Adding emotion to Wagner

David Ng, in the Los Angeles Times, explores two current movies that employ Wagner on their soundtracks: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and Lars von Trier's Melancholia. I have yet to see the Cronenberg film, which evidently features Lang Lang playing the Siegfried Idyll, but I did endure Melancholia, as I commented in a previous post. What did von Trier and his collaborators think they were doing when they carpeted their movie with swatches of Tristan? Kristian Eidnes Andersen, the sound designer, explains to Ng that he retouched the Tristan prelude to "get more into the emotions." As Stephen Sondheim might say, "Wow."