Giuseppe Becce

This biographical portrait of composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), feature-length and lavishly produced, was released in conjunction with the centennial of his birth. It's an outstanding achievement in many respects. Naturally it looks primitive by modern standards, but contemporary viewers should bear in mind that it was made at a time when the motion picture industry was still in its infancy, and feature films were still a novelty. The very notion of a silent movie about a composer may seem odd, but Wagner is an ideal choice, simply because his life was so tempestuous and dramatic. Wagner's personality was operatic, while his tumultuous love life unfolded like a soap opera. He knew great success and abysmal failure, luxury one day and poverty the next. He participated in the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in the late 1840s, and had to flee Germany under threat of arrest.

Forty-year-old Gianni Orzan is satisfied with the life he has built for himself. He lives with his wife Anna, a very sweet woman, and their son Francesco. An encounter with a strange stranger who claims to know things about his father, a fascist soldier, throws Gianni's equilibrium into crisis, forcing him to make a lucid analysis of who he is and who he would have liked to become.