BAYREUTH, GERMANY — Midway through the second act of the Bayreuth Festival’s new production of Rienzi, a miniature Richard Wagner takes command of the Festspielhaus. A child painted gold and wearing the composer’s familiar velvet cap and facial hair bursts onstage and presides over a manic pageant of the ten operas that have made up Bayreuth’s repertoire for the past 150 years. Minnesingers and Meistersingers collide; mythical and medieval heroes jostle for position; the medieval Wartburg castle of Tannhäuser turns into the boxy East German automobile that shared its name. The whole sequence, chaotic yet tightly choreographed, has a high-camp exuberance.

Over the past decades, Bayreuth has become surprisingly good at critiquing and even poking fun at itself. The Norwegian director Stefan Herheim’s landmark 2008 Parsifal turned Wagner’s mystical final opera into a galloping history of Germany and the festival that had grown up around it. Nine years later, Barrie Kosky, the first Jewish director to work on the Green Hill, set Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg partly inside Wagner’s own home and partly in the courtroom of the Nuremberg trials.

Founded by Wagner in 1876 as the ideal theater for his own works, Bayreuth is marking its 150th anniversary this summer with its very first staging of Rienzi. The festival had originally hoped to also perform its full repertoire of canonical Wagner works. Financial limitations forced it to abandon that plan.

Rienzi was Wagner’s third completed opera and his first great success when it premiered in Dresden in 1842, yet it belongs to the period of his career that Bayreuth has traditionally treated as the composer’s prehistory. The opera, a rarity nowadays, also feeds directly into several histories that the festival has spent decades learning how to discuss: Wagner’s enormous artistic debt to the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer; Wagner’s rabid antisemitism; Adolf Hitler’s fascination with Wagner; and the Wagner family’s own embrace of German nationalism and Nazism.

Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes) takes its story from an 1835 historical novel by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Its hero, Cola di Rienzo, was a 14th-century Roman notary and man of letters who tried to break the power of the city’s feuding aristocratic families and establish a republican government. During Wagner’s lifetime, Rienzi remained his most popular opera.

This summer on the Green Hill, the sparkling and rousingly triumphant music of Rienzi itself kept pointing away from Bayreuth and toward Paris. Giacomo Meyerbeer, born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1791, became the dominant composer of French grand opéra and one of the most internationally successful musicians of the 19th century. His Robert le diable and Les Huguenots showed what opera could achieve when intimate drama, huge public scenes, chorus, orchestra and stage technology were coordinated on an unprecedented scale. There is an old joke that Rienzi is Meyerbeer’s best opera. The young Wagner would not necessarily have taken that as an insult.

In 1837, the 24-year-old Wagner wrote to Meyerbeer that the older composer’s works had given his ideas about dramatic music a “new direction.” He praised Meyerbeer for mastering the strengths of the Italian and French schools and combining them into an art with international reach. “Goethe is dead — but he was no musician; there is nobody left but you,” Wagner wrote Meyerbeer in 1840. When the young composer arrived in Paris poor, obscure and desperately ambitious, Meyerbeer supported him, wrote recommendations on his behalf and praised music from Rienzi. In one letter, Wagner told Meyerbeer that he wept when he thought of “the man who is everything to me” and that working and striving “for you, and you alone” gave meaning to his efforts.

The musical indebtedness ran deeper than the patronage. Wagner later acknowledged that grand opéra, with its huge scenic and musical resources, had been his model for Rienzi. His ambition, he wrote, was “not simply to imitate it” but to surpass it through an extraordinary expenditure of means: five acts, five large finales, hymns, processions and what he called the “musical clash of arms.” Those techniques did not disappear when Wagner later repudiated grand opéra. He absorbed and transformed them in “mature” works like Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Götterdämmerung, the final installment of the Ring cycle, which might be said to be the grand opéra par excellence.

