280. Der fliegende Holländer [The Flying Dutchman] (Wagner) (2024)

• Romantische Oper in 3 acts
• Composer / libretto: Richard Wagner
• First performed: Königlich Hoftheater, Dresden, Germany, 2 January 1843, conducted by Wagner

Characters

SETTING: The Norwegian coast, 18^th century

Johohoe! Johohohoe! Johohoe! Johoe!
Have you seen the ship upon the ocean
with blood‑red sails and black masts?

The Dutchman is condemned to wander the seas forever, unable to die; attempting to round the Cape of Good Hope in a storm, he swore, ‘In all eternity, I’ll not give up!’ – and Satan took him at his word. The Dutchman has one hope: every seven years, he can come ashore to find a maiden who will be faithful to him even unto death – but his quest has been fruitless. At last, however, he is set free by the Norwegian lass Senta, obsessed with the legend, and who has vowed to be his redeeming angel. To prove her loyalty, she throws herself off a cliff into the sea. The Dutchman’s ship founders; the sea rises and sinks in a whirlpool; and in the sunset, over the wreck of the ship, the Dutchman and Senta are seen rising upwards, embracing each other.

The Flying Dutchman is the first of the canonical Wagner operas, and the earliest work still performed at Bayreuth. It marks an advance in technique and inspiration over the first three operas: while still a ‘number opera’, divided into arias, duets, and ensembles, the score is unified by the themes in the overture and in Senta’s ballad of the cursed sailor. Wagner¹ himself considered that this opera marked an epoch in his artistic development: “This was the first folk poem that forced its way into my heart, and called on me as man and artist to point its meaning, and mould it as a work of art. From here begins my career as poet, and my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera texts.”

The Flying Dutchman, Wagner² believed, represents “the longing after rest from amid the storms of life”. He combines elements of Ulysses (longing for home and faithful Penelope) and of the Wandering Jew (an aimless, joyless wanderer for whom “death was the sole remaining goal of all his strivings; his only hope, the laying down of being”). Unlike the Wandering Jew, who cannot attain redemption, the Dutchman seeks salvation through a woman who sacrifices herself out of love. “The yearning for death thus spurs him on to seek this woman; but she is no longer the home-tending Penelope of Ulysses, as courted in the days of old, but the quintessence of womankind; and yet the still unmanifest, the longed-for, the dreamed-of, the infinitely womanly woman – let me out with it in one phrase: the woman of the future.” Wagner originally named the heroine ‘Minna’, after his wife. He further developed the theme of the salvation of the man through the self-sacrificing love of a woman in his next opera, Tannhäuser. Parsifal, his final opera, switches the sexes; there, the man saves the sinful woman.

The Flying Dutchman was influenced by a Heinrich Heine short story, and by a sea voyage Wagner took from Riga to London in 1839, aboard the Norwegian ship Thetis. “This voyage I never shall forget as long as I live; it lasted three and a half weeks, and was rich in mishaps. Thrice did we endure the most violent of storms, and once the captain found himself compelled to put into a Norwegian haven. The passage among the crags of Norway made a wonderful impression on my fancy; the legends of the Flying Dutchman, as I heard them from the seamen’s mouths, were closed for me in a distinct and individual colour, borrowed from the adventures of the ocean through which I then was passing.”³

Wagner had originally intended Dutchman as a one-act curtain-raiser for Paris; despite Meyerbeer’s efforts to aid his protégé, the Opéra did not bite, and Wagner ended up selling the plot to its manager, Léon Pillet, for 500 francs in 1842: “My final renunciation of my success in Paris”.⁴ (Dietsch’s Vaisseau fantôme, using Wagner’s plot, lasted only 12 performances.)

Wagner nevertheless persevered with the composition of his opera; if France were not interested, surely Germany would be. Neither Munich nor Leipzig were, however. “I had the disheartening answer: the opera was not at all fitted for Germany. Fool that I was! I had fancied it was fitted for Germany alone, since it struck on chords that can vibrate only in the German breast.”⁵ At last, Meyerbeer arranged a production in Berlin, while the opera premièred in Dresden. (Theatre management insisted Wagner’s opera, which he conceived in one act, be split into three.)

