Richard Wagner - George Hunka

Opernabend: Rienzi

*Rienzi* at the 2026 Bayreuth Festival in a production designed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 19, radio klassik Stephansdom offers Richard Wagner’s 1842 Rienzi on its Opernabend program at 2:00 pm Philadelphia time and 8:00 pm Vienna time. A brief synopsis from Wikipedia:

The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles’ rebellion against the people’s power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had initially urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

Barry Millington reports that the original 1842 Dresden production, featuring one of Wagner’s favorite mezzo-sopranos Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient as Adriano, ran with intermissions from 6:00 pm to the other side of midnight. “[There] are elements of grand opera throughout both parts of the work; in the spectacular mises-en-scène (massive crowd scenes, dramatic excommunications, collapsing buildings and so forth) … and in the abundance of marches, processions and ballets. … The grandiloquence of the music may perhaps be seen as a reflection of the extravagant pomp and ceremony that were perceived — by an anonymous contemporary biographer of Rienzi — to have been the cause of the demagogue’s downfall.” Wagner biographer Ernest Newman called Rienzi an “attack of musical measles” (ouch!) and Charles Rosen cheekily described it as “Meyerbeer’s worst opera,” but Mahler considered Rienzi one of the greatest of Wagner’s music dramas. So your own mileage may vary.

Although Rienzi‘s reputation has suffered compared to the rest of Wagner’s corpus (a year later Wagner conducted the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer, the earliest of truly Wagnerian operas, in Dresden), its populist political theme as well as its comparative rarity in live and recorded performance are apparently rendering it more attractive to producers and musicians today; this year saw its first-ever production at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. Gaby Reucher considered the implications of its contemporary production for Deutsche Welle in July.

While Rienzi was Wagner’s first great success, later in his career the composer tended to dismiss it as a minor work, but it wasn’t minor for everybody. In his diaries, Albert Speer recorded a comment from Adolf Hitler to his Nazi comrade Robert Ley; Hitler described the impact of Rienzi, a production of which he had possibly seen as a teenager in 1906 or 1907 in Linz, on his own political ambitions:

You know, Ley, it isn’t by chance that I have the Party Rallies open with the overture to Rienzi. It’s not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper’s son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.

The manuscript of Rienzi has disappeared. Hitler reportedly received it as a fiftieth birthday gift in 1939; it was possibly in Hitler’s personal possession in his Berlin bunker in 1945; it either burned or was stolen.

Tomorrow’s radio klassik Stephansdom broadcast features a 2013 recording; Sebastian Weigle leads the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester; Peter Bronder sings Rienzi and Claudia Mahnke sings Adriano. Fortunately for all of us, perhaps, it runs only two hours and 24 minutes.

The 2026 Bayreuth production is available as a recording on Deutsche Gramophon’s Stage+ platform. The trailer, which looks tempting indeed, can be found here.

Regular programming to resume shortly

I’ve just about completed my move to Philadelphia and am gearing up to writing again here just after Labor Day.

My books and music are just about unpacked. With every move my library becomes smaller and smaller as a practical matter, but the process does tend to focus the attention on what I’ll be dragging with me into my retirement years. And it provides insight into what affinities and ideas have stayed with me all this time. There is, of course, Vienna:

Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner have earned a place of honor:

And apparently German and Austrian literature have been saved from the local used book store, along with a growing collection of language textbooks:

Finally I’m just about ready to spend my time on a writing project about Vienna. But before that, there’s one child to get to college, another to a new high school, and myself to a more orderly daily routine. I haven’t forgotten my friends, so you’ll hear more from me soon.

Four by four

My books have yet to be unpacked, so in the meantime I’ve been busying myself with celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Bayreuth festival and the first production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in its entirety. (You can’t say I don’t know how to have fun.) While at the moment I don’t have 16 hours to devote to all four operas again, I’ve been enjoying Eric Schulz’s 2012 four-part, six hour documentary The World of the Ring on Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage-Plus platform, an ideal introduction to the Ring which even has something for those who already know it well. Fortunately it ranges across a wide variety of approaches to the operas, from a look at Christian Thielemann’s rehearsals with the Wiener Staatsoper to Laurence Dreyfus’s more musicological musings to a really stunning set of observations from the late pianist Stefan Mickisch. The first part, about Das Rheingold, can be found here, and more information about the series is here. If you can possibly find a way to see it, I encourage you to do so.