That artistic debt increasingly tormented him. When Robert Schumann remarked in 1843 that Der fliegende Holländer “smacked of Meyerbeer,” Wagner responded with extraordinary defensiveness, insisting that the faintest Meyerbeerian odor would threaten his creative identity while conceding in the same letter that he remained personally indebted to the elder composer. After an attempt to staged Rienzi in Berlin in 1847 ran aground, Wagner’s resentment acquired a paranoid cast: he persuaded himself that the Jewish composer exercised secret control over the press and court circles that had disappointed him, despite the considerable evidence of Meyerbeer’s efforts to assist him.

The anxiety Wagner seemed to feel about Meyerbeer’s influence never fully disappeared. In 1872, eight years after Meyerbeer’s death, Wagner’s wife Cosima recorded a dream in which her husband was “walking arm in arm with Meyerbeer” and Meyerbeer had “smoothed for him the paths to fame.” She immediately connected it with another dream that repeatedly troubled Wagner: Money due to him had failed to arrive and he was unable to pay his rent.

Wagner’s antisemitism cannot be reduced to wounded professional vanity. It drew on larger currents of German nationalism and anti-Jewish thought and became, over the ensuing decades, one of the ugliest and most persistent elements in his worldview. Meyerbeer nevertheless became central to how Wagner articulated it. The cosmopolitan art Wagner had once admired could now be recoded as rootless; theatrical brilliance became superficiality; international success became commercial calculation. In the infamous 1850 essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Judaism in Music”), Wagner denied Jews the capacity for authentic artistic creation. In “Oper und Drama” (“Opera and Drama”), Meyerbeer became his supreme example of a composer who manufactured “effects without causes.”

The accusation is comically revealing when heard alongside Rienzi, one of the most unabashedly effect-hungry scores ever composed, especially in Bayreuth’s gargantuan performing version. This points to why Rienzi sits so uneasily inside the later Wagner myth: The prophet of a regenerated German art first made his name with a gigantic cosmopolitan entertainment modeled on a genre perfected in Paris by a Jewish composer.

Rienzi’s most consequential 20th-century admirer was Adolf Hitler. August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Hitler’s, claimed in his memoir that Hitler emerged from a performance of Rienzi in 1905 in a state of near ecstasy and later told him, “In that hour it began,” retrospectively lending the performance in Linz a prophetic quality.  What had begun that evening was a political vocation modeled on the populist tribune who rose from obscurity by promising national renewal.

Early on, Hitler adopted Rienzi’s rousing overture for his political meetings in Munich; it later became a ritual element of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. For his 50th birthday in 1939, Hitler received Wagner’s autographed manuscript of Rienzi. Now lost, it was presumably in the Führerbunker when Hitler committed suicide to escape capture from the advancing Soviet troops.

I don’t think one need describe any of this as an “abuse” of Wagner. Music does not arrive with instructions for use. The Nazi embrace of Rienzi belongs to the opera’s reception history just as Meyerbeer belongs to its compositional history. Hitler recognized something in Rienzi’s transformation of political aspiration into mass spectacle that answered to his own imagination. That does not make Wagner responsible for Hitler; nor does it require us to pretend that the attraction was based on a misunderstanding.

The connection between the Führer and the Wagner Festival, however, is a different story altogether. After Wagner’s death in 1883, his widow Cosima helped turn the festival into a center of völkisch nationalism and antisemitism. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law, directed the festival from 1930 to 1944 and became one of Hitler’s closest friends. The relationship between Nazism and Bayreuth was not a hostile takeover of an innocent artistic institution. As I wrote in these pages in 2013, Bayreuth supported Hitler before Hitler supported Bayreuth.

After World War II, the festival answered this inheritance principally through aesthetics. When Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner — the composer’s grandsons — reopened Bayreuth in 1951, Wieland’s stripped-down, abstract productions decisively broke with the representational style associated with the Nazi period. But the brothers also asked visitors to refrain from political discussion on the Festival Hill: “Here, art is what counts.”

The morning of this year’s Rienzi premiere, the German-Jewish public intellectual Michel Friedman stood inside the Festspielhaus and quoted that appeal in a speech devoted to Wagner’s antisemitism and Bayreuth’s history.

