Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath
In Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, the Genoese Doge calls for peace and love: “E vo gridando: pace! E vo gridando: amor!” In Wagner’s Rienzi, the Roman Tribune calls for peace and the rule of law: “Willkommen sei, wer Frieden bringt, Wer dem Gesetz Gehorsam schwört.” Yet the contexts of Verdi’s humanist patriotism and 28-year-old Wagner’s nationalist rabble-rousing give almost opposite meaning to these lofty statements. When the Bayreuther Festspiele decided to premiere Rienzi for its 150th anniversary, it faced a daunting musicological, dramaturgical, and historical challenge. Using a new reconstructed edition prepared by dramaturg and musicologist Markus Kiesel, Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s new Bayreuth production makes a case for reviving Rienzi, but its emphasis on social and psychological dynamics largely leaves out incisive political and musical commentary. Though helped by an excellent cast, this version’s focus on family relations came at the expense of deeper engagement with the sinister charisma of the “last of the tribunes.”
With the financial and artistic support of Meyerbeer, Wagner premiered Rienzi in Dresden in1842 to great fanfare. Drawn from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1835 novel, the opera sensationalizes the life of 14th -century Roman politician Cola di Rienzo. As self-stylized “Tribune” of Rome, Cola unsuccessfully attempted to unify Italian city states and wrestle power from the Pope. After several years of exile, a short-lived return to power ended disastrously, and Cola was killed by a mob. Cola’s anti-clerical and nationalist legacy regained popularity in the 19th century, especially in the lead-up to the 1848 Revolutions. Although in Italy Gabriele D’Annunzio revised Cola’s legacy as a deranged political upstart instead, today one can still find a creepy statue of Cola on the Capitoline Hill, just below the Michelangelo-designed Campidoglio.
Cola’s dramatic biography suited Wagner’s desire to compose a Grand Opera in the French style. Wagner’s version condenses the story into a single rise-and-fall, including an implicit love triangle with Rienzi’s sister Irene and the young nobleman Adriano Colonna. While immensely popular in Wagner’s lifetime, he grew to dislike Rienzi, calling it “very repugnant” decades later. Wagner’s Rienzi is also associated with a dark chapter in German history. Infamously, Rienzi was one of Hitler’s favorite works. As a teenager, a 1905 performance in Linz allegedly helped inspire his political ambitions. The martial Overture was used at the start of Nazi rallies. The Führer even received the manuscript for his 50th birthday, the now-lost score possibly destroyed in the Bunker in 1945. While Lohengrin has enjoyed success despite its own “Führer” controversy, Theodor Adorno, for example, noted the shared autocracy and faux humility of charismatic leaders in Wagner’s early works: “as the first servant of the greater social totality, the dictator Rienzi spurns the title of king, just as Lohengrin will later refuse the rank of duke.” This tarnished reception history, combined with the general decline in popularity of Grand Opera, has meant that Rienzi is rarely performed today.
Thus, when Wagner’s own festival decided to stage it for the first time, its production was tasked with making sense of the bloated five-act musical structure and commenting on the work’s notoriety. Set in a nondescript, contemporary populist Rome, Szemerédy and Parditka’s production tries very hard to navigate the noxious baggage associated with Wagner’s early triumph. Yet by shifting the focus to Rienzi’s inner doubts and the fast-paced environment of contemporary politics and social media, the result flattens its troubling ideological subtext.
The most overt plot modification comes during the Overture, where we see Rienzi and Irene’s unnamed younger brother die from illness while the siblings are engaged in incestuous intimacy. Instead of an attempted kidnapping of Irene in the opening scene, a paparazzi posts compromising pictures that go viral on social media and become tabloid fodder for the live cameras of “Capitol News.” This clever change revised an important element of Rienzi’s backstory, namely the death of his young brother during a battle between the Colonnas and Orsinis (depicted extravagantly in a pre-Raphaelite painting by William Holman Hunt). Thus, when Rienzi declares “My poor brother, not by me, but by Rome itself will you be avenged!” after his assassination attempt, his revenge is driven by internal motives to restore his family reputation, rather than the bitterness of a military feud between Roman factions.
Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath
Conveying Rienzi’s descent into madness, Magnus Vigilius delivered a confident performance. In his role debut (taking over for Andreas Schager for one performance), Vigilius started off with some shaky high notes as Rienzi promises the protection of the Roman citizens. Yet as the evening went on, the Danish Heldentenor proved why he has been increasingly recognized for his Wagnerian roles with a clarity and tenderness that avoided the “Bayreuth bark.” While Schager may have more powerful projection, Vigilius offered a surprisingly subtle Rienzi in a theater designed for completely different types of tenor roles. The measured tone of his prayer, curiously moved forward from the beginning of Act V to IV (before the Papal excommunication), seemed to draw out more sympathy for the Tribune, granting a sense of religious honesty. His upper register had a lightness almost reminiscent of Klaus Florian Vogt, who himself was in the middle of a marathon Ring cycle (review coming shortly). Vigilius was visibly emotional when taking his well-earned bows.
The star performance was Jennifer Holloway as Adriano. Part romantic opportunist, part pacifist, Holloway employed a full vocal range from passionate anger to tender comfort, conveying indignancy towards Rienzi’s cruelty, and narrowed her vibrato and sharpened diction as Adriano becomes more agitated. Szemerédy and Parditka’s Personenregie for the young Colonna shows her intimate with Irene, though consistently spurned as soon as the siblings are together. Holloway portrayed this outsider status such that Adriano was the most in-depth of the protagonists.
