Overture to Rienzi
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Composed 1838-1840.
Premiered on October 20, 1842 in Dresden,
conducted by Carl Gottlieb Reissiger.

The years around 1830 saw the efflorescence of grand opera,
with the genre’s most elaborate examples appearing in Paris.
Auber’s Le Muette de Portici (1828), Rossini’s William Tell (1829), Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836) and Halévy’s La Juive (1835) overwhelmed contemporary audiences with their potent combination of opulent spectacle and pompous music placed in a pageant-like historical setting. Richard Wagner, then an ambitious stripling in his twenties whose second opera, Das Liebesverbot (“The Love Ban”), had failed gloriously enough in Magdeburg in 1836 to bring the company tumbling down and cost him his job there as music director, longed to enter the pantheon of grand opera composers. In the summer before he took up a position as conductor at the opera house in Riga (in Latvia, on the Baltic Sea) in July 1837, he read Bärmann’s German translation the 1835 novel Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes by the British writer E.G.E. Bulwer-Lytton, which was in turn based on Mary Russell Mitford’s play of 1828. Wagner saw operatic potential in the sweeping story of the 14th-century struggles of the Orsinis and the Collonas in Rome, and he finished the libretto in summer 1838. He started the music immediately, and continued work on it until September 1839, when he was hounded out of Riga by cabals and creditors. (Wagner was a notorious financial deadbeat throughout his life, always looking for a Maecenas.) He fled to Paris, where he met many of that city’s most important musicians, including Meyerbeer (a transplanted German), but, speaking virtually no French, he could not make any professional headway and struggled to exist with the most menial musical tasks. The nadir of his fortunes came in October 1840, when he was briefly incarcerated in debtor’s prison. His faith in himself
and in his Rienzi never wavered, however, and he took up the
score again and completed it on November 19, 1840; the Overture was finished on October 23rd.

Wagner’s efforts to have Rienzi produced in Paris were fruitless. It was finally accepted by the Dresden Court Opera on the recommendation of the generous Meyerbeer, who called it the best of all the grand operas, and Wagner left France for Germany in April 1842 to oversee the production. The premiere was delayed several times, but finally staged on October 20th. Heinrich Heine wrote of the worried young composer that night that he “looked like a ghost; he laughed and wept at the same time and embraced everybody who came near him, while all the time cold perspiration ran down his forehead.” Rienzi was a success, and remained one of the most popular items in the Dresden repertory until Wagner was
run out of town for his part in the political uprisings there seven years later. Its popularity not only led to Wagner receiving an appointment to the opera house’s musical staff but also to the premiere there of The Flying Dutchman the following January. Wagner’s international fame began with these two operas.

Rienzi, the heroic story of Cola di Rienzi, who tried to lead a
popular revolt against the despotic nobles of 14th-century Rome only to be thwarted and killed through the intrigues of his enemies, is filled with the large choruses, spectacular sets and costumes, ballets, processionals and military scenes that
characterize grand opera. The Overture, a “violently splendid”
piece according to George Bernard Shaw, is based on several
themes from the opera drawn into a loose sonata form. An
opening trumpet blast, the signal for the uprising of the people, begins the slow introduction, much of which is given over to the majestic theme of Rienzi’s Act V prayer. The main body of the Overture, commencing with the faster tempo, comprises several melodies: the music of the chorus Gegrüsst sei hoher Tag!; the battle hymn Santo spirito cavaliere, stentorianly intoned by the brasses; a repetition of Rienzi’s prayer; and the joyful Rienzi, dir sei Preis, used as a closing theme. An energetic development and an abbreviated recall of the themes, initiated by the trumpet summons that opened the Overture, bring this stirring piece to its grand close.

Notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda