Wagner: Unlikely hero

He was curmudgeonly, grasping and anti-Semitic, but film-makers just can't leave Wagner – or his music – alone. Geoffrey Macnab reports

Film-makers are attracted and repulsed by Richard Wagner in equal measure. On the one hand, the great German composer lives up to the ideal of the romantic revolutionary. He was forever challenging taboos, questioning accepted wisdom and railing against authority figures. His idea of Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork") is akin to the "total cinema" that the British director Michael Powell tried to achieve with films like The Red Shoes, in which every aspect of film-making – from colour to design to costume to script – was seamlessly integrated.

On the other hand, Wagner was curmudgeonly and exploitative: cadging money from patrons whom he mocked, seducing other men's wives, pontificating about philosophy and politics, and (most notoriously) espousing anti-Semitic views.

"If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music," Harmony Korine (the director of Gummo and Julien Donkey Boy) says of him. "He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about."

If you like majestic noise on your soundtrack – a bit of Sturm und Drang – Wagner is your man. Francis Ford Coppola realised as much when he decided to have the psychopathic Kilgore (Robert Duvall) put on a tape of "The Ride of the Valkyries" during the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. ("We'll use Wagner," he says. "It scares the hell out of the spooks. My boys love it!")

And if you like trolls and giants and outlandish myths, Wagner is likewise a first point of reference. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is full of imagery that you might expect to find in a staging of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Conversely, for film-makers who really want to test themselves, Wagner remains one of the greatest challenges. French director Patrice Chéreau stepped into the lion's den in 1976, when he agreed to direct a 100th anniversary version of Wagner's Ring cycle in Bayreuth. The audience was bitterly divided. "On opening night there were bloody brawls, Wolfgang Wagner's new wife had her dress ripped and another woman had her earring torn off – and the earlobe with it. There were death threats and bomb threats; friendships and marriages were said to have been broken," writes Frederic Spotts in Bayreuth, A History of the Wagner Festival. Nonetheless, Chéreau (who set the drama in the Industrial Revolution rather than mythical olden times) earned huge plaudits simply for having had the courage to tackle Wagner on home ground.

The Danish director Lars Von Trier (of Breaking the Waves fame) signed up to direct Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 2006 but then decided it was more than he could manage. "I think about every day and every night. It is going to be enormous work," he said shortly before his shock resignation. In the end, even this most egotistical of directors had to admit that Wagner was beyond his powers.

To understand the repulsion that Wagner induces in certain audiences, you need only watch The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (1975), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's documentary about Wagner's English-born daughter-in-law, who ran the Bayreuth Festival between 1930 and 1944. She is a formidable figure: domineering, articulate, intelligent and doggedly loyal to her friends. The problem is the choice of friends.

"I was very much impressed by the magnetic personality of the man," Winifred blithely remarks of Adolf Hitler, whom she first met in the early Twenties. "I can separate him entirely from the man he is now accused of being," she tells Syberberg. "If Hitler were to come through that door, I would be just as glad to see him as ever. Once I have an attachment to a person, I stick by them through thick and thin."

It is hard not to think of Winifred's remarks when you watch Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen (1924). According to his biographer Patrick McGilligan, Lang detested Wagner's music "with even more passion than his usual dislike of classical music". Nonetheless, his film was much admired by the Nazis and is reported to have reduced Hitler to tears. "This German film was the favourite viewing of Hitler and Goebbels, dark-complexioned men who saw themselves as blond heroes of a heroic race," wrote the historian Lotte Eisner.

The imagery of the strapping, blond-haired Siegfried (Paul Richter), striking down dragons and bathing in their blood, can't help but take on a sinister resonance. Some of the footage of Siegfried communing with nature, racing through the forests or showing off his athleticism in his tussles with Brünnhilde, are uncannily similar to the documentary footage of sportsmen Leni Riefenstahl was later to shoot in Olympia (1936), her film of the "Hitler" Olympics. Meanwhile, it is hard to overlook the crudely anti-Semitic way in which the King of the Dwarves is portrayed. (He's like a cross between Oliver Twist's Fagin and Rumpelstilstskin.)

Wagner himself has best been portrayed on screen by British actors. Richard Burton plays him beautifully in Tony Palmer's lengthy biopic, Wagner (1983). In Burton's hands, Wagner comes across as a mercurial, self-obsessed figure. Neither exile nor poverty come close to shaking his amour-propre or his sense of his own genius. In keeping with its subject, Palmer's Wagner is a magnificent folly that must have cost a fortune to make. Almost eight hours long, it was shot on location in Germany, Austria, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, France, Switzerland and England, and seemed to employ most of Europe's best-known actors.

Trevor Howard offers a rather different interpretation of Wagner in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1972). Sporting some magnificent whiskers, he plays the German composer as a querulous and mercenary figure, only too delighted to fleece his new patron, the hyper-sensitive, gay, castle-building 19th-century king of Bavaria (Helmut Berger).

Incidentally, Visconti made Ludwig after The Damned (1969), his study of an ultra-decadent family of industrialists during the Nazi era. With its depiction of family feuding, death, betrayal and illicit sex, that film played like a grotesque, modern-day version of Die Nibelungen.

Wagner's influence on cinema is much more pervasive than you might expect. The very first film version of one of his operas, Parsifal, was begun by Thomas Edison in 1904 and an early biopic of him followed a few years later. Meanwhile, many Hollywood composers have drawn heavily on his music. The real measure of his influence is that it can be felt everywhere, from war movies like Apocalypse Now to the work of determinedly offbeat and experimental directors like Korine.

The Ring Cycle continues at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) to Friday