LEIPZIG, Germany — How quickly Richard Wagner changed his mind about “Rienzi”, his first successful opera.
In his self-aggrandizing memoir, “My Life,” composed at the request of the Bavarian King Ludwig II and dictated to his wife, Cosima, Wagner described the opening night of 1842 as something like the apotheosis of his artistic coming of age. “No subsequent experience,” he said, “has given me feelings even remotely like those I had on this day of the first performance of ‘Rienzi’.”
Granted, that was written before bigger achievements: the inauguration of his Bayreuth Festival Theater with the first ‘Ring’ cycle in 1876, or the premiere of his last work, ‘Parsifal’, six years later. But Wagner nevertheless looked at “Rienzi” with fondness.
Affection, and then indifference. By the time he worked on “Lohengrin” in the mid-1840s, “Rienzi,” he said, had “become a work that no longer interested me” — a welcome, much-needed source of income, but not a reflection of the poetry, mystery and unique musical language that would come to define his mature operas.
And so, when the non-“Ring” and “Parsifal” works were slowly introduced to the Bayreuth scene by Cosima after her husband’s death in 1883, she stopped at “Rienzi,” going back only to his successor,” Der Fliegende Holländer’, and codifying the 10 canonical operas still performed at the festival.
Doomed to exclusion and oblivion were his three earlier attempts, which, in addition to ‘Rienzi’, also included ‘Die Feen’, a work never performed during Wagner’s lifetime, and ‘Das Liebesverbot’ from 1836. All of them have been put on the map over the years. appeared on stage, but they remain curiosities.
Do they have to? At the Oper Leipzig, in Wagner’s hometown, an overview of his entire stage production – a festival called Wagner 22, which continues until July 14 – offers another chance to assess his early works in conjunction with their canonical siblings, and in chronological order.
The trio of rarities reveals an impressionable composer who, before finding a voice of his own, skillfully drew on those he admired; and who, before pioneering a declamatory style of operatic dramaturgy, quickly developed a keen sense of theatrical storytelling and a grasp of the fashions of his time. In a sense he is himself from the start, writing less in a form of entertainment than of deep exploration – in the tradition of Mozart’s collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, such as ‘Don Giovanni’, and of Beethoven’s fiercely political ‘Fidelio’.
Mozart especially looms over “Die Feen”, composed when Wagner was 20 years old. It came after he gave up a previous work, “Die Hochzeit,” and after he turned down a proposal to compose an opera about the life of Polish national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He wrote the libretto himself, inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s ‘La Donna Serpente’, a precedent for all his works.
“I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and just wanted to write a decent libretto,” he later recalled, “because now I realized that no one else could do this for me, as an opera book is something unique to itself and cannot be easily conveyed by poets and literati.”
Die Feen did not premiere until 1888, five years after Wagner’s death. So he was spared the pain of the public reception he might have had in his youth. It’s impossible to say what that would have been, but from a 2022 perspective, frankly, the opera isn’t very good. And that’s not the fault of Oper Leipzig, which – as a reminder that the performing arts remain cautious under the threat of Covid-19 – went into production last week with last-minute replacements for not only the two lead roles, but also the conductor.
The staging, by Renaud Doucet, helps viewers better orientate themselves with a work they probably don’t know, aided at every turn by the clear and luxurious sound of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the pit. Doucet’s production is set in the present, in the home of a man who tunes in to a radio broadcast of the opera, which provides a contextualizing introduction. The dreamy action begins to penetrate reality; this evening is as much about discovering “Die Feen” as performing it.
The libretto contains the subplots of a Mozart comedy and the romance of Carl Maria von Weber, whose “Der Freischütz” shaped the young Wagner. Stylistically, the music also owes them a debt of gratitude. These arias are designed to open up the characters’ inner thoughts, without the grace that would come, for example, in Hans Sachs’ occasional musings or Tristan’s delirium.
