Rienzi, der Führer: Michael Fuller misses the sense of the epic in the Deutsche Oper’s now classic staging of Wagner’s early opera

Review of Rienzi, directed Stölzl, conducted Rogister, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2016.

July 2016, Volume 10, Number 2, 59–60.

The Deutsche Oper’s production of Rienzi was first presented in 2010. It was filmed and subsequently released on DVD, in which format it has been reviewed in The Wagner Journal (March 2011). The production was revived in the Wagner bicentenary year, and now makes its third appearance on the Bismarckstrasse. It is without doubt an audacious and theatrically brilliant take on Wagner’s grand opera, but that brilliance is achieved at some considerable expense to the structure and content of the original. Thus the work is cut to some two and a half hours of music, Wagner’s five acts being reduced to a bipartite structure in the process; and director Philipp Stölzl sets the work unequivocally in the 1930s and 40s, with Rienzi re-cast as a fascist dictator.