Wagner’s patron Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Wagner was living in Stuttgart and was, as ever, up to his eyes in debt when Ludwig sent his secretary to summons the creator of Lohengrin to his presence. Suspecting a creditor’s ruse to gain access to him, Wagner refused to see the man. When he finally agreed, a chapter in his life opened up that left even Wagner, with his grandiose self-image, dazed. He was soon staying at the king’s residence at Hohenschwangau where the mythical world of his operas helped feed the fantasy world of a monarch who already had considerable problems facing reality.

Wagner was now in a position at the Bavarian court where he could order Wagnerian motifs to be played from the turrets in the morning. He had royal greetings performed by oboists of the First Infantry regiment and pulled off his greatest coup when he recreated Lohengrin’s Arrival for the king alone. On a cool November evening in 1865 a shimmering figure emerged from the mist of the lake below Ludwig’s castle. Wagner had arranged for the adjutant general to dress as Lohengrin and sail across the Alpsee in a boat pulled by a small skiff covered by a wooden swan. A delighted Ludwig ordered a repeat performance.

Wagner’s piano still stands in a room in the castle that overlooks the lake. On a winter’s day when tourists are few, snow covers the pines, the Alpsee is frozen and Ludwig’s dream castle Neuschwanstein drifts in and out of the mists, then, in a quiet moment, the true spirit of the composer can be felt as myth and nature entwine.

Wagner, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Clint Eastwood

Here in Britain, Citroen have fallen back on the tired old Ride of the Walkyries for their latest promotion. So Wagner gets an outing, riding, as usual, with his warrior-woman creations. But he's appeared in some more surprising places over the past few years. How could one ever connect Jerry Seinfeld and his relentlessly unromantic Manhattan life of obsessive trivia with Wagner? The link turns out to be Seinfeld co-creator, Larry David. His "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode "Trick or Treat" opens with Larry whistling the Siegfried Idyll for his wife, and explaining to her the work's romantic background. Richard Wagner wrote it for his wife, Cosima, to mark the birth of their first son, Siegfried. He wanted to surprise her on her 25 December birthday so he arranged for a small orchestra to come to the Swiss villa where they were living. The musicians lined themselves up on the stairs outside her bedroom and woke her with this gentle, lyrical work. Larry David, of all people,knew this and explained it to Cheryl.


In the "Trick or Treat" episode, he is overheard by a militant Jewish neighbour who attacks his liking for this music as anti-semitism. After a typical CYE tangle of outrageous events and loud arguments - this time involving Halloween and toilet paper - Larry takes his revenge on the neighbour by stationing himself outside the man's house at dawn and conducting The Meistersinger overture. As my Canadian friends would say: "Larry David and Wagner - who'd have thunk?"

Dozing the other night in front of a Clint Eastwood movie , "Absolute Power", on the tv, I suddenly heard the Tannhauser overture. The movie told a convoluted tale of a burglar, Clint who witnesses a corrupt US president, Hackman, stand by while his security men murder his mistress. Ed Harris is cast as the world-weary detective called in to investigate. In one of those, "lonely cop with feelings and intellect," scene, that I thought was reserved for Inspector Morse, Harris is show, home alone, pondering the case to the accompaniment of Wagner's Tannhauser.