Rienzi - Composition History

Composition History

Rienzi is Wagner's third completed opera, and is mostly written in a grand opera style; depictions of the mob, the liberal ethos associated with the hero and the political intervention of a reactionary clergy recall La vestale, Les Huguenots, and also Fromental Halévy's La Juive. Each act ends with an extended finale ensemble and is replete with solos, duets, trios and crowd scenes. There is also an extended ballet in Act II according to the accepted Grand Opera format. Hans von Bülow was later to joke that "Rienzi is Meyerbeer's best opera".

Wagner began to draft the opera in Riga in 1837, after reading Lytton's novel. In 1839, meeting Meyerbeer by chance in Boulogne, he was able to read the latter the first three acts of the libretto, and to gain his interest. Meyerbeer also introduced Wagner to Ignaz Moscheles, who was also staying at Boulogne; as Ernest Newman comments, this was "Wagner's first meeting with real international musical celebrities". When the opera was completed in 1840, Wagner had hoped for it to be premiered at the Paris Opéra.

Several circumstances, including his lack of influence, prevented this. Moreover, Wagner's wife Minna, in a letter of 28 October 1840 to Wagner's friend Apel, who had likely first made the suggestion that Wagner compose Rienzi, mentions a plan to perform the overture to Rienzi "a fortnight hence", but contains a clear indication that her husband had just been committed to a debtor's prison. The full score of Rienzi was completed on 19 November 1840.

In 1841 Wagner moved to Meudon, just outside Paris, where the debt laws could be more easily evaded, whilst awaiting developments for Rienzi, having already written to King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, requesting that he order a production of the work in Dresden.

With the support of Meyerbeer, a staging of Rienzi was arranged in Dresden; Meyerbeer wrote to the Director of the Opera in Dresden, Baron von Lüttichau, that he found the opera "rich in fantasy and of great dramatic effect". This, with the proposed staging of The Flying Dutchman in Berlin, also supported by Meyerbeer, persuaded Wagner to return to Germany in April 1842. During rehearsals the performers were highly enthusiastic; the tenor Tichatschek, in the title role, was so impressed with a passage from Act III (later deleted because of the opera's length), that 'at each rehearsal, each of the soloists contributed a silver groschen to fund that Tichatschek had started ... No one suspected that what was an amiable joke for them was the means of buying an extra morsel of sorely-needed food'.

The premiere of Rienzi took place on 20 October in the new Dresden Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper and opened on 14 April 1841. Semper and Wagner were later to become friends in Dresden, a connection which eventually led to Semper providing designs which became a basis of Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.

The first performance of Rienzi was well received in Dresden despite running over six hours (including intermissions). One legend is that, fearful of the audience departing, Wagner stopped the clock above the stage. In his later memoirs, Mein Leben, Wagner recalled:

No subsequent experience has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of Rienzi. The only too well-founded anxiety as to their success has so dominated my feelings at all subsequent first performances of my works that I could never really enjoy them or take much notice of the way the audience was behaving. The initial success of Rienzi was no doubt assured beforehand. But the uproarious way in which the public declared its partiality for me was extraordinary ... The public had been forcibly predisposed to accept it, because everyone connected with the theatre had been spreading such favourable reports ... that the entire population was looking forward to what was heralded as a miracle ... In trying to recall my condition that evening, I can remember it only as possessing all the features of a dream.

Subsequently, Wagner experimented with giving the opera over two evenings (at the suggestion of von Lüttichau), and making cuts to enable a more reasonable performance in a single evening.