BAYREUTH — Richard Wagner famously omitted Rienzi, his third opera, from his canon of 10 music dramas at the Bayreuth Festival. Even after the work’s successful premiere in 1842, which came about through a recommendation from Giacomo Meyerbeer to the director of the Royal Saxon Court Theatre in Dresden, the composer felt that Rienzi was still far too closely tied to the grand opera of Paris, which he essentially despised. He called his early opera a “monster” and a “shouter” and didn’t want it in the Bayreuth repertoire.
Now, 184 years after the premiere of Rienzi, Bayreuth has presented the opera as a one-off exception for the festival’s 150th anniversary.
Adolf Hitler first saw the work in Linz as a teenager. The future dictator was very fond of the work and saw himself reflected in the character of Rienzi. One had to ask whether it was wise to present the opera, especially in this anniversary year of the festival, which also set out to address the Wagner family’s close ties to National Socialism in the 1930s and ’40s.
On the morning of the festival’s opening performance July 26, a Holocaust memorial lecture by the Jewish author and broadcaster Michel Friedman — which had been canceled by the festival and then reinstated, after an outcry — was an attempt to come to terms with the Bayreuth past on this special day.
Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka were engaged as directors for Rienzi, the first women to undertake these roles in the festival’s history whose surname is not Wagner. They were also responsible for the set design and costumes. Somewhat surprisingly, Parditka was completely unaware of the festival history with Hitler and apparently learned about it only during the preparation phase, which prompted her to realize that the material contains pitfalls and stumbling blocks.
This is perhaps why the production came across as an attempt to trivialize the subject matter, to reduce it to a level of entertainment overflowing with many superfluous activities. The practice is becoming increasingly common at festivals these days, such as a wayward production of The Tales of Hoffmann in Salzburg in 2024. Szemerédy and Parditka sought to examine the character of Rienzi psychologically and, above all, humanly, not simply as a populist tribune of Rome who ultimately fails due to his growing power.
They wanted to look beyond the man to see how far power changes a person, how deeply the private and political become intertwined, and how this creates constraints and anxieties. They succeeded at times, but ultimately much was lost in the constant, sometimes unbearable, hustle and bustle, especially in the first and second acts.
Just as Rienzi’s actual, and clear, story was obscured to a considerable extent, so too was the conflict with Colonna and Orsini. These characters, as well as that of Cardinal Raimondo, were relegated to barely perceptible, peripheral figures. The stage, almost constantly cluttered, featured a spectacular set consisting of four stories rising from the ground to the stage ceiling. The chorus performed on stadium-like staircases amid glimpses of sunlit and cloudy skies. There was a lot of ostentation and grandeur, but surely less would have been more in some places, even in terms of action, and would have increased the focus on the core plot and its conclusions.
During the overture, Rienzi sat in his study, immediately recalling Hitler writing Mein Kampf, especially given his hairstyle. In the next room, Irene drank tea. In the third room, Rienzi’s younger brother lay in bed, injured by Colonna, and died during this fully staged overture, much to the grief of Irene and Rienzi, pointing up the latter’s human side right from the start. The transition from his initial relationship to the two women was also very well depicted.
And that brings us to the next point: In this production, Adriano is not the trouser role Wagner intended. In Szemerédy and Parditka’s version, he is a woman. Thus, a lesbian relationship between Irene and Adriano is immediately established, as is an erotic relationship between Rienzi and Adriano. Added to this is an incestuous relationship between him and his sister Irene, all of which makes little sense.
And then Szemerédy comes up with the absurd idea of discovering psychological similarities to Wagner’s Die Walküre in the incestuous relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde. This was truly beyond belief, and no one who hadn’t read the director’s interview in the almanac of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth would have suspected that Rienzi could have parallels with Die Walküre, which premiered 28 years later under completely different artistic and social circumstances.
The production has many more dramatic aberrations or even transgressions. To depict Rienzi’s decline under the influence of power, the directors don’t hesitate to have Colonna and Orsini spectacularly gunned down by Rienzi, even though both are known to play significant roles later. The chorus is preoccupied with the cumbersome process of changing costumes. In the end, everyone has cell phones.
There was also far too much video. Like in a movie theater, the action was shown simultaneously on up to 11 LED screens across four floors showing images of war, stamping soldiers, or rapidly rising percentages in the Rome election for the three candidates. It was overload from all sides.
Even though Rienzi’s downfall is dramatically depicted at the end of this production, the message of the opera was significantly compromised by the staging and its pseudo-intellectual, overly contrived dramaturgical interventions. With less embellishment, the directorial concept, which initially and sensibly focused on psychological analysis but was ultimately abandoned, could have yielded more from the piece.
Nathalie Stutzmann conducted the festival orchestra and, considering their lack of experience with the piece at the Festspielhaus, did a decent job. At the beginning, they were a bit hesitant but later loosened up to give a solid performance.
The choir, under the relatively new director Thomas Eitler-de-Lint, has certainly sung with greater homogeneity and sensitivity in years past. While the choir sang powerfully, and thus loudly, its sound lacked the refinement of its former glory and the sensitivity to convey the opera’s nuances and emotions. One couldn’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia for admired Bayreuth choral directors Wilhelm Pitz, Norbert Balatsch, and Eberhard Friedrich.
Andreas Schager played Rienzi. We know him as a leading Wagnerian heldentenor, along with Klaus Florian Vogt, who is singing Loge, Siegmund, and Siegfried here this summer. Schager embodied the role fantastically and intensely, if at times following the directors’ exaggerated stage directions. Perhaps driven by the character’s great emotions, Schager gave it a bit too much vocal gas throughout the evening. He possesses tremendous vocal potential, which he always enjoys showcasing in its full range. But he can also sing softly and contemplatively, as he has demonstrated here in Parsifal.
Gabriela Scherer seemed to be under a certain amount of pressure. While she mastered the role of Irene with her powerful soprano, she offered few nuances. The role of Adriano, as a woman, was sung by Jennifer Holloway, who performed with enormous energy and very good high notes while maintaining a stable middle register. The diction of both women, and to a certain extent also of Schager, was inadequate. Michael Nagy, a splendid baritone well known in Bayreuth, was Paolo Orsini. Andreas Bauer Kanabas was a fine Colonna, and Vitalij Kowaljow sang Cardinal Raimondo, papal legate. All were seriously underserved by the director.
In the end, the production confirmed that in his decision not to include Rienzi in the Bayreuth canon, Richard Wagner was right.
