Due to the high costs of copyright for Richard Wagner's pieces, which were not in public domain at the time of the movie's production, Giuseppe Becce, who played Wagner due to his resemblance to him, wrote an own score that resembles Wagner's composition and also sued elements from Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Gioacchino Rossini. Today Becce's music is considered one of the first movie scores in the German cinema and opened a way for Becce to work as a composer. He was working on various movies until 1959, including movies like Der Spieler (1938), Der letzte Mann (1924) or Peer Gynt (1934).
While describing the chronically life of Richard Wagner, the movie entirely ignores Wagner's connection to Felix Mendelsohn Bartholdy, who helped him to put on his pieces and his operas at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, where Bartholdy was the director, as well as his antisemitism and his antisemitic writings in the 1860s.
The movie was released due to the 100th birthday of Richard Wagner.
After the movie was recovered and recreated in 2011-2012 by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam in cooperation with the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Organisation in Wiesbaden, Germany, it was shown in 2013 for the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner on the TV station arte as a recording from the "Festspielhaus Baden-Baden" in with a live orchestra, the German Statephilharmony Rheinland Pfalz, playing the score of the movie.