SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Richard Wagner,  Rienzi: (New Production) Soloists, Chorus of Leipzig Oper and the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Axel Kober, Leipzig Oper  16.11. 2007 (JPr)

Nicolas Joël (director)
Andreas Reinhardt (sets and costumes)
Michael Röger (lighting design)

Cast:

Stefan Vinke (Rienzi)
Marika Schönberg (Irene)
Pavel Kudinov (Colonna)
Elena Zhidkova (Adriano)
Jürgen Kurth (Orsini)
Christopher Robertson (Raimondo)
Martin Petzold (Baroncelli)
Thomas Oertel-Gormanns (Cecco)
Gabriela Scherer (Friedensbote)

 

Act I
 

Leipzig in November before the Christmas festivities:  grey, bleak, snowy, industrial, a mix of the quaintly medieval with the austere relics of Communism and the high-rise buildings of post-Berlin Wall regeneration. All these preconceived ideas hit their target but the city was also full of some of the friendliest, smiley and helpful people I have ever found in Germany, regardless of whether they thought I was German or Johnny-Foreigner.

The Leipzig ‘Neues Theater’ dated back to 1868 but was destroyed in an air raid in 1943. It reopened in 1960,  but as someone remarked to me recently,  European opera houses often find any excuse for a ‘grand reopening.’ In this case it seems that the theatre has been undergoing progressive renovation over recent years and has finally got round to doing up the foyers,  cloakrooms and toilets. This generated November 16th's gala,  complete with  a  new production of Wagner’s rarely performed Rienzi, an event  promoted by adverts on nearly every street corner.

Adolf Hitler apparently first saw Rienzi in Linz with August Kubizek, a friend of his youth,  sometime in the early 1900s. Without much money in their pockets, Hitler and Kubizek would go to the opera house early, to find the best places in the standing-room-only section and they saw all of Wagner's works while leaning against the columns of the old Linz Opera House.  Kubizek wrote  that of all of the operas they saw there, Rienzi took an almost mystical hold on the young Adolf. After  seeing the performance and seeming to go into a trancelike state, for the first time in his life  Hitler  talked profusely about politics. It is because of this account - and the indiscretions of some of Wagner’s writings when times  were hard for him - that Wagner has become so associated with the undoubted horrors of World War II.

Act II
 

Wagner was actually born in Leipzig,  but because of these twentieth-century associations little is made of the fact. The site of his birth is almost a state-secret;  the address is absent from most city guides despite the fact that when you arrive there  a plaque marks the place where the Wagner  house  stood until 1886. Although at the  birth place, typical East European concrete blocks of flats are currently being demolished, the local Wagner Society is trying to repatriate the composer  with the slogan ‘Richard ist Leipziger…’ in time for the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2013.

The manuscript score of Rienzi - which last belonged to Hitler -  is now missing. The longest version we now have has been reconstructed from Wagner's original composition draft and the 1844 vocal score for some Hamburg performances so that  almost one-fifth of the current version has been reconstructed. The 1844 Hamburg version presumably contained cuts from the missing Dresden version made for  the successful 1842 première which Wagner himself found  too long at six hours including the intervals.

Bayreuth refuses to perform this work, Wagner's  third  opera, and the composer distanced himself from it later in life, even though the opera had more performances  during his lifetime than all of his other works. This is fairly common occurrence among composers:  Puccini and Verdi rejected many of their early operas, such as Le Villi, Edgar, and Il Corsaro. Even so, the Wagner of Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser has undoubted roots in Rienzi and this  is blatantly detectable in musical ideas  recycled in the later works.

Act III - Elena Zhidkova as Adriano
 

Other differences in Rienzi from later works  include the use of a non-mythical  historical topic for the opera. And instead of providing his own libretto,  Wagner adapted the plot  from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s nineteenth-century novel of the same name.  In the story, Rienzi, proclaims himself tribune of Rome, faces assassination plots from  noblemen led by Orsini and Colonna, whose son Adriano loves Rienzi's sister Irene. After his opponents are killed,  Rienzi is excommunicated by papal allies of Colonna and is abandoned by everyone except Irene, who remains loyal to the end. As Rienzi and his sister are stoned by the people, Adriano tries to rescue Irene but all three are killed when the burning Capitol building collapses. Afterwards the nobles attack the people.

At this time Wagner was trying for an anticipated Parisian audience to ‘out-Meyerbeer’ Meyerbeer and was not being true to his  musical instincts. Additionally  the vocal lines are merely supported by the orchestra which is not intrinsic to  telling the  story by continually  employing the leitmotifs that Wagner would use later. Wagner voluntarily  included  a  40-minute ballet in the score without being compelled to do so  by the Paris Opéra as he was with Tannhäuser. The  pantomime/ballet is divided into almost equal sections, telling the story of the rape of Lucretia with a second part added that  allegorizes the union of classical and modern Rome. The Schott score used in Leipzig contained a little over three hours of music: it kept  the five acts intact but had some scenes shortened and offered only the briefest account of the ballet music.  The result was that Act I lasted about an hour, Acts II, III and IV about 45 minutes each and  Act V about twenty minutes.

