The Freytag – The Fire of the Firstborn

For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, Bayreuth is performing Wagner’s *Rienzi*. A pilgrim’s account from the seventh row—reflecting on a disowned triumph, the susceptibility of the masses, and the humility of the stalls. When the Lights Go Down

There is a moment in Bayreuth unlike any other: the lights fade, the house falls silent, and the first note rises from the invisible pit as if from another world. Last Monday, I was sitting there once again—seventh row, stalls, right up close to that abyss from which the music emerges. On the program was something unprecedented in the festival’s hundred-and-fifty-year history: *Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes*. Wagner’s third opera, his first triumph, his disowned child—performed for the very first time on the Green Hill.

It is worth reflecting on this. Wagner has been performed in this house since 1876—nothing but Wagner, yet specifically the *canonical* Wagner: the ten works starting with *The Flying Dutchman*. *Rienzi* was left out for a century and a half, like a relative not invited to the family gathering. Now, in this anniversary year, he has been welcomed in. As the opening premiere, of all things. And I was there to witness it—on a quiet Monday in August, in this small, peaceful, contemplative town in northern Bavaria that gives no hint of the madness enacted every evening on its most famous stage.

A pilgrimage, once again

For me, Bayreuth has always been a pilgrimage. You arrive at a leisurely pace, you watch, you listen, you reflect, you travel home. The two one-hour intervals between acts—regulars are used to them, newcomers are surprised—structure the evening like the canonical hours of prayer. I was traveling alone this year, too, and I view this not as a lack, but as a necessity. Much as I love my Bettina, and much as I cherish and enjoy having her with me, a visit to Wagner is a singular experience—one that requires you to be entirely with yourself and entirely with the work. Wagner brooks no divided attention; he demands one’s whole being, and he gets it.

Nor does Wagner brook comfort. Anyone who knows Bayreuth knows that the stalls offer no luxury seating. The chairs are hard, cramped, and unforgiving; one endures them just as one endures the sheer length of the performances, and over the years—and the many visits—one inevitably learns humility. Perhaps that is the true point of this house: it trains its audience in asceticism, even as a state of ecstatic intoxication reigns on stage.

With this *Rienzi*, I am now very close to my personal goal. I am missing only *Lohengrin*; once I see that, I will have seen every Wagner opera at Bayreuth at least once. I actually had tickets once before—but that was during the year of the pandemic; the performance was cancelled, and the disappointment ran deep. Two years later, however, I did see the premiere of *Lohengrin* at the Vienna State Opera, conducted by Christian Thielemann—a fine and fitting consolation for the pandemic disaster, in my view. But Vienna is not Bayreuth. The gap remains, and it is waiting.

I have already experienced the other milestones. I saw *Tristan und Isolde* here around 2011—and the dying process in that opera is a long, drawn-out affair; anyone who has endured the third act knows exactly what I mean. I saw *The Flying Dutchman* several times: a completely different proposition—engaging, performed without an intermission, and barely two and a half hours long. It was a sprint compared to the marathons this house usually demands. And then, in 2024, came the complete *Ring* cycle: *Das Rheingold* as the preliminary evening, followed by *Die Walküre* (first day), *Siegfried* (second day), and *Götterdämmerung* (third day). Sixteen hours of Wagner in just under five days, with a single day off in between. When the final curtain fell, I felt transported to another world, close to heaven; had there been just one more opera in the cycle, I might well have transcended the earthly realm entirely. Since that *Ring* experience—I can say this with confidence—every subsequent Wagner performance has felt like mere light entertainment.

A Bold Leap Forward: The Genesis of Rienzi

To understand what appeared on stage that Monday, one must look back to 1837. Wagner—twenty-four years old, ambitious, and burdened by debt—reads the novel *Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes* by the successful English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It tells the story of Cola di Rienzo, a Roman notary who led the common people against the nobility in the 14th century but ultimately failed in his role as tribune. The subject matter sparks an immediate creative fire. By the summer of 1838—now working as a *Kapellmeister* in distant Riga—Wagner has completed the poetic text; as he would do for all his later operas, he wrote the libretto himself. He begins composing the very next day.

Yet Riga is a provincial stage, and Wagner does not think in provincial terms. He deliberately writes on a scale far too grand for the theater where he is employed: his sights are set on Paris—on the *Grand Opéra* and the center of the musical world. He manages to compose the first two acts while still in Riga—but then, his creditors catch up with him. In the summer of 1839, he secretly fled across the border with his wife Minna, boarded a small sailing ship in East Prussia, and—after a stormy crossing that incidentally inspired the idea for *The Flying Dutchman*—finally reached Paris. There, living in abject poverty and enduring both menial jobs and humiliations, he completed the score in November 1840. Paris did not want it; Dresden did. On October 20, 1842, *Rienzi* premiered at the Royal Court Theatre under the baton of Carl Gottlieb Reißiger—a triumph without equal: nearly six hours of music and an audience beside itself with excitement. It was Wagner’s breakthrough: overnight, the fugitive burdened by debt became a celebrated composer, and shortly thereafter, the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. Without *Rienzi*, there would have been no Dresden Wagner; without Dresden, no *Tannhäuser*, no *Lohengrin*—and ultimately, no Bayreuth.

A charming footnote in music history: Wagner’s very first opera, *Die Feen* (The Fairies), did not premiere until after his death—in 1888, in Munich. Some works must wait for their moment to arrive. *Rienzi* waited one hundred and eighty-four years for Bayreuth.