The Flying Dutchman, however, did not please the public. The opera was a failure, performed only four times. “The audience fell to wondering how I could have produced this crude, meagre, and gloomy work after Rienzi, in every act of which incident abounded, and Tichatschek shone in an endless variety of costumes.”⁶ Wagner blamed Wächter, the baritone who created the rôle; fat and unromantic, he was “utterly incapable of realising the horror and supreme suffering of my Mariner”. On the other hand, the soprano Schröder-Devrient, gave a “magnificent performance … although she stood horribly alone on the stage, [she] had succeeded in rousing enthusiasm in the second act”.

The opera only became popular in the 1870s, once Wagner’s mature works had made him Germany’s dominant opera composer. Nevertheless, critics looked down on The Flying Dutchman. Jacobs⁷ complained that the subject was undramatic, and the numbers “for the most part conventional and insipid”. Hadow⁸ objected to “the slowness of movement and the comparative poverty of thematic material… Of all Wagner’s operas it is the least memorable, and though it still occasionally holds the stage, it shines chiefly by the reflected light of his subsequent reputation.”

Dutchman’s chief merits are its picturesqueness – ships, seas, and storms – and a handful of Wagner’s best tunes. It is perhaps his most accessible opera; even if there are a few longueurs or uninspired stretches, Dutchman is by far Wagner’s shortest opera (barring the odd case of Das Rheingold, the prelude to a dozen more hours of opera), less “heavy” than mature Wagner, and the audience is not forced to listen to heightened recit and endless melody for four or five hours.

Nevertheless, his treatment provides a situation rather than a drama; the plot is simple, and for all the Dutchman’s angst, there is little in the way of conflict or dramatic impetus, nor do we care much about the characters. Senta’s suitor Erik is a notoriously thankless part, while Senta herself is, as Jacobs remarked, “not a flesh and blood woman whom the Dutchman found, won, lost, and with whom he died; she was an angel predestined to deliver him from a curse.” Only with Lohengrin did Wagner first write a really theatrically effective libretto.

The Flying Dutchman juxtaposes the humdrum reality of a Norwegian maritime community with intense Romanticism, even mysticism. The Dutchman is a visitor from another world. Indeed, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle once directed a production in which the whole story was the Steersman’s dream; only when he falls asleep at the start of the opera, singing of a lover coming across the seas, does the Dutchman appear. In Harry Kupfer’s production, Senta goes mad when her father arrives with the stranger he intends her to marry; the Dutchman is a hallucination of an ideal, driving her onto suicide.

Eccentric though these concepts may be, they highlight the fact that Senta, dreamy, monomaniacal, and naïve, as Wagner⁹ described her, is surrounded by conservative, conventional figures – petit bourgeois, if you will. Daland sees his daughter as marriageable property, faithful and obedient to his will or to a husband’s; romantic love is outside his conception. “He is a rough-hewn figure from the life of everyday, a sailor who scoffs at storms and danger for sake of gain, and with whom, for instance, the – certainly apparent – sale of his daughter to a rich man ought not to seem at all disgraceful: he thinks and deals, like a hundred thousand others, without the least suspicion that he is doing any wrong.”¹⁰ Erik the hunter pursues Senta with an eagerness bordering on harassment; she is expected to marry him, but she desires something else, something more meaningful.

Is it surprising that Senta prefers fantasy, as she then believes the Dutchman to be? Both Erik and Mary, the nurse, are horrified by, or disapprove of, Senta’s obsession with the legend of the Dutchman; they would rather that she were more practical, more conventional. Senta is “sunk in dreamy contemplation” while the village maidens are busy spinning and gossiping; the Ballad and the picture of the Dutchman are more real to her. As Erik relates his ill-omened dream to Senta, “she sinks into a kind of mesmerised slumber, so that she appears to be dreaming the very dream he is relating to her”¹¹. Erik runs away in horror, believing his dream was a premonition and that Senta is doomed; she sits sunk in thought, and repeats a line from her ballad at the very moment that her father and the Dutchman arrive. In their duet, Senta appears like a vision from the past the Dutchman has seen in dreams; she herself wonders if she is in some wondrous dream, and if her life has only been a delusion. Although Senta and the Dutchman’s marriage is sanctioned by society, her idealistic passion and his doom put them outside it; only when he runs away to sea again, and she dies, both leaving this narrow, materialistic world behind, can their love be consummated.

