The Zurich Affair – Wagner’s One and Only LoveA film by Jens Neubert (2021)Mathilde Wesendonck – Sophie Auster
Richard Wagner – Joonas Saartamo
Minna Wagner – Julienne Pfeil
Otto Wesendonck – Rüdiger Hauffe
Filming locations and dates not supplied
Naxos NBD0170V Blu-ray [116]
The Zurich Affair is a feature film set in the mid-19th century that purports to tell the story of Richard Wagner’s relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck during the time he spent in the Swiss city as a political exile from Germany. The surviving historical evidence is scant and, therefore, insufficient to indicate whether or not the two of them actually had a full-blown physical affair. Nevertheless, we cannot necessarily assume that they didn’t. After all, when lovers want to conceal their liaison from their respective spouses, they generally ensure that they carefully destroy as much proof of their adultery as possible. As you might well expect from a film made in the 21st century, A Zurich affair comes down decidedly on the side of physicality. One particular scene shows Wagner seizing an opportunity to make a sudden grab for the clearly-not-unwilling-to-be-manhandled Frau Wesendonck and, while nothing more explicit is shown on screen, filmmaker Jens Neubert leaves us to imagine, if we care to do so, what might have happened next…
Neubert’s film is decidedly less ambiguous in its depiction of Wagner as self-centred and selfish. He’s the sort of man who, when his wife Minna is ill, literally picks her up and pops her behind a curtain so that her moans of pain won’t disturb his composing. While neglecting his spouse, he is simultaneously obsessed with the young Mathilde, the wife of a rich patron – although even that, we might note, doesn’t prevent him opportunistically eyeing up the young, attractive and, once again, already-married Cosima von Bülow as a future prospect.
Mathilde Wesendonck’s husband Otto is, meanwhile, an equally selfish character, though his particular brand of self-absorption is centred on his business affairs. Already a wealthy trader in silk, he invests not only in the project to construct the Suez Canal but also in Wagner’s compositions, the copyrights of which he buys up. Obsessed by his plans for his new Zurich villa – a lavish pile in which even the entrance hall boasts a Bellini, a Raphael and a Tintoretto – he is another man who is emotionally distanced from his wife. She, the dreamy but somewhat vacuous Mathilde, is, as depicted here, often little more than an elegant clothes horse whose motivations are left somewhat unclear. Wagner himself characterises her as “a white sheet of paper that needs to be inscribed”, an image that the film’s script references twice, just to make sure that we register the point. Matters come to a dramatic climax when, with both Otto and Minna increasingly aware of their spouses’ affair, an incriminating note written by Mathilde to Richard falls into Minna’s hands. To avoid an open scandal, Otto, a man who considers that cash can fix any of life’s difficulties, takes Mathilde off to Italy and gives Wagner money to leave Zurich for good.
The Zurich affair has more than a few things going for it. It is undeniably, for instance, a film that’s been beautifully shot. The settings – a succession of Alpine meadows backed by dramatic mountain ranges, gorgeous lakes, picturesque olde worlde city streets and palatial mansions with lavishly decorated interiors – are expertly chosen and very easy on the eye. Meanwhile, a well put-together soundtrack also offers us the opportunity to enjoy some brief snatches of Wagner, Beethoven and Liszt, during which the accomplished baritone Michael Volle giving viewers a flavour of Wagner’s writing for the voice (he also hosts the disc’s 11 minutes’ long bonus feature, showing us a few of the story’s Zurich locations as they are today).
Not only Michael Volle but all the other actors look good on screen, too. Joonas Saartamo (who apparently moonlights as a well-known hip-hop artist under the names Jonde and Alarik) has been very effectively made up to resemble a middle-aged Wagner, while Rüdiger Hauffe, as Otto, looks the very image of the Victorian paterfamilias (think César Franck). While the women’s costumes feature particularly handsome fabrics, patterns and colours, the men’s accurately convey the styles of the – quite literally – buttoned-up Victorian era. Indeed, the occasional prurient sight of naked flesh, virtually obligatory in a modern film, comes as something of a cultural shock, as when Otto strips to the waist while dressing or when, in an episode that’s entirely irrelevant to the plot, an equally bare-chested Richard wades out of a lake after an invigorating morning swim.
That particular Colin Firth-like moment isn’t The Zurich affair’s only instance of cinematic silliness. There’s the risible sight (not, to be fair, one confined to this particular film) of a character reading a letter aloud while they are the only person present in the room. Yes, I realise that the audience needs to know what the letter says, but a more intelligent scenario would have found another, more believable way to achieve that. There are instances, too, where Wagner – who is, it appears, is, in addition everything else, a conductor of the highest genius – instantaneously transforms the sound of an orchestra or a choir by the simplest of technical tweaks, thereby rendering, at a stroke, the whole concept of lengthy and laborious rehearsals utterly redundant. No wonder that Zurich’s municipal choir subsequently awards him Honourable (shouldn’t that be Honorary?) Membership!
