A film by Andy Sommer with Antoine Wagner.

In this biographical and musical road movie by Andy Sommer, Antoine Wagner, a young (30-year-old) photographer living in New York, heads to Switzerland on the trail of his great, great-grandfather, the renowned composer Richard Wagner.

It is not widely known that Wagner spent several years in Switzerland - first as a political exile, then as an artist who had become famous. It was in that country that he wrote his great theoretical essays, began working on the composition of 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' and wrote 'Tristan und Isolde', the 'Wesendonck-Lieder' and 'Die Meistersinger'. There, too, he lived the two great love stories of his life: first with Mathilde Wesendonck and, later, with the woman who would become his wife, Cosima Liszt.

In order to apprehend this complex personality, Antoine Wagner returns to Zurich and Lucerne and the sites where his ancestor had lived, meeting historians, musicologists, musicians and enlightened amateurs. He also sets off on a mountaineering expedition in contact with grandiose, violent Nature, exploring those landscapes that Wagner so admired and which were a profound source of inspiration for him.

Reviewed in BBC Music Magazine, June 2013: ****
"a straightforward, visually attractive survey of Wahner's Swiss links and locations during his two periods of exile, with the multi-lingual Antoine asking local experts the salient questions, punctuated with his own quite interesting photography. Some good sense and new perspectives emerge...a welcome corrective to the picture of the decadent dreamer some biographers peddle...An enjoyable account and a good guide." - Michael Scott Rohan