Overture (Rienzi)

Rienzi was staged at the Dresden Hoftheater on 20 October 1842 and ran for something over five hours; the audience stayed, and it was the first unqualified success Wagner had. He had written it in Paris in conditions close to destitution, modelling it on Spontini and the Parisian grand operas he could not get performed, and taking the plot from Bulwer-Lytton's novel about the fourteenth-century Roman tribune. Wagner later disowned the work and kept it out of Bayreuth. The overture, which sets out the principal themes in order, outlived the opera and is what remains regularly played.