Rienzi (review)

This first video of the early Wagner opera Rienziis a welcome contribution to the DVD catalogue. The grand opera dating from 1842 is a surprisingly engrossing political drama set in late medieval Rome, contrasting large public scenes with private double-dealing. With some conventional numbers and some larger, more dramatic sections in the later acts, its score at times echoes Meyerbeer and at others, bel canto. The work bears scant resemblance to mature Wagner, and the score contains both inspired and banal music. Today the opera is best known for its reception by one individual: Adolf Hitler was obsessed with it. The parallels with its demagogic, messianic title character are only too obvious, and serve as the hook for this 2009 Deutsche Oper Berlin production.

Rienziis a forbiddingly long work, and most recordings and performances are cut. The premiere reputedly ran over six hours, and it is believed the lost manuscript score of this edition burned in Hitler's bunker. Later editions are nearly as long. This production, however, takes cutting to a new extreme presenting only around half the score. Excisions are both large, such as the entire No. 7 (the opening scene of Act 2) and small (seemingly no aria or recit is left intact without internal cuts). Only the well-known overture is performed in its entirety. Some of the strongest music remains, such as Rienzi and Adriano's major arias, but some cuts seem to have been made for reasons of expediency rather than artistic merit. (The loss of the concertantewith children's chorus in Act 2 is unfortunate.) This approach drastically alters the mood of the opera, which goes from a stately and complex political tragedy to a fragmentary series of tableaus painted in broad dramatic strokes, the supporting characters rendered inconsequential or eliminated completely. Scholars will find it lacking as a performance of Rienzi, serving as little more than a preview. The producers are honest about the edition, describing it as a "version in two parts by Philipp Stölzl and Christian Maier." But on its own terms, the edition has significant merit.

Director Stölzl's production explicitly evokes the Expressionism of the Weimar era and the Nazis, with a flat cartoonish cityscape and a large R and pictures of Rome replacing the swastika and Berlin. He essentially trusts that the mythology of the Third Reich will fill in the blanks of the drama, with the help of a few minor text edits (the "free Romans" in Act 1 become "proud Romans"). Genocide remains discreetly offstage, though war intrudes towards the end, and we are trusted to interpose our own conventional wisdom of Nazis as the evilest of evil to make sense of the story. Stölzl cuts most of the episodes involving the Church, and what remains is confusing and an insufficient counterweight to the title character. Yet on the whole the production works well and produces a number of memorable images. In Act 1, a flat cityscape recalls Metropolis, when Rienzi takes over a gallery of Weimar freaks (contrasted with Irene, a blond Mädchen in a Drindl) and transforms into a uniformed, ordered army. In the second half, a stunning double-level set portrays the street above and Rienzi's bunker-like headquarters below. The production effectively uses video, imitating grainy newsreel footage, in Rienzi's proclamations.

Musically the performance is solid, with particularly good contributions by the well-drilled chorus and excellent orchestra. Torsten Kerl sings Rienzi with sweet yet forceful tone, though struggling with the fiorature. While he sincerely tries to act, he is not the most charismatic of singers. The strongest portrayal is Kate Aldrich's impassioned Adriano Colonna, sung with a creamy mezzo and acted with conviction. Camilla Nylund is silvery but often sharp as Irene. None of the other singers really register, their roles having been far reduced, another unfortunate side effect of the large-scale cuts. Sebastian Lang-Lessings' conducting...