Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Wagner: Rienzi

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host, Keith Brown, writes:

Here's a Wagner opera that I can broadcast in its entirety on one Sunday afternoon! Frankfurt Opera has made a series of recordings of their live concert performances of Richard Wagner's early operas, this in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the composer in 1813. The German label Oehms Classics released Frankfurt Opera's Rienzi on three compact discs in Wagner's bicentennial year. Sebastian Weigle directs the chorus and orchestra. The opera's story is based on the novel Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Wagner read it in German translation and prepared his own libretto from it. His "Great Tragic Opera" rivals in its grand operatic scale the works of Spontini and Meyerbeer.

Tenor Peter Bronder stars in the title role in the new Frankfurt Opera production. The last time I aired Rienzi the starring tenor was Rene Kollo. That was way back on Sunday, August 5, 1984, when I presented Rienzi on five LP's in its 1976 world premiere recording for EMI of the first published edition of the score. It was a production of Staatsoper Dresden, the city where Rienzi was first staged in 1842. (The premiere performance ran for six hours!) I struggled to squeeze that old recording into my three-and-a-half hour time-slot, cutting the ballet music in my effort to make it fit. The new Oehms Classics CD concert version of the opera has been considerably abridged. But the cuts made reduces its playing time to the proper length for broadcast. Actually, there no longer is a complete definitive autograph score for Wagner's third opera. It was destroyed in World War Two.