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From Grand Opéra to Verismo Bayreuth
Festspielhaus
07/26/2026 - & August 3, 8, 14,17, 19, 22, 24, 26, 2026
Richard Wagner: Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen
Andreas Schager*/Magnus Vigilius (Rienzi), Gabriela Scherer (Irene), Jennifer Holloway (Adriano), Andreas Bauer Kanabas*/Vitalij Kowaljow (Stefano Colonna), Michael Nagy*/Michael Kupfer-Radecky (Paolo Orsini), Vitalij Kowaljow*/Patrick Zielke (Kardinal Raimondo), Matthias Stier*/ Martin Koch (Baroncelli), Michael Kupfer-Radecky*/Joachim Goltz (Cecco del Vecchio)
Chor der Bayreuther Festspiele, Thomas Eitler‑de Lint (Chorus master), Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele, Nathalie Stutzmann (Conductor)
Alexandra Szemerédy & Magdolna Parditka (stage director, sets & costumes), Bernd Gallasch (Lighting), Leonard Koch (videography), Markus Kiesel (dramaturgy)
G. Scherer, J. Holloway, A. Schager
(© Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath)
Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen is a five‑act grand opera composed between 1838 and 1840 and premiered in Dresden in 1842. It is based on Edward Bulwer‑Lytton’s 1835 historical novel Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes, itself inspired by the life of the fourteenth-century Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo.
At the time Wagner wrote Rienzi, he was deeply influenced by French grand opéra, particularly the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy and Daniel Auber. The opera bears all the hallmarks of that genre: monumental choruses, elaborate processions, ballet, spectacular stage effects, and political intrigue on a vast historical canvas.
Set in fourteenth‑century Rome, Rienzi tells the story of the idealistic tribune Cola di Rienzo (1313‑1354), who leads a popular uprising against the oppressive aristocracy in an effort to restore the glory of the Roman Republic. His political ambitions are complicated by the love between his sister Irene and Adriano Colonna, the son of one of the noble families he seeks to overthrow.
Having defeated the aristocracy, Rienzi establishes a republican government, but his clemency towards his enemies proves futile as the nobles rebel anew. Although victorious in battle, his increasingly authoritarian rule, coupled with bloodshed, alienates both the Church and the Roman people. Excommunicated and deserted by the populace that once hailed him as a saviour, Rienzi finds only Irene remaining loyal. Refusing Adriano’s pleas to escape, she stays by her brother’s side as an enraged mob sets the Capitol ablaze. Rienzi and Irene perish in the flames, while Adriano dies attempting to rescue her, bringing Wagner’s tragic portrait of political idealism corrupted by power to its catastrophic conclusion.
Despite its enormous nineteenth-century success, Rienzi virtually disappeared from the repertory after 1945 for artistic, political and practical reasons. Above all, it became irrevocably associated with Adolf Hitler, who regarded the opera as formative, used its overture at Nazi Party rallies, and admired its themes of charismatic leadership and mass mobilisation. These associations made the work deeply problematic in post‑war Germany.
The opera’s depiction of a leader adored by ecstatic crowds also invited uncomfortable comparisons with twentieth-century totalitarianism. Consequently, modern productions tend to interpret Rienzi as a cautionary study of populism and the corrupting nature of political power rather than a heroic celebration.
Its decline was further hastened by Wagner’s own artistic development. Overshadowed by his later music dramas, Rienzi came to be viewed as a derivative French‑style grand opéra rather than a representative Wagnerian masterpiece. Finally, its immense scale—with a running time of nearly six hours, vast choral and orchestral forces, and lavish staging requirements—has discouraged all but the largest opera houses from mounting it.
Bayreuth’s decision to stage Rienzi—in one of its shorter versions—in 2026 was historically significant because, despite being Wagner’s first major success, it had never before been included in the Festival’s canon. The Bayreuth canon traditionally began with Der fliegende Holländer. Rienzi is a French‑style grand opéra, with self‑contained numbers, ballets, massed choruses and spectacular pageantry, rather than the continuous music drama and leitmotivic structure associated with Wagner’s later works. For decades it seemed out of place at a festival dedicated to Wagner’s mature artistic ideals.
