Wagner's early opera Rienzi debuts at Bayreuth as a frenzied contemporary election drama

Richard Wagner's early opera 'Rienzi', once Adolf Hitler's favorite, has finally made its debut at the Bayreuth Festival, opening the 150th anniversary season. This is an exception to the festival's strict canon of Wagner's ten 'mature' works. The opera faces several problems: the complete handwritten score was given to Hitler and later disappeared, so no authentic version exists. Aesthetically, it resembles French grand opera but sounds broadly Italian, with flashes of chromatic ambition hinting at Wagner's later language. Yet there are endless repetitions and a sense of an epic both overcompressed and underpowered.

Bayreuth's acoustic worked its magic, lending even four-square passages a diffuse luminosity. Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann found moments of pure chamber-music tenderness, majestic poise and vast surges of bass amid 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, screens everywhere, dystopian concrete) that also references recent political events in the US and beyond. One 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, labeled 'live from the Capitol'. Rienzi's narrative becomes an election drama incorporating psychosis and incest. The act two ballet is a madcap compilation of Wagner's operas directed by a child dressed as the composer. Bible verses spool across the stage, and there are numerous video clips of pigeons. In short, too much is 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.