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| Opera Orchestra of New York: Chauvet, Matos, Storey (c) AP Photo |
Wagner's 1842 opera
Rienzi is a heady cocktail of medieval history and political idealism, shaken together in grand operatic fashion (libretto
here.) Hardly a curiosity from a noted composer's juvenilia,
Rienzi was among Wagner's most popular operas during his own lifetime. Music historian Carl Wilhelm Bauck, writing in the 1860s, characterized
Rienzi as possessing "an unusual power, a living spirit, [and] a design of massive, even at times imposing dimensions, and that this all springs from an imagination that surrounds all that enters its purview with burning colors." Another early review praised its "energy of feeling and warmth of imagination." That it is rarely performed, and still more rarely staged, may be partly due to the demands of this form: elaborate processions--and a cast of dimensions to make Cecil B. DeMille proud--do not come cheap. There is also the question of how to piece the opera together; the original manuscript has been "lost, presumed destroyed" since the Second World War, so some cuts are inevitable and, given its massive length (over 8000 bars) further editing is a commonplace. The three-hour version given by the
Opera Orchestra of New York (slightly shorter than the
EMI recording
) was missing some ambassadors and a ballet, but the former are easily omitted from the
elaborate plot, and the latter perhaps a prudent excision from this concert performance. (I didn't notice specifics of other cuts;
Zerbinetta's report on Likely Impossibilities will almost certainly have a more detailed and thoughtful consideration of these issues.) What of the work itself? Like the early critics cited above, I was drawn in by its musical and dramatic vividness. Many of Wagner's characteristically rich harmonies are present, as are his concerns with the individual's relationship to social institutions. But all of this inhabits, in structural and stylistic terms, the world of grand opera--most decidedly, the world of Meyerbeer--rather than the late nineteenth-century orchestral landscape which Wagner himself did so much to create.