Act IV
 

Even at this length Rienzi has occasional longueurs when the brass section is required to blow too long and  loud, where choruses repeat themselves or we hear Rienzi’s battle-cry ‘Santo spirito cavaliere!’ more times than necessary. The melodic inspiration in the accompaniment also sags from time to time with fare too much Verdian ‘rum-ti-tum’ but on the plus side there is also more inspired music than Wagner himself seems to have acknowledged.  Examples arethe fine duet ‘Mein Bruder/Irene, meine Heldenschwester!' between Rienzi and his sister in the last act andhis sublime prayer ‘Allmächt’ger Vater’. To summarise,  Rienzi is a very large scale work requiring many great voices,  scenes that include soldiers, crowds, monks and (here six) nuns. It has a  long, convoluted plot including standardised dramatic operatic devices like power struggles, divided family loyalties and star-crossed lovers. There's even an excommunication and it all ends with the obligatory operatic tragic ending.

So what about the production? I predicted before opening the programme that there would be men in grey suits, machine guns, and multiple  dining chairs ranged round the margins of the set,  which would be thrown over at least once. All these boxes were ticked in a staging of typical Wagnerian Euro-blandness by Nicolas Joël who is soon to take up the post of Director of the Opéra National de Paris. It was completely inoffensive  because there was not a single thing that I  didn't anticipate.

Act I was pretty static; almost like a staged concert performance set against a drop curtain showing an engraving of 1347's Rome. Apart from the papal legate in his fine robes, grey is the predominant colourway until Rienzi dons  shining armour for ‘Sei frei, sei jeder Römer frei!’ In Act II there were three plain grey walls and a spectacular chandelier,  Rienzi’s goons with guns and his supporters dressed in tails sitting on the chairs and smoking. The only splash of colour is Rienzi’s red-bedecked podium and by ‘ich, der Tribun’ Rienzi begins to  show signs of being power-mad and out of step with his former supporters. Nicolas Joël’s simple moral is that dictators have become megalomaniacs throughout history.

Act V

At the start of Act III,  Rienzi strides in  full regalia  down a walkway at the back of the stage to be surrounded by Rome in miniature: St Paul’s Basilica, the Colosseum, Castel Sant’Angelo, and Capitol are among the sites shown.  Rienzi dons a red robe and later on, his vanity knows no bounds when he has make-up applied before addressing the Roman people. We witness  state-sponsored terror and torture by the end of the act and Colonna, Adriano’s father, has become one of the victims. By  Act IV -  when Rienzi is excommunicated by the Papal Legate (‘Du aber bist verflucht’)  -  musically we are very much in the world of the soon-to-be composed Tannhäuser.  For Act V all we have left on a deserted stage, is the small version of the Capitol which eventually catches fire to signal Rienzi’s downfall. At the end there is (silent) gunfire and a horrible massacre of the people of Rome dated 1354. The model building incidentally, was still alight during the curtain calls : nobody  observes ‘Health and Safety’ rules  like we do in the UK.

The cast was fairly strong rather than sensational. Stefan Vince (Rienzi) had a stolid if not very stylish voice and easily rode the orchestral climaxes. However his singing was all rather dry and one-dimensional until he showed some genuine colours in a lyrical, moving and well-nuanced prayer in Act V. Rienzis are a rare breed though and he had the stamina to get through the role which itself  was much of the battle won. Marika Schönberg’s Irene sounded  shrill at times but contributed affectingly to the last act duet with Rienzi. The best singer on the evening was Elena Zhidkova in the difficult trouser role as Adriano, Rienzi’s sister's  lover, role  conceived originally  for Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Wagner’s favourite soprano. Elena Zhidkova brought passion and a fine legato to all that she sang but her highlight was probably ‘Gerechter Gott’ when she swears vengeance for her father’s death in Act III. Less good was Jürgen Kurth’s light-grey suited Orsini who sounded like a well-worn Loge. The rest of the cast seemed more youthful and exhibited promising voices (notably the American Christopher Robertson as Raimondo) in roles which presumably they had never sung before. Most likely they never will again except for revivals in Leipzig.

Axel Kober knew how to shape the music and began with an unhurried Overture that anticipated better music to come than we would actually hear. He was very responsive to his singers and never drowned them - always a risk in this music.  But because of his likely close involvement in preparing the score he was completely at ease with it, well aware of the points at which dangerous tedious moments could occur and mainly he overcame these well. The off-stage music was nicely balanced and there was a perfect ensemble between this, the principal singers, the excellent enhanced chorus of Leipzig Opera (directed by Sören Eckhoff) and the wonderful musicians of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. It is never a Rienzi conductor’s fault that some choruses and marches seem over-insistent and loud:  at this stage in  his career Wagner probably believed that the more brass and wind instrumentation he could put in, the better his score would judged.

I first encountered Wagner and his music some thirty years ago and consider my visit to Leipzig, the place of his birth, a  memorable one  since it was for the first authentically staged Rienzi I had seen (I discount the bowdlerised hatchet-job the ENO presented in 1983). The only drawback to the visit was arriving towards midnight to discover there were no trains because of a national strike. I know now what Rienzi would have done to the rail union … but  let's not go down that road!

Jim Pritchard

Pictures © Andreas H Birkigt