Rienzi’s review – Wagner’s original opera makes Bayreuth a contemporary choice drama | Opera

Met was Adolf Hitler’s favorite opera – and thus very important to the German historical chapter Bayreuth Festival for a long time he used to avoid it. But Rienzi has arrived WagnerA symbolic building, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival’s catalog of his 10 “mature” works.

Rienzi’s problems are inevitable. Since all manuscripts were given to Hitler and later disappeared, no authentic version of Wagner’s longest opera exists. Funnily enough, Rienzi shares a lot of the great French theater but it sounds Italian. The luster of chromatic passion gives a hint of the Wagnerian language to come. Yet there is an endless repetition with the epic’s sense of both the oppressed and the powerless.

Bayreuth’s music worked its magic, lending itself even to four large passages of light. But the slow rise of the game was down to the conductor Nathalie Stutzmannwho found time for the love songs of the bedroom, the silence of the earth and the sound of the bass between the war marches and the sound of the music.

In Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka‘s production, 14th-century Rome becomes a familiar futuristic setting (smartphone-like devices for all, ubiquitous screens, dystopian concrete) that also references current political events in the US and beyond. One political group produces banners shouting “lock him up” and “take back Rome”; Rienzi’s supporters insist they are “stronger together”. Events on stage are recorded and shown, labeled “live from the Capitol“Rienzi’s story becomes a choice drama combining psychosis and family sex. Bayreuth itself became famous for two ballets, a madcap group of Wagner operas led by a child dressed as a fairy.

Leading players, Andreas Schager he was too fast for his role, his clarity was pleasing if unchanging, his gentleness in acting four times rare. Andreas Bauer Kanabas and Michael Nagy were as persuasive as his political opponents Colonna and Orsini when Gabriela Scherer she looked like her sister Irene. Most of all it was Jennifer HollowayAdriano – now a soft prostitute instead of Wagner’s pants – whose desperation and loyalty remained his sympathies, his singing was irritating, while the tragedies surrounded him.