British director Tony Palmer has been making films about music and musicians since the late 1960s, his idées fixes ranging from Ginger Baker’s drumming for Cream to Richard Wagner. Palmer’s energies remain directed towards explaining to the layman the mysteries behind artists’ biographies, or their creations, and the interview remains his favoured form for doing this. Even the heart of a feature film like Wagner – newly available in an original-length director’s cut (just under eight hours) – is to be found when Richard Burton’s intriguing, almost Brechtian assumption of the title-role speaks directly to camera.

Like a Meyerbeer opera, Wagner at full length is better than Wagner truncated. Charles Wood’s storyline, running from the composer’s Kapellmeister days in Dresden to his death, and linked by Andrew Cruickshank’s skilfully understated narrations, unrolls at a pace that can better accommodate the many drop-in set pieces. Of these, by far the best are the most fictional (or should that be the most ‘spun’?): Wagner’s Hitler-like speech to the Vaterlandsverein, his proto-Jewishness in Music rant about Meyerbeer at a Zürich reception, his dropping of gold coins on Meyerbeer’s head as the latter arrives for the Paris Tannhäuser, and the taking over the end of Parsifal from Hermann Levi with the dismissive ‘you should be baptised’. Here Palmer and Wood are so right in spirit while playing free with detail that one wishes that there had been more like this.

Elsewhere, we get as much mountains and water in Vittorio Storaro’s state-of-the-art landscape photography as the soundtrack (mostly under Solti) gives us the aggressive Nibelung music and the Fire music. It becomes a cultural equivalent of those business lectures that interpolate porn clips to keep the audience awake. There’s also more than a dash of ‘luvvie’ silliness – watchable only once – in the appearance of non-actors Sir William and Lady Walton as the royal family of Saxony, and the camping around of British acting knights Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson as Ludwig II’s ministers. And facts are either very right (Beethoven’s Seventh given with Wagner’s own score emendations) or very wrong (the Paris Tannhäuser sung in German). None the less, if you don’t take things too seriously – it’s a movie, not a docu – enjoyment and increased curiosity about the subject matter is virtually guaranteed. Do try also to catch up with Carl Froehlich’s 1913 silent Wagner and William Dieterle’s comically compact 1956 Magic Fire, music ‘arranged by’ Korngold.