The Rise and Fall of a Tribune

The plot is quickly told, yet inexhaustible. Rome in turbulent times: the noble Colonna and Orsini families terrorize the population; the city sinks into chaos without a government; the Pope—the sole moral and spiritual authority—resides far away in Avignon. Cola di Rienzi, a papal notary and man of letters, rises up against these tyrannical cliques after his younger brother is murdered. The people follow him, the Church supports him; he becomes Tribune and promises a republic of liberty, unity, and justice—a state governed solely by the rule of law, where all are equal.

It is the eternal promise of all populist saviors—and it carries within it the seeds of failure. An assassination attempt by the nobles fails; at the urging of his sister Irene and her lover Adriano—a son of the Colonna family—Rienzi pardons his enemies. Those pardoned return with an army. Rienzi triumphs, but at a terrible cost, and his downfall begins with that victory: his idealism curdles into hubris, the people turn against him, the Church casts him out, and even Adriano abandons him. Only Irene remains—to the very end, until the Roman populace sets fire to the Capitol where the siblings are trapped. Wagner enriched the source material—originally by Bulwer-Lytton—with precisely this love story between Irene and Adriano, and he knew why: "My *Rienzi* lacked that *amour* for the French," he later quipped, "and yet even there I had the 'tailbone'"—that vestigial remnant of French tragedy, which always demanded a love story.

The Disowned Debut

And this brings us to the evening’s most peculiar question: Why did Wagner later disown his most successful early work? The mature master who celebrated the music drama as a *Gesamtkunstwerk* (total work of art) in Bayreuth wanted nothing more to do with the *grand opéra* of his youth—too much Meyerbeer, too much artifice, too much Paris. Hans von Bülow coined the most malicious quip in the history of the work’s reception: *Rienzi* was, he claimed, "Meyerbeer’s best opera." Wagner did not include it in the canon of ten works deemed worthy of Bayreuth.

Yet the matter is not quite so simple, and this year’s Bayreuth production builds its argument around this very fact. For the older Wagner spoke quite warmly of his early work. "One ought to be able to see the fire in *Rienzi*," he noted in 1871; "I was a music director and wrote a grand opera; the fact that this music director later gave them such tough nuts to crack—that ought to amaze them." The fire of the debut work as a prerequisite for the later "nuts to crack"—it would be hard to capture the relationship between early and late works more beautifully. Even his 1878 remark—describing every finale as "a frenzy, a drunken nonsense of suffering and joy"—sounds more like mischievous pride than detachment. He was capable of self-criticism, too: in 1879, he spoke of the "empty passages one churns out when nothing comes to mind." Someone who speaks of a work in such terms has not forgotten it. He has merely locked it away.

The Festival now argues that the Bayreuth canon is based neither on a formal testament nor on the founding charter, but merely on passages from letters Wagner wrote to King Ludwig II in 1882—and had a definitive version been established around 1871, *Rienzi* would certainly have found its place in the canon. One might view this as elegant anniversary rhetoric. Yet one can also take it seriously: the 2026 version has given as much careful consideration to the layers of transmission and the history of its reception as to the scholarship of recent decades; it has attempted to reconstruct parts of the score once thought lost—the original score is considered missing, a fact that touches upon a distinct, dark chapter of German history—and has made cuts in line with the work’s musical dramaturgy. Even if Wagner had written nothing but *Rienzi*—so the team’s credo goes—this opera would have been a masterpiece *sui generis*, securing its place in the history of European musical theater regardless of the later "Master of Bayreuth." After this Monday, I am inclined to agree.

What Politics Does to People

Musically, I found the evening—as is invariably the case at this venue—simply magnificent. I like virtually every Wagner opera—some a bit more, some a bit less—and *Rienzi* surprises one with a freshness one would hardly expect from a twenty-four-year-old composer: French grandeur, Italian melodic richness, and, already present, that unerring dramatic instinct that would later sustain his music dramas. Nathalie Stutzmann, on the podium, held the monumental choral forces together with masterful command; Andreas Schager shouldered the grueling title role with heroic, inexhaustible energy.

I find the production harder to embrace—as is often the case for me. *Regietheater* (director-driven theater) is not really my cup of tea; there is too much politicization, too much of the present day intruding between the audience and the work itself. However, I must admit that the directing duo Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka—the first women to direct as a team on the Green Hill—have forged an interesting link to the present day this time around. Their interpretation asks not what people make of politics, but what politics makes of people—placing emotional dynamics at the center, including the "unhealthy" closeness between Rienzi and his sister, which already foreshadows the sibling love found in *Die Walküre*. The madness of the world does not stop at the opera stage. A people cheering for their savior only to burn him shortly thereafter; an idealist whose republic of equality ends in hubris and flames; the susceptibility of the masses to promises of salvation—there is no need to blatantly advertise the parallels to the present; they emerge naturally. Hannah Arendt would have taken grim delight in this material: the Tribune does not fail because of his enemies; he fails because he confuses the people with an idea. Humility, Seventh Row

As I stepped out into the mild August night after the final curtain—my limbs stiff from the notorious seating—I thought: Perhaps that is precisely what belongs to Bayreuth—that nothing here comes easily. Not the seats, not the duration, not the simple answers. The house demands patience, and it rewards it with moments that exist nowhere else. One must endure Wagner, and therein lies the true gain. The banished Rienzi has found his way to the Hill—after one hundred and eighty-four years, for a single summer. I saw him—on a Monday, from the seventh row. Now, only *Lohengrin* remains. History—including one’s own small story—is simply never fully told; and that, all things considered, is a truly comforting thought.

Sapere aude!

S.

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