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
Overture in D minor (Handel, arr. Elgar) first performance. Elgar's friend W. H. Reed wrote of Elgar's enthusiasm for Handel: '...he would speak of Handel with tears in his eyes... would rub his hands gleefully and look up to heaven at the thought of Handel's genius'. Elgar wrote to John E. West, music editor at Novello & Co., that he had known the overture since he was a little boy and always wanted it to be heard in a large form. Elgar's arrangement followed two orchestrations of works by another composer he admired: he transcribed J. S. Bach's "Fugue in C minor" in 1921 and the "Fantasia