As the audience’s euphoric response after each act—and above all the fifteen‑minute ovation at the close—amply demonstrated, the Bayreuth Festival’s decision to programme Rienzi proved entirely vindicated. It was all the more successful thanks to the exceptional cast assembled for the occasion. The three principal singers were nothing short of magnificent.
Austria’s Andreas Schager once again confirmed his status as the pre‑eminent heldentenor of our time. More than any other Wagner opera, Rienzi rests squarely on the shoulders of its tenor protagonist, and no singer today possesses Schager’s extraordinary combination of stamina, vocal power and dramatic intelligence. His is the ideal instrument for the role: virile without lapsing into baritonal heaviness, capable of surmounting its murderous tessitura without the slightest hint of fatigue, and unfailingly expressive both vocally and theatrically. Having long admired him in many of Wagner’s greatest roles, such as Tristan in Vienna and Bayreuth, Siegfried in Vienna and Paris, Parsifal in Bayreuth and also as Midas in Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae in Munich, one can only conclude that Schager is a godsend to contemporary Wagnerian performance. It was therefore particularly regrettable that the staging largely undermined his delivery of the opera’s most celebrated aria, “Allmächt’ger Vater, blick herab!” More on that that later.
Swiss soprano Gabriela Scherer was a mesmerising Irene. Endowed with a youthful yet full‑bodied lirico spinto soprano, she radiated freshness and innocence, qualities that provided an ideal contrast to Jennifer Holloway’s darker, lower‑lying mezzo‑soprano as Adriano. Having greatly admired Scherer two seasons ago as Senta in Düsseldorf’s Der fliegende Holländer and last summer as Gutrune in Bayreuth’s Götterdämmerung, I found her portrayal of Irene even more compelling. Vocally radiant and dramatically engaging, she brought uncommon warmth and emotional sincerity to a role too often overshadowed by the opera’s political drama.
Had Andreas Schager not delivered so commanding a portrayal of the title role, the performance would undoubtedly have belonged to the electrifying Jennifer Holloway as Adriano. I first encountered Holloway as an incandescent Senta in Der fliegende Holländer in Dresden two years ago, where her sumptuous lirico spinto soprano already made an indelible impression. Crowned with gleaming, effortlessly projected top notes, her voice is equally distinguished by a richly coloured middle register and a remarkably secure lower compass, which she employs with consummate artistry to inflect every phrase.
Listening to the brilliance of her upper register, one could scarcely imagine that the American singer began her career as a mezzo‑soprano. Yet Holloway—whom I have admired more recently in such soprano roles as Elsa in Damiano Michieletto’s Lohengrin in Rome and an intensely moving Sieglinde in last summer’s Bayreuth production of Die Walküre—still retains the ability to return, cum laude, to the formidable mezzo role of Adriano in Rienzi. The result was a performance of extraordinary vocal assurance and dramatic intensity, confirming her as one of the most versatile Wagnerians on today’s international stage.
Astonishingly, Rienzi, despite its unmistakable debt to French grand opéra, departs from Meyerbeer’s customary formula of distributing the dramatic burden among five or six principal roles spanning the full range of voice types. Wagner instead concentrates almost the entire dramatic weight upon a triumvirate: Rienzi, Irene and Adriano. The remaining protagonists—Stefano Colonna, Paolo Orsini and Cardinal Raimondo—serve largely as faire-valoir, their functions more ceremonial than dramatically substantial. Even so, Andreas Bauer Kanabas, Michael Nagy and Vitalij Kowaljow endowed these comparatively peripheral roles with authority and distinction.
Where Wagner remained entirely faithful to Meyerbeer’s model was in his lavish deployment of the chorus. Indeed, the monumental choral tableaux are among Rienzi’s greatest glories, and the Chor der Bayreuther Festspiele rose magnificently to the challenge. One sensed a palpable enthusiasm in their singing, perhaps born of the rare opportunity to tackle a score that had never before graced the Festspielhaus after decades devoted to the familiar Bayreuth canon. Their singing combined thrilling amplitude with remarkable precision, lending overwhelming force to the opera’s vast public scenes.