Gabriela Scherer as Irene was unfortunately given little to do in this production, though this was also Wagner’s fault for providing no standalone arias for Rienzi’s sister. Scherer’s voice was often covered during the larger ensemble moments, while the staging often had her idly standing around Rienzi or Adriano. Her velvety sound only came through towards the end as she rejects Adriano and laments the futility of love: “Geh, es gibt keine Liebe mehr!” In a striking moment of agency, Irene stabs Rienzi before eventually slashing her wrists, cradled by an inconsolable Adriano.
Anchoring the trio and facilitating the 10 choral set-pieces — performed by a top-form Festival Chorus directed by Thomas Eitler-de Lint — Nathalie Stutzmann and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra for the most part captured the youthful spirit of Wagner’s score. The march-like moments kept moving, the liturgical choral numbers appropriately solemn. Dramatic gestures reminiscent of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin came through, and even surprising motifs that could have been Wagner’s rough drafts for Siegfried’s horn call as a trumpet fanfare and Wotan’s lament in the low cellos and basses. Nevertheless, Stutzmann and the orchestra couldn’t always rescue the repetitive elements and poor imitations of French and Italian styles that pervade the score. While the evening was visually a welcome relief in the middle of the AI-eyesore Ring and an acoustic treat to hear performed in Bayreuth’s famous Orchestergraben, Rienzi is probably not a piece even devoted Wagner fans listen to on repeat.
Despite the performance’s strengths, Szemerédy and Parditka neutralized much of the political intrigue both visually and dramaturgically. Their costumes and stage design are washed in steel grey, black, and white, creating an overall dull look. The sets alternated between intimate spaces and an imposing agora. Small apartment-like rooms that move up and down each feature the non-stop glare of television screens and cell phones as media constantly broadcasts political intrigue. With lighting by Bernd Gallasch and video by Leonard Koch, the production dealt with the toxic interactions between private life and mass media. This was a smart way to comment on the paradox between contemporary digital hyper-connectivity and increasingly segmented and isolated living spaces. When not glued to phones and TVs, the chorus also resorted to somewhat cringy thumbs-up and down gestures that supposedly represented social media “likes” and “dislikes.”
Like in Tobias Kratzer’s acclaimed Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser, the Festival Theater serves an important meta-role. Whereas Tannhäuser explored theater-as-pilgrimage, here the Wagnerian stage stands in for the intrigue of the Grand Opera ballet sequence. Instead of a pantomime of the Rape of Lucretia which mirrors Rienzi’s own biography, we see a pastiche of Wagner’s own works, “conducted” by a child dressed as one of the mini gold statues of Richard that have populated the festival grounds in recent years. On one level, this plays as a sequence of funny sight-gags, from the audience rushing to the bathroom at intermission, to the scarce VR glasses for Parsifal, to Kundry figuring out which button to press to illuminate the Grail. On another level, Szemerédy and Parditka poke fun at the political and social role of the festival itself. The Bayreuth stage returns in the final act, as Rienzi and Irene meet in a dilapidated theater with a sealed-off “Bühnen eingang.” Like in Kratzer’s recent Die Walküre in Munich, authoritarian ideology has shut down the arts. But why Rienzi’s madness has produced such cultural censorship is never clear. Rather than gesturing to the seductive allure of Wagner’s political thought, one instead gets a somewhat muted exploration of his controversial legacy.
The monochromatic aesthetic also impacted many of the secondary roles. Rienzi’s political rivals Steffano Colonna and Paolo Orsini have virtually no agency since Rienzi’s own downfall is presented as a personal and psychological story. This is unfortunate for Andreas Bauer Kanabas as Stefano Colonna and Michael Nagy as Paolo Orsini, largely reduced to cameos, though perhaps this was also due to cuts in the score. Kanabas’s snarly tone lacked nuance and did not always clearly cut through, but he made up for it with an imposing stage presence. Nagy’s baritone conveyed an unpleasant and scheming Orsini through a balanced control of both upper and lower registers.
Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath
The biggest flaw, however, is the production’s inability to explain why the Roman mob changes opinions so quickly. We see video projections of election results going up and down but never know why. The Catholic Church, whose decision to align with the Patricians in Act IV and excommunicate Rienzi causes the Roman populace to turn on the tribune, was also entirely absent from this production. Wagner himself drew on works like Halevy’s La Juive and Mayerbeer’s Les Huegenots that critiqued the institutional power of the Church and would return to this theme in works like Tannhäuser. Yet here ecclesiastical politics is underexplored. Cardinal Raimondo is dressed in a grey suit, almost indistinguishable from the other politicians. notwithstanding Bass Vitalij Kowaljow‘s rich voice with a distinctive lower register full of gravitas. The chorus of peace messengers is offstage the entire time; their proclamations are instead Rienzi’s internal hallucinations. The peace messenger, also sung offstage by a gleaming Catalina Bertucci, is presented as a vision of Rienzi’s dead brother. Roman citizens Baroncelli and Cecco del Vecchio, played by Matthias Stier and Michael Kupfer-Radecky, are given a bit more to do in rousing the Roman mob, but their bright tenor and light bass often do not cut through the dense choral numbers. Given that religious authority and Church-State relations were crucial not only in 14th-century Rome, but also in Wagner’s nationalist ideology and in the production’s contemporary right-wing populist setting, this was a glaring omission.
Rienzi most likely won’t be returning to the Green Hill beyond this year’s festival. While perhaps not a strong enough case to permanently add it to the 10-work canon, this was an important moment for the Bayreuth Festival. However, one got the sense from this production that the politics on stage was tamer than the virulent rhetoric, violence, and deep fakes ubiquitous today. Despite its flaws, Rienzi remains relevant.
