Rienzi hymns, processions and the musical clash of arms". Cosima Wagner recorded Wagner's comment in her diary for 20 June 1871: "Rienzi" is very repugnant to me, but they should at least recognize the fire in it; I was a music director and I wrote a grand opera; the fact that it was this same music director who gave them some hard nuts to crack – that's what should astonish them. Thus the work has remained outside today's Wagner canon, and was only performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 2013, staged by Matthias von Stegmann. Although the composer disclaimed it, it
Rienzi followed on 27 January 1879 by the first UK performance at Her Majesty's Theatre in London. The overture was the first work performed at the inaugural Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Queen's Hall in London in August 1895. A staging at the English National Opera in London, produced by Nicholas Hytner in 1983, placed the hero in the context of 20th-century totalitarianism. A production by David Pountney at the Vienna State Opera in 1999 set the work in the "near future". Of this production Pountney wrote: Other contemporary productions have been rare. Performances were given at the Theater Bremen