Lisztomania: the most embarrassing historical film ever made?

Wagner as Hitler, Ringo Starr as the pope, and an anatomical anomaly that suggests an unfortunate mishearing – this film just gets worse and worse

Lisztomania (1975)
Director: Ken Russell
Entertainment grade: Fail
History grade: Fail

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was a Hungarian composer. He became famous across Europe as a pianist.

Fame

Franz Liszt (Roger Daltrey) is at a party. "Liszt, my dear fellow!" says a fellow composer. "Oh, piss off, Brahms," Liszt sneers, and adds to his companion Richard Wagner (Paul Nicholas): "He's a right wanker." This is the high point of both intellectualism and wit in the film's dialogue. Afterwards, Liszt plays the piano to a throng of screaming teenagers. In the 1840s, long before Elvis, Beatlemania or Justin Bieber, Heinrich Heine coined the term "Lisztomania" to describe the hysteria of Liszt's fans. Women shrieked, swooned, took cuttings of his hair, collected the dregs from his coffee cups, and even kept the discarded stubs of his cigars between their bosoms.

Romance

In real life, Liszt took up with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein in 1848. In this film, she is a maniacal dominatrix bat-demon with inverted crosses dangling from her nipples. It's something of a one-sided portrayal. Liszt dons a crinoline and plucks a lyre. Sex-crazed women grab at his skirts. He develops an erection bigger than himself. As his member nears eight feet in length, evil Princess Carolyne prepares a guillotine for it. This isn't an attempt at historical accuracy: just an alarming glimpse into director Ken Russell's mind. Or possibly he misheard someone describing Liszt as Europe's biggest pianist. Lisztomania may be the most embarrassing historical film ever made. Wait! It gets worse.

People

Wagner gloats that his music will bring forth "a man of iron, to forge the shattered fragments of this century into a nation of steel". He grows fangs, bites Liszt on the neck, sucks his blood, then snogs his daughter Cosima. The real Cosima Liszt left her husband for Wagner, though it didn't happen like this and nobody was a vampire. Liszt and Carolyne try to get married, but the pope is having none of it. The pope is a little beardy bloke with a heavy Scouse accent. Good grief. The pope is Ringo Starr. Since he can't marry Carolyne, Liszt takes religious orders. Pope Ringo sends him to exorcise Wagner.

Politics

Wagner – dressed, in a painful literalisation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, as Superman, complete with red cape – strums an electric guitar and sings about restoring the Teutonic godhead. Like Dr Frankenstein, he has created a monster. It is Rick Wakeman (who himself created the monstrous prog-rock soundtrack), done up as Thor. In real life, Nietzsche broke his friendship with Wagner over the religious tone of the composer's opera, Parsifal. Wagner's revenge was to tell Nietzsche's doctor that the philosopher's headaches were caused by excessive masturbation. A condition one would imagine the makers of this film understood only too well.

Prejudice

Wagner was a great composer and a nasty piece of work. He was outspokenly anti-semitic, and it is hardly a mitigating factor that many others in the music world at the time also held these obnoxious views to some degree. Liszt's own feelings about Jewish people, while not so actively hateful, weren't exactly friendly either. Still, Lisztomania goes a bit far in blaming the existence of Nazism and the rise of Adolf Hitler entirely on Wagner. He died in 1883, six years before Hitler was born.

War

Wagner is squished beneath his own castle. During his funeral, he rises from his swastika-embossed tomb. In case you haven't yet absorbed Ken Russell's silly point that Wagner is Hitler, Wagner is now actually dressed as Hitler. His electric guitar turns into a machine gun and he rampages around the city, killing Jews. It's played for laughs. It doesn't get any. Liszt – who is also now dead – climbs into a heavenly spaceship, flies back to earth and laser-explodes Zombie Vampire Hitler Wagner. The end. Thank goodness.

Verdict

Can't think what went wrong with this one. Nineteenth-century composer plus a spaceship, comedy zombie Hitler, Pope Ringo, and a giant penis: it must have sounded so good on paper.

Contributor

Alex von Tunzelmann

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Tom Service on Ken Russell's Lisztomania

Tom Service: Wagner as the antichrist, Ringo Starr playing the pope - I can't wait to see Ken Russell's 1974 tribute to musical romanticism

Tom Service

30, Apr, 2009 @1:20 PM

Article image
Samson and Delilah: a good effort at biblical sex and violence

Alex von Tunzelmann: Cecil B DeMille's film does justice to the tale of lust and betrayal, despite the stuffed lion and bouncing temple stones

Alex von Tunzelmann

20, Jun, 2013 @9:00 AM

Article image
Testament of Youth: battles of Brittain make for moving biopic
Taking us from her conservative rural girlhood to the agonies of war, this film of Vera Brittain’s memoir twists the facts to fine if heavy-handed effect, says Alex von Tunzelmann

Alex von Tunzelmann

17, Dec, 2014 @12:23 PM

Article image
Grace of Monaco - historically accurate? You've got some de Gaulle

The adherence to fact is as weak as the rest of Olivier Dahan's tale of Grace Kelly's princess years

Alex von Tunzelmann

04, Jun, 2014 @10:00 AM

Article image
Nicholas and Alexandra: mashing up history can't make this pair lovable

Alex von Tunzelmann: Trying to humanise pigheaded royals running full-tilt towards death is a tough call. Luckily the other side weren't much better

Alex von Tunzelmann

14, Jun, 2013 @9:04 AM

Article image
Mr Turner: the fine art of historical biography
Mike Leigh’s impeccably researched, beautifully filmed but dull film has to join the dots in order to describe the private life of the highly secretive painter, writes Alex von Tunzelmann

Alex von Tunzelmann

06, Nov, 2014 @9:06 AM

Article image
Raging Bull: an undisputed historical heavyweight

Martin Scorsese's 1980 masterpiece squeezes in the brilliance, the charisma and the paranoia of Jake LaMotta without chaining itself to every point of fact, writes Alex von Tunzelmann

Alex von Tunzelmann

09, May, 2013 @11:41 AM

Article image
A Little Chaos: leads historical accuracy down the garden path
Alan Rickman’s historical romance, about the landscape architect to the Palace of Versailles, is a limp, aimless film without any feel for 17th-century speech or manners

Alex von Tunzelmann

23, Apr, 2015 @11:26 AM

Article image
Scrap accuracy – give me Ringo Starr as the pope: the 10 quirkiest historical films
From John Wayne as Genghis Khan to 1776’s catchy showtunes about dysentery … here’s my favourite examples of movies which have played fast and loose with historical truth

Alex von Tunzelmann

30, Sep, 2015 @12:13 PM

Article image
Top 10 musicals

Musicals have been tap dancing their way into moviegoers' hearts since the invention of cinema sound itself. From Oliver! to Singin' in the Rain, here are the Guardian and Observer critics' picks of the 10 best

03, Dec, 2013 @12:51 PM