Rienzi review – Wagner’s early opera makes its Bayreuth debut as a frenzied contemporary election drama

Bayreuth festival theatre, BayreuthAlexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s production swaps 14th-century Rome for an abstract near future in an over-busy staging . Jennifer Holloway’s Adriano is a standout in a strong cast It was Adolf Hitler’s favourite opera – and thus vital to a historical chapter that Germany’s Bayreuth festival long preferred to avoid. But Rienzi has finally arrived at Wagner’s symbolic HQ, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival’s rigid canon of his 10 “mature” works. Rienzi’s problems are unavoidable. Since the complete handwritten score was given to Hitler and subsequently disappeared, no authentic version of Wagner’s longest opera exists. Aesthetically, Rienzi shares the vast scale of French grand opera but sounds broadly Italian. Flashes of chromatic ambition hint at a Wagnerian language to come. Yet there are endless repetitions and the sense of an epic both overcompressed and underpowered. Bayreuth’s acoustic worked its magic, lending even four-square passages a diffuse luminosity. But this performance’s sporadic momentum was down to conductor Nathalie Stutzmann, who found moments of pure chamb