Rienzi der Letzte der Tribunen

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes (1834) is the kind of book that only the dawn of the Victorian era could produce: a high-flown historical melodrama portraying the rise and fall of Cola di Rienzo, the 14th-century rebel who led the people of Rome against a tyrannical aristocracy before falling victim to the bloodlust of the mob. Richard Wagner—at this point an ambitious but impoverished young conductor in Riga—enjoyed the novel, and spotted its potential as the grandest of grand operas: something very much like the effects-laden blockbusters with which Giacomo Meyerbeer was taking the theatrical world by storm. Five years after the composer first read the novel, in October 1842, Wagner’s Rienzi opened in Dresden, and became the first real triumph of the 29-year old composer’s operatic career. In its original form, it lasted more than six hours, and was written with a flamboyance and an eye for spectacle that bears little direct relationship to Wagner’s later operatic masterpieces. Wagner later disowned Rienzi, and modern stagings are rare. Its massive choral scenes and impassioned, Italianate ensembles place it closer to the operas of Meyerbeer (and Verdi’s Don Carlos) than mature Wagnerian music-drama. But its thrilling overture is an enduring concert hall favourite—making dazzling use of the score’s greatest single melody (a popular recital number in its own right), the soaring tenor aria known as “Rienzi’s Prayer”.