I can, however, live with a few minor quibbles like those. Far more concerning are fundamental issues concerning the film’s script and the way in which it’s delivered. The dialogue itself is often somewhat stilted and, quite apart from when they feel the need to read a letter aloud to an otherwise empty room, characters are often prone to come out with none-too-subtle passages of factual exposition. OK, I accept that there are pieces of background information that we, the 21st century audience, will need to be made aware of from time to time. Nevertheless, skilful scriptwriting can surely find better ways of conveying it than having one character tell another something which you’d quite reasonably expect them to know already. To be fair, there are a few scenes where, in almost Shakespearean fashion, a few otherwise unimportant characters are introduced to keep us viewers up to speed. A couple of somewhat comic handymen, for instance, occasionally interrupt their work on the Wesendoncks’ villa to offer a running commentary on what’s going on – though the relevance of their prurient report that Wagner is suffering from a bad case of haemorrhoids seems pretty questionable. Similarly, there’s a group of ladies-who-lunch who appear occasionally to act almost in the manner of Macbeth’s witches or a Greek chorus. Odd though they are, using such devices more frequently might, perhaps, have imposed less of an information-conveying burden on the leading actors and thereby rendered their own dialogue more informal and believable.
Given the script’s own issues, The Zurich affair needs its cast to deliver performances with sufficient strength and conviction to carry the day regardless. That itself brings to the fore the question of the language in which the film has been made. With the exception of a few passages in Swiss German – a language so idiosyncratic, it seems, that its speakers are routinely subtitled even for German television – The Zurich affair has been shot in English. There are obvious commercial reasons for that decision, although it is worth pointing out that modern audiences, faced with the proliferation of internationally-produced dramas on both cable and terrestrial TV, appear pretty comfortable with both subtitling and dubbing. Indeed, it’s a well-documented phenomenon that even native English-speakers, when confronted with obtrusive background music or local or specialised vocabulary or dialect, are increasingly switching on English subtitles during English-language TV these days. Without them, for instance, I wouldn’t have understood much of the apparently authentic drug-dealers’ lingo used in the award-winning American cop series The wire.
If, however, you go down the route of making an English-speaking production, you also need to ensure that your leading actors have a degree of proficiency sufficient to ensure that their delivery of dialogue doesn’t draw unwitting attention to itself. Unfortunately, in the case of The Zurich affair, the no doubt accomplished actors in the leading roles – variously an American, a Finn, a Swiss and an East German – have come from very diverse linguistic backgrounds. With the exception of the American Sophie Auster, I assume that all of them speak English as a second language and that simple fact results in at least a couple of less than optimal side effects.
In the first place, some of the cast, lacking the innate relaxed confidence of a native speaker, can be found delivering lines in a way that’s neither natural nor colloquial. Indeed, I was once or twice reminded of Queen Victoria’s observation that Prime Minister Gladstone “speaks to me as if I were a public meeting”. Portraying Wagner, Joonas Saartamo is, it has to be said, one of the more effective actors in most of his scenes. Once or twice, however, as when ranting to Liszt about his marital unhappiness or storming out of chez Wesendonck in a hissy fit, even he seems to forget that, in acting for the camera, less is almost always more (a point which ought surely to have been addressed head-on by the film’s director who bears responsibility for shaping and ultimately controlling the actors’ performances).
In the second place, non-native speakers may not necessarily have mastered all the idiomatic quirks of English pronunciation and the correct emphasis on particular syllables within words. Some of the cast, I have to say, are actually very accomplished in that respect. Thus, Patrick Rapold, who plays Liszt, clearly understands what he is saying and how to say it, delivering his lines with both subtlety and nuance. In fact, I had patronisingly assumed that he was an English actor until I looked him up and found that he was actually Swiss. I do have an issue, on the other hand, with Rüdiger Hauffe who takes the role of Otto. While he is no doubt a fine actor, Mr Hauffe’s unusual emphasis on individual syllables within certain English words can be somewhat problematic. Distractingly idiosyncratic delivery is the enemy of effective communication and, as Hauffe takes pretty much centre stage in the film’s earliest scenes, I quickly found myself concentrating on oddly-expressed individual words rather than on following the plot. Ironically enough, that particular issue might well have been resolved if English subtitles had been simultaneously available, but, even if you use the disc’s menu to supposedly switch them on, they still only pop up in in a few passages where characters are speaking Swiss-German.
