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

Alexandra 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 chamber-music tenderness, majestic poise and vast surges of bass amid the military marches and rousing choral outbursts.

In Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s production, 14th-century Rome becomes an abstract near-future (smartphone-like devices for all, screens everywhere, dystopian concrete) that also references recent political events in the US and beyond. One political faction brandishes placards screaming “lock him up” and “bringing Rome back”; Rienzi’s supporters insist they’re “stronger together”. Events onstage are filmed and projected, labelled “live from the Capitol”. Rienzi’s narrative becomes an election drama incorporating psychosis and incest. Bayreuth itself gets a cameo in the act two ballet, a madcap compilation of Wagner’s operas directed by a child dressed as the composer. At one point, Bible verses spool across the stage. We see numerous video clips of pigeons. There is, in short, too much happening.

Leading the cast, Andreas Schager was characteristically high-wattage in the title role, his clarion tenor thrilling if unvaried, his gentleness in act four a rare instance of poignancy. Andreas Bauer Kanabas and Michael Nagy were persuasive as his political rivals Colonna and Orsini while Gabriela Scherer gleamed as his sister Irene. Best of all was Jennifer Holloway’s Adriano – now a soft-butch lesbian rather than Wagner’s trouser role – whose desperation and torn loyalties remained sympathetic, her singing searing, as catastrophe raged around her.

• Rienzi continues at the Bayreuth festival until 26 August.