Before Richard Wagner became a Nazi favorite, a Jewish composer made him weep

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. 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. 150 years after Bayreuth opened, their new Rienzi reminds us that Meyerbeer was inside Wagner’s music all along.