Discovering Rienzi with Philipp Stölzl

Behind the scenes of the Deutsche Oper Berlin to discover a production of Wagner's Rienzi by stage director Philipp Stölzl.

Richard Wagner's early opera Rienzi is stylistically closer to Meyerbeer and bel canto than to Wagner's later masterworks. Yet even this early work is a startlingly powerful and timeless parable of power and abuse. Though the story of the rise and fall of a charismatic leader and his totalitarian regime takes place in 14th-century Rome, the stage director Philipp Stölzl sets it somewhere in the recent past. The topic "anticipates the history of the 20th century in a visionary way," says Stölzl, adding that "one can make surprising analogies to many despots of this time: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Ceausescu...." Since film was a central propaganda tool of 20th-century totalitarian system, Stölzl uses film projections to make the "tribune" Rienzi tower above the masses or, in the style of old newsreels, to show a utopian "New Rome."

In this documentary about the staging of Wagner's Rienzi, the movie director Johannes Grebert brings the spectator behind the scenes of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and interviews the stage director, the singers as wall as scholars specialized in political sciences and history of the 20th century.