Before Friedman spoke, the Russian-Jewish maestro Semyon Bychkov conducted Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” alongside chamber music by Gustav Mahler and Pavel Haas, the Czech Jewish composer murdered at Auschwitz. The festival has also made the open-air Silenced Voices memorial to Jewish artists excluded and persecuted at Bayreuth a permanent feature of the Green Hill. (First unveiled in 2012, it could definitely use a facelift.)

Bayreuth has approached this outlier with the characteristic fussiness of an institution that considers itself the standard bearer of Wagner. There is no definitive Rienzi and so the festival has assembled its own new performing version from the earliest available materials and later revisions. The result contains roughly four hours of music inside an evening that runs six hours with its two long intervals. Rienzi resembles its successors in sheer length, if in nothing else.

The last time I saw a live Rienzi was 16 years ago at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Back then, the director Philipp Stölzl compressed the opera to about three hours and presented Rienzi’s rise and fall as an explicit Hitler-Mussolini parable. As a commentary on the work’s reception history, it was anything but subtle.

Bayreuth’s production, directed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, is less literal but also less involving. Their Rome is a gray contemporary or near-future political landscape dominated by election campaigns, polling, smartphones and screens. The production had a strong visual grammar and some remarkably assured tableaux (including the riotous act two ballet), but it didn’t seem particularly interested in telling a story.

Virtually nobody at Bayreuth or anywhere else can be expected to know the intricacies of this plot in advance, which made the festival’s refusal to provide surtitles unusually exasperating. With Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal, performed before an audience that often knows the texts intimately, dispensing with projected translations can enhance concentration. But Rienzi is an obscure opera being performed in an unfamiliar version, and the staging itself rarely clarified the action. Eventually I stopped worrying about it. Another chorus arrived, another political faction reversed itself, another steely declaration climbed toward a climax. Rienzi is prodigiously good at generating excitement and considerably less good at persuading you that one excitement necessarily leads to the next.

In interviews, Nathalie Stutzmann, the French conductor helming the production, has stressed Rienzi’s affinities with Bellini and the Italian bel canto tradition. The Festival Orchestra sounded phenomenal: brilliant without becoming merely blaring and surprisingly lyrical beneath all the military and ceremonial pomp.

The Festival Chorus, which bears much of the opera’s weight, produced one immense wave of sound after another. The Austrian heldentenor Andreas Schager sounded as though he were born to sing Rienzi, which is an insane thing to say about anyone. His seemingly inexhaustible voice and effortless buoyancy suited the character’s mixture of exhortation, certitude and growing desperation.

Their audience responded with the decorum of a mausoleum. This audience can sit through a climax that would bring almost any Italian or French opera house to its feet with the stillness of a congregation awaiting further instructions. (Whenever I tentatively tried to applaud an aria in the silence that followed a full cadence, I was immediately shushed.)

No one needs Rienzi to become a permanent Bayreuth fixture. 150 years since the first Bayreuth Festival, it’s enough that it has punched a hole in the repertory. The Salzburg Easter Festival, which is currently building a new Ring with Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic, plans to interrupt Wagner in 2028 with Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. Bayreuth might profit from similar encounters: With Meyerbeer and the other composers who fed Wagner’s imagination, or perhaps with composers whose music later found itself excluded from the German tradition in the name of ideas that flourished on the Green Hill. The sepulchral Festspielhaus could stand a little “luft von anderem Planeten” (“air from other planets”), to quote a Stefan George poem that Schoenberg set to music.

Listening to Rienzi at Bayreuth makes audible something the Wagner cult spent generations trying not to hear. Beneath the composer who would announce a new German art stands the cosmopolitan operatic world he learned from; behind the antisemite who made Meyerbeer a symbol of artistic falseness stands the desperate young composer who begged for Meyerbeer’s help and absorbed his example. 150 years after Bayreuth opened, their new Rienzi reminds us that Meyerbeer was inside Wagner’s music all along.

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