No less impressive was the conducting of France’s Nathalie Stutzmann, who proved an ideal advocate for this neglected score. Now Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Artistic and Music Director Designate of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte‑Carlo, Stutzmann enjoys a distinction shared by very few conductors: she first established herself as one of the finest contraltos of her generation. That unique artistic pedigree has made her an exceptional opera conductor. Having already demonstrated her theatrical flair in a gripping Der fliegende Holländer in Turin two seasons ago, she once again revealed an instinctive rapport with the stage. Her experience as a singer translated into exemplary support for the cast, allowing the voices to bloom naturally without ever compromising orchestral richness. At the same time, she displayed an acute understanding of Rienzi’s singular musical language, illuminating its fascinating position at the crossroads between Meyerbeerian grand opéra and the revolutionary Wagnerian music drama that was soon to follow.
Among the more formidable trials of French grand opéra are its seemingly interminable ballets, a convention de rigueur in Paris and particularly so during the period in which Rienzi was conceived. Mercifully, the edition adopted for this production retained a substantially abbreviated divertissement of some twenty minutes. Unexpectedly, this much‑dreaded episode proved one of the production’s most felicitous inspirations. The choreography itself was admittedly rather haphazard, yet it was redeemed by a welcome vein of self‑deprecating humour.
The ballet unfolded as a cavalcade of figures from Wagner’s mature masterpieces: Valkyries thundered across the stage, Lohengrin’s swan glided by, the incestuous Wälsung twins from Die Walküre appeared, the Holy Grail from Parsifal made its inevitable entrance, while Tristan and Isolde were discovered energetically consummating their passion beneath the bedclothes. The wittiest conceit, however, belonged to Senta from Der fliegende Holländer, who wandered the stage clutching her portrait frame in a desperate search for the elusive Dutchman, repeatedly attempting—and invariably failing—to squeeze the various Wagnerian heroes into it.
The satire did not end there. Equally amusing was the sight of the on‑stage audience behaving exactly like a real operatic public during the interval of an expansive Wagnerian evening: stampeding towards the bar and forming serpentine queues outside the lavatories with a mixture of urgency and resignation that every seasoned Wagnerian could instantly recognise.
Hungarian co-directors Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka brought several intelligent ideas to their staging, not least the transposition of Rienzi into the world of contemporary electoral politics. Their depiction of media‑driven campaigning and the skilful integration of live video frequently captured the febrile atmosphere of modern political life. Particularly evocative were the recurring images of pigeons perched on rooftops and windowsills, whose quiet symbolism suggested both hope and freedom amid the surrounding turmoil.
Yet these felicitous ideas were too often undermined by others that not only obscured the opera’s central message but, at times, contradicted it outright. Determined to emphasise the intrusion of the private into the political sphere, the directors staged, during the overture, the death of a frail young boy—apparently either a much younger brother of Rienzi and Irene or, more provocatively, the offspring of an incestuous relationship between the siblings. It was yet another example of contemporary directors’ apparent inability to trust the expressive power of Wagner’s music, feeling compelled instead to illustrate the overture with a psychologically loaded narrative.
The intention was evidently twofold: to establish a compromising rumour that could later be weaponised against the aspiring tribune and, more fundamentally, to tarnish Rienzi’s moral stature from the outset. Admittedly, Wagner’s hero ultimately succumbs to the intoxication of power and is far from an unblemished idealist. But burdening him with so gratuitous and sordid a transgression serves neither drama nor psychology. It betrays either a determination to diminish the protagonist—and, in so doing, inadvertently diminish the opera itself—or else a profound misunderstanding of Wagner’s conception of the character. Far from adding complexity, the invention merely cheapens a tragedy whose power lies precisely in the gradual corruption of an initially noble political ideal.
