Wagner's early opera Rienzi has received its first ever staging at the Bayreuth festival, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival's usual canon of his 10 "mature" works. The opera has long been avoided at Bayreuth partly because it was Adolf Hitler's favourite work and because no authentic complete score survives, its handwritten manuscript having been given to Hitler and subsequently lost. The production, directed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, reimagines 14th-century Rome as a dystopian near-future and casts the story as a frenzied contemporary election drama referencing recent US politics, though the review judges the staging overloaded with ideas.

Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann was praised for bringing tenderness and grandeur to a score that mixes French grand-opera scale with an Italianate sound and only occasional hints of Wagner's mature style. Andreas Schager led a strong cast as Rienzi with a powerful but largely unvaried tenor, supported by Andreas Bauer Kanabas, Michael Nagy and Gabriela Scherer, while Jennifer Holloway's reworked, "soft-butch lesbian" take on Adriano was singled out as the standout performance.