“Die Feen” is a song opera — far from the “endless melody” Wagner would describe in his 1860 essay “Music of the Future.” And it’s a clumsy attempt to weave aria pauses into act three in a frenzy. pace and an abrupt, orphic turn. Like Wagner’s instrumental works of the era, it doesn’t need to be taken out of the curio cabinet except for the occasional dusting.
A similar fate should not befall ‘Das Liebesverbot’, Wagner’s first staged opera. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, which was mainly greeted with a shrug at the premiere. But while it’s still an adult-works world, it’s a skillfully, amusingly told story with depth and resonance.
The Italianate overture, which begins with a resounding tambourine and festive percussion, is not recognizable as Wagner. But the content of the opera is. His librettos were like sub-tweets; therefore, Wagner argued, the critic Eduard Hanslick cooled him off after reading the text for “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” a cri de coeur against artistic gatekeepers. Here Wagner’s target is the chastity-obsessed conservatism and the bad behavior it engenders.
He would later struggle with socially unacceptable sensuality in “Tannhäuser” and “Tristan und Isolde”, not without an element of autobiography. Neither work, however, is as unruly as “Das Liebesverbot,” which laces hypocrisy—with crimes and punishment for the #MeToo era—while asserting that morality is a malleable thing on which we can only try to enforce rigidity.
For good listeners, there are flashes of the future Wagner. And coincidences too; the line “Es ist ein Mann” recalls the opposite, “Das ist kein Mann!”, which Siegfried exclaims upon discovering the sleeping Brunnhilde in the “Ring”. Early on, when the heroine, the novice Isabella, is introduced with a prayer, the music seems to prefigure “Parsifal”.
Much closer to the mature Wagner is ‘Rienzi’, a sprawling five-act adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel about Cola di Rienzo, a 14th-century tragic figure of Italian politics who took on a new importance in nationalist movements of the 1800s. If “Tannhäuser”, another transitional work, stands stylistically on uncertain grounds, “Rienzi” is even more so: transparently a response to the great operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, but also contending with a new musical language that would take shape with “Hollander.”
In Leipzig, “Rienzi” was understandably presented with extensive austerity measures. Using the required elements of a grand opera, such as a plot-stopping ballet, the original version lasted over six hours. It lasted so long that it was later split into two nights, “Rienzi’s Greatness” and “Rienzi’s Fall,” but returned to one after the public reacted negatively to paying for multiple tickets.
After budget cuts, the Oper Leipzig “Rienzi” still lasted just over four hours and unfolded on an expanded scale, despite the lack of 21 choir members with Covid-19. The work is best known today for its overture, a concert hall staple and the easiest way to share the music, which would otherwise require a substantial investment for a massive cast and production, along with a tenor with the stamina to deliver a punishing performance. role at the level of Siegfried and Tristan. (Here, Rienzi was fearlessly sung by Stefan Vinke, a veteran Siegfried.)
“Rienzi” speaks to the present as much as its own time, and not just because it includes a scene where a mob storms a main building. As in “Lohengrin,” Wagner questions the limits of charisma and the burden of leadership, and begins to ponder the ambiguity and complication that would run through his canonical works. And he does so in an increasingly declamatory rather than melodic tone, never more so than in Rienzi’s V-prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater.”
The work was a hit when it premiered in Dresden, admired by colleagues and audiences alike. Less well received was “Der Fliegende Holländer”, which debuted at the same theater about two and a half months later and marked an entirely new direction for Wagner – one in which he would call his librettos “poems” and in which he would contribute his vision of ” The Artwork of the Future.”
“The management was forced to prevent my reputation from being tarnished by putting ‘Rienzi’ back on the stage at short notice,” Wagner said in ‘My Life’. “And now I had to think about the success of this opera, but also about the failure of the other.”
“Holländer”, as we know, won. Still, Wagner’s achievements are now widely accepted, so there’s no need to categorize his operas as successes or failures—except perhaps for “Die Feen.” Bayreuth’s doors have long been closed to the founder’s early, dignified works. It’s time to open them.