If Mr Hauffe’s performance as Otto Wesendonck creates some distracting issues, so too does that of Sophie Auster as his wife. Brooklyn-born Ms Auster has a distinctly American accent that makes her stand out markedly from the rest of the leading cast members who all seem to be aiming for Received Pronunciation English, albeit with their own individual Teutonic/Nordic tinges. Another issue is the way in which either she or director Neubert has chosen to portray her character. For much of the film, Mathilde Wesendonck, who, in reality, we know to have been a poet and author of some accomplishment, comes across as a somewhat shallow individual. That, of course, fits in with the script’s repeated point about Wagner considering her “a white sheet of paper”. Nevertheless, given that his dialogue also suggests that his attraction to Mathilde is both intellectual and physical, the character’s rather vacuous on-screen personality leaves us uncertain as to why he picks out that particular white sheet as worthy of his attention in the first place.
I suspect that I ought to pause at this point in order to defend myself against any charges of Anglo-centrism aimed at me by readers who are not native English speakers. Let me stress that I am absolutely not calling for the film to have necessarily been made in English. Far from it. It was the producers of The Zurich affair who had already made that decision. As I hope I have already made clear, I would have been just as happy for it to have been made in German, Finnish, Swiss-German or whatever. The point is, however, that once you have taken your decision on a film’s language, you owe it to both your performers and your paying audience to maximise its chances of making its artistic point. That includes, in the first place, creating a script that is natural-sounding and idiomatic and that doesn’t draw unnecessary attention to itself and, in the second, putting together a cast of actors who are able to do the words justice – not just through their ability to act, which ought to be a given, but through their sufficient, fluent and natural command of the language being used.
The Zurich affair’s producers have unfortunately adopted the worst of all worlds. With a somewhat problematic script to start with, they ought surely, if they had really wanted to target the international market, to have used an English or American cast who could have made the best job of it, supplementing the finished product with subtitles in German, French, Japanese and the rest. Alternatively, they could equally easily have used, say, a German-speaking cast and then, for the rest-of-the-world market, added English and other subtitles – which, as we’ve already noted, are no longer the cultural deterrent that they once were.
I am really sorry to have been so critical. I’d love to have been able to give more of a welcome to The Zurich Affair. After all, since the days of Ken Russell it’s been pretty rare for feature films to have centred on – or even to have peripherally featured – any aspect of the classical music world. Even when they’ve done so, the thinking seems to have been that it’s a milieu so utterly alien to most cinema audiences that it’s an entirely appropriate one in which to set bizarre stories of flawed or even outright psychotic characters, whether murderously-ambitious, hallucinating ballerinas (Black swan) or sexually-predatory conductors (Tár). Coming up in November, of course, we have the much-anticipated Maestro, a biopic of Leonard Bernstein. Maybe some other writer is already hard at work on a script for James Levine – the movie. In such a context, I guess we can be grateful that the romantic antics of Richard Wagner and his muse Mathilde don’t even qualify for a warning of Parental Guidance.
Rob Maynard
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Other cast
The singer – Michael Volle
Franz Liszt – Patrick Rapold
Johann Jacob Sulzer – Roland Bonjour
Georg Herwegh – Caspar Kaeser
Emma Herwegh – Lotti Happle
Eliza Wille – Dagna Litzenberger-Vinet
The tinsmith – Leonardo Nigro
Usenbenz – Joe Fenner
Hotel director Baur – Hans-Joerg Frey
Mr Riese – Michael Gempart
Gottfried Semper – Oliver Stein
Hans von Bülow – Luca Leonetti
Cosima von Bülow – Lisa Brand
Gottfried Keller – Stefan Bütschi
Johann Bernhard Spyri – Leonard Kocan
Zeugheer – Luc Müller
Emilie Heim – Samia von Arx
Franz Hagenbuch – Matthias Fankhauser
Francesco De Sanctis – Manuel Vetsch
Myrrha Wesendonck – Cheyanne Tanner
Hotel guest – Verena Bosshard
Procurator – Kevin Mike Minder
Anonymous Mr – Werner Biermeier
Council members – Herbert Pfortmüller, Niklaus Helbling, Norbert Hodel, Freddy Niederhäuser and Josef Zuger
Mountain guide – Beat Hutmacher
Hotel guests – Sigfried Schibli, Manuela Nipp and Peter Marti
Painter Karl Ferdinand Sohn – Patrice Gilly
Bellboy – Julius Kastner
Nanny – Marie Jeger
Production staff
Director and author: Jens Neubert
Costume designer: Odile Hautemulle
Director of photography: Harald Gunnar Paalgard
Music composed by Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt and Torsten Rasch
Music performed by the London Symphony Orchestra/Eckehard Stier
Pianists: Andreas Haefliger, Annika Trautler and Hiroko Imai
Video details
BD-25 Blu-ray disc
Picture format: HD 16:9/2.35:1
Sound format: PCM stereo and DTS Master Audio 5.1
Region code: A, B, C
Language: English, Swiss German; Subtitles: English, German, Japanese, Korean
