Happy birthday to Rena and Roger Daltrey! We’re delighted to be joined by the brilliant Elana Levin from the Graphic Policy podcast (https://graphicpolicy.com/radio/, on Bluesky @Levin) for the completely bananas, wildly original Lisztomania, Ken Russell’s 1970s musical biopic on the first rock star, Franz Lizst.
In this super-sized episode, we’re talking about birthday boy Roger Daltrey, a Roger Daltrey voodoo doll, phallus-laden musical numbers, Ringo Starr as the pope, neglected children, a room filled with butt sconces, a gold-dipped Frankenstein, a Richard Wagner-Hitler-vampire hybrid, a gorgeous score by prog rock el divo Rick Wakeman, and the most beautifully literal Deus Ex Machina in the history of the world. And that’s only scratching the surface.
Naturally, there are corpse capers, because why wouldn’t there be?
Buckle up: You haven’t seen one like this before.
Lisztomania is directed by Ken Russell and scored by Rick Wakeman, and stars Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt, Paul Nicholas as Richard Wagner, Sara Kestelman as Princess Carolyn, Ringo Starr as the Pope, Veronica Quilligan as Cosima, Fiona Lewis as Marie, and Nell Campbell as Olga Janina.
Sources:
Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar, by Oliver Hilmes.
Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived, by Simon Callow.
The Biographers podcast six episode series on Franz Liszt.
Find Elana here: https://graphicpolicy.com/radio/
Spoiler Warning: We spoil everything. And we enjoy it.
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