Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
I sat once with an audience in Prague that stayed po-faced while a string quartet played ‘The Overture to The Flying Dutchman as it would be sight-read by a bad spa orchestra, poolside at 7 in the morning’. I was struggling not to laugh out loud, as the composer of this high-spirited parody, Paul Hindemith, surely intended I should. He could assume that anyone with any musical culture would be sufficiently familiar with Wagner’s themes to get the jokes. And part of the fun is that Wagner’s Flying Dutchman is an intensely serious drama, by a composer who wasn’t much noted for laughing at himself. Hindemith’s parody is a reminder that The Flying Dutchman is a standard: the earliest of Wagner’s music dramas to hold a permanent place in the repertoire. Hindemith shows affection too – he must often have played this opera as a violinist in the pit, and in concerts, where its overture is frequently played.
There is a further irony that Hindemith probably wasn’t thinking of: the version of the legend (of the ship’s captain condemned to sail the seas until Judgment Day) that first got Wagner’s serious attention was in From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski, by Heinrich Heine (1834). Wagner read Heine’s book in Riga, before the sea voyage that gave him the experience on which to base the sea setting of his drama. The irony is that in Heine’s story the legend isn’t taken seriously. Heine’s fictional Schnabelewopski tells how in Amsterdam he attended a play on the subject of the Flying Dutchman. He mocks the Dutchman’s failure to find a faithful woman to redeem him: ‘Time after time he is glad enough to be saved from marriage, so back he goes to his ship’. At the very moment in the play when the Dutchman encounters Katharina, daughter of a Scots sea captain, Schnabelewopski meets a pretty girl in the theatre, and takes her away to enjoy an hour of sexual pleasure, returning just in time to catch the final scene. Heine draws two morals from the play: girls should take care not to marry flying Dutchmen, and men may come to grief through even the best of women.
Wagner was later to meet Heine in Paris, where he began to write his Dutchman libretto. He took Heine’s lively, witty style as a model for his own journalism, describing his experiences in Paris. But his reading of Heine’s Flying Dutchman story completely ignores its mockingly ironic tone. Instead Wagner seizes on the new element Heine added to the old legend, the idea of redemption by a woman. This is what made the subject so irresistible to Wagner. Writing his autobiography Mein Leben, more than 20 years after composing The Flying Dutchman, he acknowledged that Heine’s ‘treatment of the redemption of this Wandering Jew of the ocean…gave me everything at hand for utilising this legend as an operatic subject’. But Wagner implied that the kernel of Senta’s ballad, her vision of herself redeeming the Dutchman through love, was his own idea. He described it as ‘a thematic image spread involuntarily before my eyes as a complete web covering the whole drama’.
Wagner was more reliable in remembering that it was on the sea that he made his intimate acquaintance with the Flying Dutchman subject. He had already read Heine’s version of the story when he was forced to leave his post at the opera house in Riga, Latvia, in 1839. Largely to escape the scandal caused by his debts, he determined to escape to Paris via a sea journey to London. On the voyage, the ship was forced by a storm to seek refuge on the coast of Norway, setting the scene for the first act of The Flying Dutchman:
‘What I had taken to be a continuous line of cliffs’ Wagner wrote, ‘turned out on our approach to be a series of separate rocks projecting from the sea. The hurricane was so broken by the rocks in our rear that the further we sailed through this ever-changing labyrinth of projecting rocks, the calmer the sea became. A feeling of indescribable content came over me when the enormous granite walls echoed the hail of the crew as they cast anchor and furled the sails. The sharp rhythm of this call clung to me like an omen of good cheer, and shaped itself presently into the seamen’s song in my Fliegende Holländer. The idea of this opera was, even at that time, ever present in my mind, and it now took on a definite poetic and musical colour under the influence of my recent impressions’.
Soon after arriving in Paris Wagner composed the music of the sailors’ choruses and Senta’s ballad, before the libretto was complete. Wagner’s music for this opera so strongly captured the power of the sea that the conservative composer Franz Lachner complained that the moment you opened the score of The Flying Dutchman the wind blew out at you. Ernest Newman called the overture ‘the first real sea-picture in music’.