Another unfortunate directorial conceit—one encountered with increasing frequency in contemporary Regietheater—is the apparent inability to accept that a woman might simply portray a male character in the venerable operatic tradition of the trouser role. Thus, Adriano Colonna becomes, for all practical purposes, Adriana. One is left wondering what precisely this newly minted lesbian relationship contributes to Wagner’s drama beyond satisfying a fashionable dramaturgical agenda. Whether intentionally or not, it further blackens Rienzi’s character: not only has he supposedly maintained an incestuous relationship with his own sister, but he now appears to have imposed himself upon a woman whose affections naturally lie elsewhere. Such embellishments reveal considerably more about the directors’ preoccupations than about Wagner’s.
The systematic character assassination of Rienzi continues. Early in the opera he is shown quietly accepting an envelope stuffed with cash from his political adversaries. One searched the libretto in vain for any suggestion that Wagner’s tribune was a common grafter masquerading as a revolutionary. His tragedy lies precisely in the corruption brought about by power, not in venality from the outset. By transforming him into a bought politician before his ascent even begins, Szemerédy and Parditka flatten a richly complex political drama into a banal exercise in universal cynicism. Apparently, no idealist may exist on the modern stage without first having his hands soiled with banknotes.
The departures from Wagner’s text become ever more extravagant after the third act. In the libretto, the Roman mob kills Stefano Colonna, Adriano’s father, thereby underscoring the terrifying volatility of popular justice. Here, however, Rienzi himself calmly executes both Colonna and Orsini. At this point, the production has ceased to stage Wagner’s Rienzi and begun rehearsing an altogether different psychological thriller. The noble republican reformer has mutated into an incestuous, corrupt, homicidal psychopath—a transformation that conveniently confirms every lurid insinuation planted during the overture. One almost expected Freud to emerge from the wings to take a bow alongside Wagner.
The directors’ fascination with Shakespeare reached its apogee in the Capitol scene. Rienzi, tormented by spectral apparitions, is unmistakably recast as Macbeth. It undoubtedly produced one of the evening’s most striking visual images: ghostly projections of senators applauding in slow motion, their mechanical ovations suggesting the hollow rituals of political conformity. It was an undeniably powerful theatrical coup. The difficulty, however, is that Macbeth is haunted because he has committed murder. Wagner’s Rienzi is not. The hallucinations therefore rest upon crimes invented by the production rather than by the drama itself. Worse still, unable to resist their own ingenuity, the directors repeated the same effect during the finale. Like so many theatrical devices, what astonishes once merely diminishes when recycled.
The true catastrophe, however, lay in the wholesale rewriting of the final two acts. Wagner’s profoundly moving final prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater, blick herab!”, is one of the opera’s emotional and spiritual summits. Even abandoned by Church and people alike, Rienzi still places his faith in Providence and in the ultimate justice of his cause. Szemerédy and Parditka evidently found such idealism intolerable. Their Rienzi is instead discovered contemplating suicide. The prayer ceases to be an affirmation of hope and becomes an exercise in existential despair. Even the musical character of the scene is altered: the tempo is slowed to an almost funereal pace, depriving the music of its nobility and forward impulse. Schager, obliged to sing much of the aria lying flat on his back, heroically surmounted the ordeal, although the awkward staging and distorted pacing understandably caused one or two insecure notes at the close—an exceedingly rare occurrence for this seemingly inexhaustible Heldentenor.
The libretto then suffers its final indignity. Rienzi implores Irene to kill him—a request nowhere to be found in Wagner’s text—and she dutifully stabs her brother before attempting suicide herself. Wagner’s tragic conclusion, in which Rienzi, Irene and Adriano perish together beneath the collapsing Capitol set ablaze by the very people who had once exalted their tribune, is discarded altogether. Instead, we are left with an ending that seems chiefly concerned with Irene’s possible survival and victimhood, while the fate of Adriano remains ambiguous.
One could scarcely avoid the impression that the evening concluded not with Wagner’s Rienzi but with an entirely different opera, the libretto having been substantially rewritten by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka. Ironically, directors long intent on rescuing Rienzi from the alleged excesses of French grand opéra have accomplished something quite extraordinary: they have transformed it into an unlikely specimen of late Italian verismo. One hesitates to congratulate them on the achievement. Wagner, one suspects, would have recognised very little of his own creation.
Ossama el Naggar
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