RIENZI is one of Wagner’s lesser-known works, yet the overture is often heard and can be depended upon to get audience pulses racing. Does the work have a »catchy« quality?
RIENZI is a very tuneful piece with simple phrasing. It has a clear periodicity, with eight-bar melody arcs. Whichever way we look at it, RIENZI is closer to Italian opera than it is to Wagner’s later works – and that’s how we should address the opera in musical terms, like an early Verdi. Wagner’s articulation in his early years, for instance, was very different. All the moments that are drawn-out in Wagner’s later music are flitted through in a trice in RIENZI. The brass instruments are also used very differently: here he is still using them largely as accompaniment over lengthy stretches, but later in his career he is very deliberate, employing them only in ultra-expressive scenes. Taken as a whole, we actually have to look at RIENZI as a Bellini opera. We should remember, too, that the work is a pivotal piece when it comes to the instrumentation: Wagner distinguishes rigorously between natural horns and valve horns and between natural trumpets and valve trumpets. Schumann and Mendelssohn do the same and Wagner sustains it until THE FLYING DUTCHMAN. The sound of the natural horn was held to be the lovelier, but with harmonies evolving in the direction of chromaticism, valve instruments were becoming indispensable.

Despite the predominantly Italian character of the work, can we glimpse aspects of the later Wagner in RIENZI?
At certain junctures you suddenly hear eight bars and find yourself thinking: that’s PARSIFAL or that’s TWILIGHT OF THE GODS. And obviously you get a lot of TANNHÄUSER echoes. Occasionally you’re being presented with chromatic sextuplets straight out of DUTCHMAN, and there’s even a LOHENGRIN moment. These connections and connotations are triggered by the simplest of techniques, such as abrupt harmonic modulation, as used by Wagner. In retrospect, we can see how much is foreshadowed in RIENZI. Compared to Mendelssohn, who had had many years of excellent training, Wagner was self-taught. If you ask me, at a relatively tender age Wagner was already envying him his eloquence and maturity. That’s the only way I can account for Wagner’s condemnation of Mendelssohn. They were roughly the same age, Mendelssohn only four years older, yet at the beginning of his career Wagner was simply not in the same league as him.

Wagner was quite quick to distance himself from RIENZI and leave behind the tradition that underlay the work. He thought of it as a brief phase that he went through. He clearly had an exact vision of what he wanted to do musically and a conviction that he had statements to make as a composer that would change the musical landscape.
With Wagner it’s hard to know what was by accident and what was by design. In any case, RIENZI was hugely important for him and marked a decisive chapter in his career. We can pretty much ignore what came before, things like THE BAN ON LOVE or THE FAIRIES. RIENZI is a colossal leap in a new direction. It’s hard to imagine a concert overture to top RIENZI’s. It may not have the refinement of the prelude in MASTERSINGERS, but as an opener it has the same explosive impact. Pure genius.

RIENZI is very much a workshop for composers and Wagner himself takes great developmental strides in the course of the work. It’s amazing to witness. For instance, he grows harmonically and tries a lot of stuff out, right down to the orchestration. Towards the end he’s suddenly taking chances that would have been inconceivable at the start of the piece. He progresses step-by-step in linear fashion, palpably learning from his mistakes. But his limitless imagination when it came to melody was already on full display. Lesser composers would spend a lifetime getting a work of the scale of RIENZI down on paper. Not that anyone should think of the piece as just a »scribbling pad« for technical composition; Wagner simply has too much to say here.

And it gave him his breakthrough at the tender age of 29 and also the post of kapellmeister in Dresden. What’s the secret behind the work?
First there’s the huge mass impact of the choruses, the phenomenon that we’ve referred to as a »catchy« quality. There are passages in RIENZI that have immense manipulative power. Hardly surprising that Hitler understood this and utilized it. I don’t think anyone can remain hardened to those mighty choruses.

How does Wagner achieve this impact?
With the melodious and rhythmic quality. The listener can’t help being swept along by the rhythm.

Many of the devices he uses are reasonably straightforward: fluctuating dynamics, much use of crescendi, etc. Effective, yes, but not that sophisticated.
The Triumphal March in AIDA is not the subtlest moment in that opera, either. The work as a whole is quite different in tone, very chamber-music-y and nuanced, but Verdi knew exactly when to throw a switch and delve into a box of effects that he hadn’t used up to that point.

Is RIENZI pop music, then?
Maybe some parts of it can be seen like that, yes. When people think of AIDA they always think of the Triumphal March, and that’s the way with RIENZI, too. The bel canto has the upper hand, the Bellini signature with the cadences and coloratura. RIENZI is basically a great bel canto opera. You have to consider it from the perspective of the history of the 1830s and ask yourself: what works were being written at the time, what was new, which people were the most radical, which people were pioneers? You’re going to come up with names like Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie fantastique was arguably the most important work of the early 19^th century because it turned everything on its head. And you’d have to mention the movement centering on Schumann and Mendelssohn, which proved to be a dead-end as far as opera was concerned. Schumann disentangled himself from it later and turned out works like Manfred, »hybrid« pieces that are performed all too seldom. Schumann’s Scenes From Goethe’s Faust are another example; their radical nature pre-empt the later Wagner. But that strand of development has largely slipped from people’s memory. In comparison, Wagner and his RIENZI are very familiar territory.

He doesn’t really innovate musically until TRISTAN with its radical harmonies. He takes his first steps in that direction earlier, with LOHENGRIN for example. And TANNHÄUSER is another work of his that is androgynous in character. You can see that from the modifications that Wagner made.

