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TLT.R.H. the Duchess of Kent was accompanied by H.R.H. Princess Alexandra when she attended the premiere of Magic Fire which was held at the Gaumont Cinema, London, on April 19th, 1956. The event filled the Haymarket with cheering crowds, who assembled early, long before the opening ceremony. The Royal party on arrival was greeted by a guard of honour of the 4th/5th Battalion Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and on the stage State Trumpets added to the pageantry and colour of the occasion by greeting them on their arrival with a fanfare. Magic Fire was produced and directed by William Dieterle. It tells a real life drama, the story of Richard Wagner, which is presented as spectacularly as the operas that have made him one of music's immortals. It shows his twin careers as a musical genius and a great lover. The film begins in 1834, when at the age of twenty-one, after a stormy interview with the manager of an opera company in a German provincial town, Richard Wagner is engaged as conductor and persuades Minna Planna (Yvonne de Carlo), a beautiful actress eight years his senior, to marry him. It ends in 1883, when Richard Wagner, played by Alan Badel, dies after a heart attack, having blazed his way through fifty years of nineteenth-century history, as a young political revolutionary with a price on his head, as the inmate of a debtor’s prison from which the great Franz Liszt (Carlos Thompson) rescues him, as the proteg6 of two German kings, King Albert of Saxony (Heinz Klingenberg) and the young King Ludwig II (Gerhard Riedmann), as the passionate lover of three women who loved him and as the genius who has given the world such operas as " Lohengrin," " Tann- hauser," " Die Meistersinger,” “ Die Nibelungen," “ Parsifal ” and “ Tristan and Isolde." It tells of his passionate love affair with the beautiful Mathilde that inspired his immortal " Tristan and Isolde," which leads to the break-up of his marriage to Minna and to his elopement with Cosima von Buelow. The Republic film, made in Germany, is beautifully adapted from the novel by Bertita Harding and filmed in Trucolor with the original music of Richard Wagner. The big screen television that I have seen preceding many of these Royal premieres, particularly the Royal Command Performance, with its glimpses of the foyer and the arrival of the Royal party, particularly interested and delighted the audience who had arrived to time and had already taken their seats. This is certainly an additional attraction at premieres. Maud Hughes. Below : H.R.H. the Duchess of Kent, accompanied by H.R.H. Princess Alexandra, attended the premiere of “ Magic Fire " at the Gaumont Theatre, Haymarket, on Thursday night, April 19 th, 1956. Here you can see the Duchess of Kent shaking hands with Mrs. Gerald Fernback, one of the guests who were presented to her. Right : The stars who appeared in “ Magic Fire,” the story of Wagner—left to right, Rita Gam as Cosima, Carlos Thompson as Franz Liszt, Yvonne de Carlo as Minna, Alan Badel as Richard Wagner and Valentina Cortesa as Mathilde Wesendonk.