The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people.

Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles' rebellion against the people's power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had urged him to assert himself, turns against him.

[4] During a 1839 visit to the bathing resort town of Boulogne, Wagner approached Meyerbeer with a partial draft of Rienzi, and the elder composer responded with encouragement.

In 1841 Wagner moved to Meudon, just outside Paris, where the debt laws could be more easily evaded,[9] whilst awaiting developments for Rienzi, having already written to King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, requesting that he order a production of the work in Dresden.

[10] This, with the proposed staging of Der fliegende Holländer in Berlin, also supported by Meyerbeer,[11] persuaded Wagner to return to Germany in April 1842.

During rehearsals the performers were highly enthusiastic; the tenor Tichatschek, in the title role, was so impressed with a passage from act 3 (later deleted because of the opera's length), that "at each rehearsal, each of the soloists contributed a silver groschen to [a] fund that Tichatschek had started ... No one suspected that what was an amiable joke for them was the means of buying [Wagner] an extra morsel of sorely-needed food.

"[12] The premiere of Rienzi took place on 20 October 1842 in the new Dresden Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper and opened the previous year.

[14] In his later memoirs, Mein Leben, Wagner recalled: No subsequent experience has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of Rienzi.

The public had been forcibly predisposed to accept it, because everyone connected with the theatre had been spreading such favourable reports ... that the entire population was looking forward to what was heralded as a miracle ...

The US premiere took place on 4 March 1878 at the Academy of Music in New York and was followed on 27 January 1879 by the first UK performance at Her Majesty's Theatre in London.

[17] The overture was the first work performed at the inaugural Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Queen's Hall in London in August 1895.

Raimondo appeals to the parties in the name of the Church to stop their fighting; Rienzi's eventual appearance (marked by a dramatic key shift, from D to E flat) quells the riot.

Irene and Adriano realise their mutual attraction (duet "Ja, eine Welt voll Leiden" – Yes, a world of sorrows).

[24] In its original form the ballet lasts for over half an hour – in modern performances and recordings it is generally drastically cut.

However, for the 1847 Berlin performance Wagner substituted a more upbeat rhetoric: "Ever while the seven hills of Rome remain, ever while the eternal city stands, you will see Rienzi's return!".

The young Eduard Hanslick, later to be one of Wagner's foremost critical adversaries, wrote in 1846 in Vienna: I am of the firm opinion that [Rienzi] is the finest thing achieved in grand opera in the last twelve years, that it is the most significant dramatic creation since Les Huguenots, and that it is just as epoch-making for its own time as were Les Huguenots, Der Freischütz, and Don Giovanni, each for its respective period of musical history.

[29] Wagner later perceived Rienzi as an embarrassment; in his 1852 autobiographical essay, "A Communication to My Friends", he wrote "I saw it only in the shape of 'five acts', with five brilliant 'finales', with hymns, processions and the musical clash of arms".

[31]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 can be noted that Rienzi prefigures themes (brother/sister relationships, social order and revolution) to which Wagner was often to return in his later works.

[35] Thomas Grey comments: In every step of Rienzi's career – from ... acclamation as leader of the Volk, through military struggle, violent suppression of mutinous factions, betrayal and ... final immolation – Hitler would doubtless have found sustenance for his fantasies.

Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.

Complete recordings (and performances) of Rienzi are rare, although the overture is regularly found on radio broadcasts and compilation CDs.