Wagnerizing "Wuthering heights" : Buñuel's "Tristan" storm in "Abismos de pasión"

Abstract

In an otherwise insightful analysis of Luis Bunuel's Abismos de Pasion, a Mexican film version of Wuthering Heights, Maria Seijo Richart oddly claims that, since its adapted Tristan und Isolde score is "simply everywhere," the Wagnerian track "lacks meaning" by failing to distinguish musically "the most climactic scenes" from the rest of the film (29). Odder still, Bunuel evidently agrees, as he chides Raul Lavista, the film's composer, for having filled Abismos de Pasion with what he labels "an over-use of Wagner's music" during his absence from Mexico. But John Baxter, Bunuel 's biographer, clearly notes that Bunuel "would not go back to Europe until April 1954, well after the film's music was mixed" (239). Lavista could have hardly inserted then any Wagner pieces without Bunuel 's consent. Significantly, Bunuel himself negates what he told Francisco Aranda in 1969, that "[he had] intended to use Wagner just at the end;' by his 1954 admission to Andre Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze that he was responsible for the musical score: "For Wuthering Heights I went back mentally to the 1930s and, since I was at that time mad about Wagner, I included fifty minutes of his music." Having apparently forgotten what he had already said, Bunuel later contradicts himself and blames Lavista for having drenched his images in Wagnerian strains.