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"You are the music While the music lasts"1
- T. S. Eliot
In an otherwise insightful analysis of Luis Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión, 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, Buñuel evidently agrees, as he chides Raúl Lavista, the film's composer, for having filled Abismos de Pasión with what he labels "an over-use of Wagner's music"2 during his absence from Mexico. But John Baxter, Buñuel's biographer, clearly notes that Buñuel "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 Buñuel's consent. Significantly, Buñuel himself negates what he told Francisco Aranda in 1969, that "[he had] intended to use Wagner just at the end,"3 by his 1954 admission to André 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."4 Having apparently forgotten what he had already said, Buñuel later contradicts himself and blames Lavista for having drenched his images in Wagnerian strains.
Still this is only half the point as Buñuel once again unfairly states that the film's "musical accompaniment [is a] real disaster."5 Peter William Evans righdy observes in fact that Buñuel "undervalues Abismos de Paná;ri'' for having rooted it in the musical excess typical of Mexican ranchera or melodramatic movies. Yet as Evans cogently adds: "the excess of music here, as in Sirk or Minnelli, for instance, in the Hollywood melodrama, heightens the emotionality of the narrative, the repetitive Tristan und Isolde motifs providing an aural compliment to the overblown visual style of thunder, lightning and howling winds [. . .]" (43). What Richart dismisses as "Wagner's musical setting sound[ing] repeatedly" (29) signifies for Evans the central leitmotif with which Buñuel's melodramatic imagination imbues the whole film. Excess strikes the right aesthetic note in Abismos de Pasión where life is, Brontëan-like, precariously lived at a hyperbolized Wagnerian...