The overture is justly famous: storm-tossed, full of waves and wind, it depicts the Dutchman (an iconic seven-note theme), his tempestuous voyages, and his redemption through love. The first scene takes place in a rocky cove, where Daland’s ship has taken shelter from a storm. The sailors’ calls (“Hojohe! Hallojo!”) were based on those Wagner heard abord the Thetis. While the Steersman sleeps, the Dutchman’s ship appears, with its black mast and red sails. His monologue, “Die Frist ist um”, expresses his weariness of his long voyages, and his longing for Judgement Day and the destruction of all. A chromatic recitative leads into the aria proper; a plunging motif sounds like the ship cresting waves and descending into troughs.

Impressed by the Dutchman’s wealth, Daland agrees to give him his daughter’s hand in marriage; this leads to a (rather uneven) buffo duet for bass and baritone. The storm lifts, and the Dutchman sails away. The scene ends with a vigorous sailors’ chorus, “Mit Gewitter und Sturm aus fernem Meer”, based on the Steersman’s drowsy song earlier.

The second scene is set in Daland’s house, in a Norwegian village. While the village maidens spin for their lovers, Senta thinks only of the Dutchman, whose portrait hangs in her house. The spinning chorus, “Summ und Brumm, du gutes Rädchen”, is very gemütlich; it reminds me somehow of the chorus “Braid the raven hair” in The Mikado. Senta’s ballad, “Johohoe! Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an”, is the heart of the opera. It is a set number telling a legend, a device common in French opéra comique. Senta’s piercing high notes sound like a storm bird hovering over the ship’s masts. The other numbers in the act make less impression.

The third and final scene takes place in the bay outside Daland’s house, where the Norwegian and the Dutchman’s ships are at anchor. It opens with a big choral scene, “Steuermann, laß die Wacht”, which culminates in the two ships’ crews, the quick and the dead, each trying to make as much noise as possible; the Dutchman’s ship, lit by an eerie blue flame, is shaken by a storm while all else is calm. It is ‘opera’ rather than ‘music drama’: the scene is musically exciting, and a good stage effect.

Today, The Flying Dutchman is probably one of Wagner’s two or three best-known operas among the general public, after the Ring cycle. The Dutchman appears in computer games like Monkey Island, and films like Pirates of the Caribbean. While the legend existed before Wagner, it is Wagner’s treatment that enshrined it in popular culture.

Recordings

Listen to: Franz Crass (the Dutchman), Anja Silja (Senta), Josef Greindl (Daland), and Fritz Uhl (Erik), with the Chor und Orchester der Bayreuth Festspiele, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, Bayreuth, 1961; Philips.

Watch:

1. Richard Wagner, On Music and Drama, trans. H. Ashton Ellis, New York: Dutton, 1964, p. 255. ↩︎
2. Wagner, On Music and Drama, pp. 254–55. ↩︎
3. Wagner, “Autobiographical Sketch”, On Music and Drama. ↩︎
4. Wagner, My Life. ↩︎
5. Wagner, “Autobiographical Sketch”. ↩︎
6. Wagner, My Life. ↩︎
7. Robert L. Jacobs,The Master Musicians Series: Wagner, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974, p. 142. ↩︎
8. Sir W. H. Hadow,Richard Wagner, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1934, pp. 86–87. ↩︎
9. Wagner, On Music and Drama, p. 335. ↩︎
10. Wagner, On Music and Drama, p. 335. ↩︎
11. Wagner, stage directions. ↩︎