Bayreuth Stages Wagner's 'Rienzi' as Futuristic Election Drama
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Bayreuth Festival opened its 150th anniversary season with Wagner's Rienzi, a departure from its rigid canon of his 10 "mature" works; the opera was Hitler's favourite, and its complete handwritten score was given to him and vanished, leaving no authentic version of Wagner's longest opera in existence.
- Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka's production relocates 14th-century Rome to an abstract near-future dystopia (smartphones, screens, concrete), incorporating explicit US-political references: "lock him up" placards, the slogan "bringing Rome back," and on-stage events filmed and labeled "live from the Capitol."
- Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann was credited with the production's "sporadic momentum," navigating the work's military marches and choral outbursts while finding "pure chamber-music tenderness, majestic poise and vast surges of bass."
- Andreas Schager sang the title role with a "characteristically high-wattage" clarion tenor — thrilling if unvaried — with the reviewer singling out his act-four gentleness as a "rare instance of poignancy."
- Jennifer Holloway as Adriano, reimagined as a "soft-butch lesbian" rather than Wagner's trouser role, drew the strongest praise for "searing" singing and a sympathetic portrayal of torn loyalties amid catastrophe.
- The review flagged visual overload in the staging: Bible verses spooled across the stage, "numerous video clips of pigeons" appeared, and an act-two ballet delivered a "madcap compilation of Wagner's operas directed by a child dressed as the composer" — in short, "too much happening."
Why it matters: By staging *Rienzi* — an opera with genuine Nazi baggage and no complete authentic score — for its 150th anniversary, Bayreuth deliberately breaks its rigid canon at its most symbolically charged moment. The contemporary election-dramaturgy framing reads Wagner's Roman-republic epic through today's populist spectacle rather than sidelining it indefinitely, reframing what prestige opera can stage and how.
