As you probably know, Rienzi was Wagner's first success (after the juvenile Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot. Wagner himself had second thoughts, and ultimately decided to ban the work from being performed at his custom-built Festival Opera House in Bayreuth. Wagner was trying to match the very long French grand opera of the day, and Rienzi came in at 5 1/2 hours (!)

Like most recent productions, this one is truncated, down to about three hours (many of the marches and processions are repetitions, and the consensus is that they can be cut without harming the basic work.

The producer, Philipp Stölzl, makes extensive use of videos and other multimedia to relate the events of 14th century Rome to more recent German events - examples:







If you don't read German, you can run these reviews through Google Translator and get decent translation in your native language:


http://www.kulturradio.de/rezensione..._Tribunen.html


http://www.morgenpost.de/kultur/berl...er-Rienzi.html



This last one has summaries, and includes comments from Katharina Wagner, Richard's great-great granddaughter , who staged Rienzi in Bremen two years ago:

http://www.deutscheoperberlin.de/?pa...=pressestimmen