“Liebeste” and co
Wagner-Musik lets films fly
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Bayreuth is over for 2025, but Wagner is available in many places. Also in films with Leonardo DiCaprio and Charlie Chaplin, in end-time and revenge thrillers the huge music is used.
The Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth are over this year and celebrate 150th birthday next year. But of course you can also hear and experience Wagner somewhere else.
Great emotions, dramatic power, moving leitmotifs: Richard Wagner’s music seems to be created for the cinema. Hundreds of film scores use Wagner-Werke.
For example, the funeral march from the “goddom” in the cinema “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011) occurs and the famous WalkUne ride, which, in addition to the bridal choir from “Lohengrin”, belongs to Wagner’s best -known melodies, in the classic “The Blues Brothers” (1980) in a chase.
A few examples where a Wagner, for example in the home cinema, can meet:
“Promising Young Woman” (2020)
In the director’s debut of the then 35-year-old Emerald Fennell (“Saltburn”), the question of whether it is really true that most men are “good boys” and where the boundaries between good and evil actually run. Fennell rightly won the Oscar for the best original script.
Carey Mulligan plays a traumatized young woman named Cassandra (once a promising) in medical studies. She now works in a café and goes into bars, plays drunk there to attract men, and then take revenge with them the rape experiences of her dead best friend. In a scene of the “Me Too” thriller, Cassie travels on the car of an outrageous man, strikes wild on his truck. In addition, “prelude and love death” from the opera “Tristan and Isolde”. Big cinema.
Lars from Trier also used “Tristan and Isolde”: Kirsten Dunst plays a depressive woman in the end of the world “Melancholia”. In contrast to her lively sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine hardly struggles with the upcoming end of the world through the collision of the earth with another planet. Von Trier mainly uses the prelude to the opera. The Tristan chord in its longing tension seems to put the longing for death of the main character perfectly.
“William Shakespeares Romeo + Julia” (1996)
BAZ Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge”, “The Great Gatsby”) demonstrated early on to be able to perfectly combine pictures and music. This Shakespeare interpretation, which can be interpreted as a reflection on violence and modern media, also ends with the famous tragic situation of the lovers. Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) mourns the supposedly dead Julia in the crypt and drinks poison. Julia (Claire Danes) awakens, but it’s too late. She sees her lover from grief for her and shoots herself with Romeo’s pistol. In addition, the “love death” runs from “Tristan and Isolde”. The term love death in times with greater sensitivity to suicide behavior: of course far too glossy.
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Ride of the Valkyries” is the name for the orchestra foreplay for the third act of opera “Die Valküre”. It belongs to the overall work “The Ring des Nibelungen”, which Wagner “stage festival gave for three days and a evening before”, whereby the opera “The Rheingold” forms the previous evening, followed by “Walküre”, “Siegfried” and “Dawn”.
In his anti-war film “Apocalypse Now”, Francis Ford Coppola is ambiguously protecting the technical fascination and the physical and psychological horror of the Vietnam War, and actually every war, with helicopters, bombs and the driving wide-off sound. An inferno in the palm paradise.
“The big dictator” (1940)
During the Nazi era, Wagner’s music was used for propaganda. Around 90 years ago in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary “Triumph of the will”, which is more of an NSDAP party) film film and “wake up” from the opera “The Meistersinger von Nuremberg”. Wagner’s sound -powerful sound language often served the National Socialists, Thomas Mann even called the Bayreuth Festival House “Hitler’s court theater”.
The visual Charlie Chaplin made fun of all of the. As early as 1940, he mimmered the anti -Jewish tyrant Anton Hynkel (English: adenoid hynkel) in his satire “The Great Dictator”.
He parodies the Wagner cult in one of the best scenes in film history: Hynkel dances to the shimmering “Lohengrin” prelude with a globe in his study. He hopped around with dedication and self -sunk. He juggles megalomaniac with the globe – until it bursts.
dpa
Source: Stern

I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.