Wagner's early opera Rienzi has finally arrived at the Bayreuth festival, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival's rigid canon of his 10 mature works. Adolf Hitler's favourite opera, it was long avoided by Bayreuth due to its historical associations.
Production and Staging
In Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka's production, 14th-century Rome becomes an abstract near-future with smartphones, screens, and dystopian concrete. The staging references recent political events in the US and beyond. One faction brandishes placards reading "lock him up" and "bringing Rome back", while Rienzi's supporters insist they are "stronger together". Events onstage are filmed and projected, labelled "live from the Capitol". The narrative becomes an election drama incorporating psychosis and incest. Bayreuth itself gets a cameo in the act two ballet, a madcap compilation of Wagner's operas directed by a child dressed as the composer. Bible verses spool across the stage, and numerous video clips of pigeons appear. According to the reviewer, there is "too much happening".
Musical Performance
Bayreuth's acoustic lent even four-square passages a diffuse luminosity. Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann found moments of pure chamber-music tenderness, majestic poise, and vast surges of bass amid military marches and rousing choral outbursts. However, the performance's momentum was sporadic.
Cast Highlights
Andreas Schager led the cast as Rienzi, his clarion tenor thrilling if unvaried, with gentleness in act four providing rare poignancy. Andreas Bauer Kanabas and Michael Nagy were persuasive as his political rivals Colonna and Orsini. Gabriela Scherer gleamed as his sister Irene. Jennifer Holloway's Adriano stood out: now a soft-butch lesbian rather than Wagner's trouser role, her desperation and torn loyalties remained sympathetic, her singing searing as catastrophe raged.
Historical Context
Since the complete handwritten score was given to Hitler and subsequently disappeared, no authentic version of Wagner's longest opera exists. Aesthetically, Rienzi shares the vast scale of French grand opera but sounds broadly Italian. Flashes of chromatic ambition hint at a Wagnerian language to come, yet there are endless repetitions and a sense of an epic both overcompressed and underpowered.
Rienzi continues at the Bayreuth festival until 26 August.