The Ring is a tetralogy, and though the number three supposedly possesses certain magical and mystical qualities, the number four appears to do so for German-language culture — at least the German-language culture I have special affinities for. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is composed of four long sections; and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s landmark Hitler: A Film from Germany stretches its four parts over seven hours. A more impressive coincidence is that these works over more than two centuries have been commenting on and challenging each other. We would not have the Ring that we have (not to mention Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde) were it not for the inspiration that Wagner found in the sage of Frankfurt, and Syberberg’s film wraps its aesthetic concerns around both of them.

Because each of them invites the spectator, the reader, the listener to approach from not only — and not primarily — an intellectual but also an emotional and sensual perspective, perhaps it’s appropriate to characterize each of them as symphonic in structure and intent: even Schopenhauer and Syberberg emerge from a conception of music as an internal human dynamic that reaches beyond language. Wagner himself seems to have particularly posited Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, performed at the start of the Bayreuth festival every year, as a cornerstone of his own operatic edifice. These four-movement works, by their very substantial size and difficulty, the interweaving of idea and sensuality both within each and among themselves, reach beyond their status as exemplars of German culture to confront human experience itself with their challenges and questions.

When I do eventually get my books back up on a few shelves, I may delve more deeply into this. I have a retirement coming up, and that 16 hours of Wagner is up there on my list.

Rienzi in Bayreuth and a word of congratulations

When the Bayreuth Festival opens tomorrow for its 150th season, it will open with a work never presented there before: Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, his third opera, which premiered in Dresden in 1842 and was for many years his most popular opera in Europe (to his considerable chagrin later in life; indeed, he himself barred any production of it at the Festival during his lifetime). Its plot, per Wikipedia:

The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles’ rebellion against the people’s power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

Rarely performed, the curtain rises in Bayreuth tomorrow, July 26, at 4:00 pm local time. Wagnerians of the United States, however, can turn to Deutsche Grammophone’s Stage+ service to watch it live tomorrow at 10:00 am Eastern time, with repeats at 6:00 pm tomorrow night and 5:00 am on Monday morning. (A Vienna friend offers a few more options.) The production is directed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, while Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium.

One of the most moving moments of my last trip to Vienna was my attendance at Mass at the Wiener Hofmusikkapelle on my birthday, where Caldara’s Missa Dolorosa was on the program. So I’m delighted to report that radio klassik Stephansdom‘s music director Ursula Magnes, with whom I had the delight of exchanging a few pleasantries about Heinrich Schütz last year, has been named the new director of the Hofmusikkapelle, beginning on September 1. This is the first time a woman has been named director to the post. Rector Peter Schipka said, “As rector of the Hofburgkapelle and thus as the ecclesiastical responsible for the services in this place, I congratulate Mrs. Ursula Magnes very warmly on her appointment as director of the Hofmusikkapelle, as the first woman in this function. I am delighted by her appointment and look forward to working with her.” I congratulate her too, for what it’s worth; the Hofmusikkapelle is in good hands.

Opernachmittag

I couldn’t let the day go by without noting that tomorrow’s Metropolitan Opera broadcast will feature the new Met production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, featuring Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres; Yuval Sharon directs and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. You can stream this via Philadelphia’s WRTI tomorrow afternoon, March 21, at 12:00 noon Eastern time.

The New York Times‘ Josh Barone was enthusiastic about the new production earlier this month — “the event of the season,” he says (gift link to his review here) — and it will undoubtedly be worth the time. Davidsen is reputed to be nothing less than miraculous (director Sharon has given her a baby in this one; I’m thinking I’ll be glad to listen and not sorry to miss the visuals), and Nézet-Séguin conducted a terrific in-concert version with Nina Stimme last season. I confess I’m somewhat skeptical of director-centric productions by the likes of Sharon; on the other hand, I was spellbound by the Chereau Ring at Bayreuth and recently very much enjoyed Barrie Kosky’s Don Giovanni for the Vienna opera. The little I’ve read of Sharon’s A New Philosophy of Opera is intriguing and tempts me to read further — what do I know? Still, a baby?

Event of the season or not, Tristan is one of the great achievements of the aesthetic imagination, an extraordinarily erotic and meditative work, Schopenhauer as music. Listen, and before a second listening read Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord.