Lisztomania

In looking through the backlog of films I've got posts written about but haven't actually posted here, I notice that the next few in terms of when I watched them are similar in tone to other movies I've fairly recently blogged about. With that in mind I decided to elevate a post about a completely different movie, Lisztomania.

The title is a portmanteau of the composer Franz Liszt, played here by Roger Daltrey of the progressive rock band The Who; and the -mania suffix, the word having been coined by 19th century German writer Heinrich Heine because apparently people went wild over the composer and his piano playing. In theory the movie is a biopic, but it's a rather fanciful one, and deliberately letting us in on the idea that the movie doesn't have so much basis in reality.

The movie starts off with Liszt trying to bed a woman who was not his wife, but instead married to another man. That man finds the two together and threatens to kill Liszt. But the man's wife doesn't want to be left without Franz, so hubby puts the two together inside a grand piano and leaves the piano on railroad tracks! It's just the first of many odd scenes that go back and forth through the composer's life.

We then flash back to a young Liszt meeting some of the other great composers of the era, notably Richard Wagner (Paul Nicholas), this being notable because Liszt's daughter Cosima would go on to marry Wagner. Much later in the movie, Liszt meets Wagner again, this time in a scene that plays on Wagner's noted anti-semitism as well as his Aryan sensibilities.

Liszt also spens time in Russia, where he's been asked to give a command performance for Tsar Nicholas I. There, he meets Princess Carolyn (Sara Kestelman), who would go on to be a major influence on Liszt for the rest of his life. Carolyn's influence is also seen as sexual, in a sequence that never would have been able to have been filmed just a few years earlier.

It goes on like this, in a bunch of increasingly bizarre scenes that may or may not fit together. It wasn't until after watching that I realized that the director of Lisztomania, Ken Russell, had also made The Boy Friend a few years earlier. That one is also a fantasy musical, albeit one that's a bit more grounded in reality than Lisztomania. If you're a fan of classical music, you may be horrified by Lisztomania as in many ways it's almost blasphemous in its treatment of Liszt's life, and the movie is really more about the idea of how celebrity can warp people than it is about classical music.

It would also help if you liked The Boy Friend, which I think is an easier movie to get into. I didn't hate The Boy Friend, but it certainly wasn't my favorite. I'm also a fan of more traditional classical music, so Lisztomania was decidedly outré for me. But give it a try; you just might like it.