Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Wagner's 'Rienzi' Takes a Cartoon-Like Turn

The new co-director or the Bayreuther Festspiele, Katharina Wagner, has moved backwards from Wagner’s second last completed music-drama, Der Meistersinger von Nurnberg, to Wagner’s first success (his third completed opera), Rienzi, in a production for Opera Bremen in late 2008.  The political nature of Rienzi, in which an almost perfect leader is brought down by perfidy and a fickle Roman populace – possibly because of his own incipient capitulation to the attractions of power or possibly because he is too principled to recognise treachery in others.  Written for Paris and intended to compete with Giacomo Meyebeer’s works for the hearts of the Parisians, Rienzi premiered in Dresden in 1842 to much acclaim, but with insuperable problems of length and logistics that still dog the work.  Almost no modern production is uncut – Ms Wagner cut the work from the notional full-length five hours to four.

According to reports, Katharina Wagner has used the tonsorial school of character analysis to portray her conception of the Roman Tribune. George Loomis, writing in The International Herald Tribune, says: ‘After the opening scene, in which the bald-headed tribune quells a skirmish, he repairs to a hair salon, where he is outfitted with a wig. His vanity pumped up, he wears it at his next public appearance, along with clothes that are, according to the libretto, ‘fantastic and pompous.’ As his power dissolves, Rienzi adopts the hairstyle of a young girl - blond with pigtails.’  Loomis pinpoints the problem with the production: ‘During the opera's ballet, Rienzi appears in a trash bin, with an outdoor vacuum cleaner strapped to his back, which he wields as a weapon. He and the other characters never emerge as real people. You never knew for sure whether ‘Rienzi’ was worth reviving, despite the strong appeal of much of the music. The impression is of a random series of episodes.’  From reports I have read of Ms Wagner’s Bayreuth Meistersinger production, this may be a genetic failing in her approach to opera production – great gimmicks; little content.

A blogger on the mostlyopera.com website injected some local relevance into the discussion by suggesting that most German critics had reacted favourably, seeing the story as ‘parallelling the fate of Rienzi with that of the CSU (Christian democratical political party in Bavaria), having just lost the absolute majority (on September 27th 2008) in the Bavaria State Election for the first time in half a century.’  Indeed, the story of Rienzi should be capable of being interpreted as a commentary on just about any contemporary political regime, with a clear moral for leaders who lose touch with the people they rule.

Catherine Hickley in her Bloomberg review concurs with Loomis in wondering about the point of locating a key scene in a hairdressing salon: it ‘diminishes the stature of the characters, making a mockery of their power games. It also reduces the grandiosity of the work of the young composer. Trouble is, Katharina Wagner gives us nothing to replace it -- we are left wondering why we should care at all about this story and these characters.’  Reinforcing her point, Hickley laments that Ms Wagner ‘has also turned it from drama to farce, especially the first two acts. Megalomania becomes vanity, violence becomes impudence in her interpretation. Rienzi is a preening, prancing, buffoonish showman, a media politician with a penchant for kitsch and an out-of-control ego. Part Liberace, part Silvio Berlusconi.’
 
Hickley notes that the set for the last three acts: ‘…some of the grandeur of the story returns -- too late to recapture interest. A staircase leaking blood is a vivid means of conveying the loss of life on the battlefield. Yet you can't forget that the bloodshed was all caused, of course, by an army equipped with vacuum cleaners. (Or were they those powered leaf sweepers? Are we missing some deeper ecological message here? Who knows?)’  (the set by Tilo Steffens, consisting mainly of a large flight of stairs, makes the stage look cramped)

Both Loomis and Hickley had good words for most of the singing, with Loomis particularly approving the chorus, even if they were made to do strange things. Loomis considered that… ‘the conductor, Christoph Ulrich Meier, does an admirable job holding the work together. And in Mark Duffin, the company has a tenor who can really sing the daunting title role…’.  Others in the cast were, as Adriano, a young nobleman torn between admiration for Rienzi and loyalty to his father, the Russian mezzo soprano Tamara Klivadenko, Patricia Andress as Rienzi's sister Irene, and Pavel Kudinov and Loren Lang as the noblemen Colonna and Orsini.

I suspect that Loomis would also have agreed with Hickley’s summation: ‘the production adds to evidence that she has a long way to go to prove that she is an opera director by more than birthright.’  You can read the full reports at the following websites: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/22/arts/loomis.php?pass=true#
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&refer=muse&sid=at9uNH7EwdKw.
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