It’s fashionable at the moment to go back the roots and go to the trouble of mounting the first-ever version of a work, as if it is the most authentic expression of artistic vision. If Wagner had had enough time, he might well have subjected RIENZI to another round of modifications.

We’re focusing heavily on interest in RIENZI that has to do with fluctuation over time. Are people only interested in the work nowadays because of its historical, musicological specificities or are there things to discover that are unrelated to this line of examination?
That’s an important question. In absolute terms – and we have to take that approach, because that’s how it’s presented to audiences – it’s a very powerful work that depicts the rise and fall of a politician and human being as a very touching story. RIENZI is a quasi-intimate tale of the failure of a great idea and how the masses will always desert you in times of crisis.

Hans von Bülow gifted us the famous – and now somewhat worn – bon mot about RIENZI being »Meyerbeer’s best opera«. Up till now you’ve mostly been making connections between RIENZI and Italian opera – but French grand opéra played a very important part in the gestation of the work, too.
People have lost touch with what Meyerbeer’s version of grand opéra was like – and that’s the problem. I mention Italian opera because we can associate something with the term. You hardly ever see works of grand opéra being performed nowadays. We can just about make out a mini Berlioz renaissance taking place. A lot of the stuff currently being exhumed tends to get staged »as is« - out of a kind of ideological purism. With RIENZI it’s different; cuts are usually made here and there.

Our production lasts about two hours twenty minutes, excluding intervals, which is very short. Whatever medium he’s working in, Philipp Stölzl always aims to tell a tight, well crafted and comprehensible story. RIENZI doesn’t have the compact musical texture of the musical drama. It has a lot of repetitions – redundancies, from a narrative/musical perspective -, which goes with the grand opéra territory selected by Wagner.

I think that’s a legitimate way of looking at RIENZI. Some of it could be described as very radical, but cuts like these are more about taking useful steps to keep the work musically tight and dramaturgically trimmed than about making half-hearted jumps. The problem with the work is not so much that it doesn’t contain enough good music. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s just that our ways of taking in an opera have changed completely. For instance, the best music around is ballet music, but no one stages ballet anymore. You have about 40 minutes of fantastic music, but it would ruin any narrative arc out there. RIENZI has a multitude of narrative strands, but they’re actually just minor threads playing out in fringe locations. Philipp Stölzl has shortened the piece radically, which means the traits of the characters are now starker. The development of Rienzi’s character is more clearly apparent to us, as is the ambivalent attitude of Adriano. The love affair between Irene and Adriano is probably not as prominent, with the focus more on the brother-sister love, the Siegmund/Sieglinde phenomenon. Since this part of the creative process had already been decided by the time I got involved, the exciting thing about my part in the process is getting the whole production to come together musically. For example, there may be times when the piece needs thirty minutes of musical development but I’ve only got 12 bars to play with, I really have to pull something out of the hat to create a transition that works. I don’t want jumps in the music to come across as huge »gear shifts« to the audience. That’s high art.

What demands does RIENZI make on singers and orchestra compared to Wagner’s later works?
RIENZI really has to be sung in an »Italian« way, using Italian techniques. The lyrics are important, too, yes, but if the singers aren’t up to legato and can’t create sweeping arcs and trajectories, then the whole thing collapses. That actually applies to all of Wagner. What I’m trying to say is that this is a bel canto work and you have to treat it as such. The title role calls for a German heldentenor with excellent bel canto and high-range capabilities, as required by the other roles as well. Adriano is a dramatic mezzo, actually straddling two voice types and even impinging on soprano. His part demands some coloratura ability and a facility for high notes. Irene is a typical high soprano, and her voice has to float above the ensembles. On the whole, RIENZI demands from its singers an ability to sing with a high degree of instrumental exactitude – not unlike works by Beethoven. Beethoven treats voices like an instrument and there are similarities in that regard here, too. The other challenge for the musicians is to understand where the work is coming from stylistically. The trouble is that Wagner is a known quantity and people associate with him a type of sound that is different from the one we need for RIENZI. Maybe we get flashes here and there of a Wagner in late career, but generally you’ve got to tackle the piece in a more transparent way and with finer articulation.

You touched earlier on this music’s manipulative quality. We know that Adolf Hitler had a thing going with RIENZI. One reason for this might be that very quality you mentioned, and another is probably the heroic nature of the music, which offers audiences two ways of identifying with the story: through the main character merging with the masses on the one hand or being lionized by them on the other. Does the music contain a »heroic« element, and if so, what does it consist in?
There is indeed a heroic element and it consists quite simply in clear harmonies, dotted rhythms, glorious brass passages and monumental choruses. When Hitler attended a performance of the work, he must have realised that, even if you try to resist the pull of the music, at the end of the evening – whether you like it or not – you find yourself sitting there humming the music to yourself. And on the way home you stride in time to the music.

We shouldn’t forget, though, that Wagner denies us the redemption at the end of the work. It doesn’t happen. RIENZI is the first and only one of his works without an apotheosis at the end. The original version of DUTCHMAN didn’t have an apotheosis either, but it was added later. The finale is compressed and is over very quickly. The ending is bleak and without redemptive closure. That is radical and modern. The work per se isn’t as blatant and blunt as many people claim. In my view, amidst all his emphasis on heroism Wagner depicts the horrors of war as well. In the Virgin Mary chorus, for instance: it’s amazing the way he portrays fear bubbling up to the surface. And the brutal end, too! He has second and third thoughts about the heroism that he built up earlier in the opera. Wagner doesn’t glorify without reflecting on the issues. It’s very likely he had a premonition of the menace to come.