Lisztomania (1975 Box Office Flop)
The third episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features the year’s biggest flop, Ken Russell’s Lisztomania. Written and directed by Ken Russell and starring Roger Daltrey, Sara Kestelman, Paul Nicholas, Fiona Lewis and Veronica Quilligan, Lisztomania was intended as part of a never-completed series of biopics about composers directed by Russell.
The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lisztomania-1975), Richard Eder in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/11/archives/screen-lisztomaniaits-ken-russells-spangled-postbeatles-rococo-and.html), and Janet Maslin in The Boston Phoenix.
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3 Replies to “Lisztomania (1975 Box Office Flop)”
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A few notes about Lisztomania from one of the few people that actually saw it at the time:
Easy to see why it flopped because Russell actually requires you to 1) have a taste for current campy/sexual excess while (2) have a university level knowledge of 19th-century classical music. Not too many people in that demographic!
The actual story somewhere underneath all of this is that Liszt was a performer with an immense female following. This led to notorious affairs but made the cognoscenti take his compositions less seriously. Liszt was fired up by the new nationalist revolutions spreading through Europe in 1848 and wanted to become the voice of Hungary (“Hungarian Rhapsody” anyone?). He started promoting young German nationalist revolutionary composer Richard Wagner who (in Russell’s interpretation) borrows some of Liszt’s innovations to create his national myth operas, operas that also express Wagner’s strong anti-semitism. Liszt, meanwhile, retreats to a monastery where he is ordained as an Abbé. Liszt’s daughter Cosima dumps her husband to marry Wagner and in her old age, sides with the Nazis who elevate Wagner and his operas as representative of their racial/national aims, leading to the holocaust. In the hopeful ending, Liszt’s music frees itself from its association with Wagner and the Nazis to finally be appreciated. Russell fully expected you would know all this before you walked into the theatre so you would appreciate his parodic interpretation.
Here’s a few things from the time: Rick Wakeman was super-hot when this was made, having put out two hit concept albums, “The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth” and “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. He wanted to put out the soundtrack to this movie in the same form but it was overruled for a more-regular soundtrack (which flopped anyway). A couple of decades later, Wakeman put it out on CD.
In the backstage scene at the beginning of the film, the roadies running around Liszt are The Who’s actual roadies in 19th-century garb. The man taking the flash photographs is Roger Daltrey’s cousin, Graham Hughes, who shot the cover of “Quadrophenia”.
Speaking of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, that’s Nell Campbell (“Columbia”) in bed when Ringo Starr’s Pope shows up.
Paul Nicholas (Wagner) started out as a 1966 labelmate with The Who under the name “Oscar”. Pete Townshend wrote a song for him called “Join My Gang”.
Roger Daltrey said that during filming, Russell was angry about critics blasting him for his excesses, saying, “wait ’till they see this!” Also, Roger keeps the penis in his garage at his home in Sussex.
Love this comment. Some really interesting added context here. I loved this movie.
I appreciate the extra context, but honestly even all that background info doesn’t make the movie more coherent from my perspective. Thanks for listening!