The ship carrying the Wagners later encountered another, still more violent storm, during which Richard began to suspect, with paranoia, that the crew were blaming him for the threatening disaster – they suspected ‘our need to escape had arisen from suspicious or even criminal circ*mstances’. Wagner’s wife Minna ‘expressed the fervent wish to be struck by lightning with me rather than to sink, living, into the fearful flood’. Wagner was identifying melodramatically with the doomed Dutchman of the legend, casting his wife as the self-sacrificing woman. The heroine of Heine’s version of the story was called Katharina. Wagner’s first name for her was Minna, a tribute to his wife’s fidelity and sacrifices she made for him in Riga and later in Paris. Changing the heroine’s name to Senta was an early sign of Wagner’s craving for a blindly loyal, self-sacrificing woman, one who would understand his mission intuitively, as Senta does the Dutchman:
‘It was the longing of my Flying Dutchman for the woman, not the wife who waited for Odysseus but the redeeming Woman whose character I could not see in any definite form but who was only dimly present in my imagination as the element of Womanhood in principle…let me say it in one word, the Woman of the Future’.
Was Wagner’s second wife, Cosima, perhaps, looking over Wagner’s shoulder as he wrote this?
Wagner called The Flying Dutchman ‘A Romantic Opera’. And so it is, in the context of the time. Retrospectively, as the great Wagner authority Ernest Newman sees it, this opera is the birth of ‘the modern musical drama’. The legend of the Flying Dutchman offered Wagner a strong theme and a striking atmosphere. A fellow-Romantic, Hector Berlioz, who experienced The Flying Dutchman in Dresden when it was new, was struck particularly by ‘its dark colouration and some stormy effects perfectly motivated by the subject’. The Berlioz of the Symphonie fantastique, may also have found affinity with an obsessional search for a woman. Berlioz drew his operatic subjects mainly from his literary heroes, Shakespeare and Virgil. In The Flying Dutchman Wagner takes as his subject, for the first time, a myth or folktale. In so doing, his admirers consider, Wagner discovers his true vocation as a musical dramatist.
The myth, in this case, is almost too simple. Carl Dahlhaus has said that the opera is little more than Senta’s Ballad dramatised; that Senta and the Dutchman are the only characters of any importance. Another musicologist, Alfred Einstein, suggests that Wagner might just as well have called The Flying Dutchman a ballad dramatised with music, so continuous that the three acts could be joined together without interruption, and indeed were, at first.
There was a practical reason. Wagner’s later explanation was that by writing the opera in a single act, he could confine the drama to the relationships between the principal characters, without troubling about traditional opera’s ‘tiresome accessories.’ But at the time there was another reason: ‘I thought I could rely on a better prospect for the acceptance of my proposed work if it were cast in the form of a one-act opera, such as was frequently given as a curtain-raiser before a ballet at the Grand Opera’. This was the purpose of Léon Pillet, director of the Paris Opéra, in purchasing Wagner’s original prose scenario. But Pillet commissioned the music not from Wagner but from one Pierre-Louis Dietsch. Eventually Dietsch composed an opera, based mainly not on Wagner’s scenario, but on Captain Marryat’s novel The Phantom Ship and other sources. Le vaisseau fantôme was on the Paris stage in the same month in 1842 as rehearsals began in Dresden for Der fliegende Holländer. That is probably why Wagner changed his setting from the Scottish to the Norwegian coast, and gave different names to the characters.
Wagner’s opera had grown beyond a one-acter into three separate acts, played without a break. When he expected his opera to be first performed in Berlin he further recast it (possibly to suit requirements there) into three discrete acts, repeating in the orchestral prelude to Act II the themes that end Act I and linking Act II and III in the same way.
Wagner, not yet established as a composer, hoped that a Berlin premiere would bring fame throughout Germany. When Berlin disappointed him by postponing The Flying Dutchman, he asked for the return of the score. Now he wanted it premiered in Dresden, to capitalise on the success there of his Rienzi. But he kept the intervals, a concession to theatrical custom. In 1901 Bayreuth, under Wagner’s widow Cosima, decided to restore the one-act version, to make Flying Dutchman seem more like ‘music drama’ in the making.
The Flying Dutchman’s initial reception might well have made Wagner think he had taken a wrong turning. But he was sure it was ground-breaking and was convinced of its rightness – hence his dismay when the Dresden audience received the premiere so badly. They had expected something more like Rienzi’s Meyerbeerian spectacle and effects, and were disconcerted by the gloomy subject of The Flying Dutchman – ‘ghastly pallid’ was one comment. In the rush to stage the opera the sets were taken from existing productions – the cyclorama from Oberon, the hulls of the ships from the ballet Der Seeräuber, the room in Daland’s house from Faust, and the exterior of the house in Act III from William Tell. These borrowed sets must have suggested a context for the audience to receive the piece.
It is possible to stage The Flying Dutchman successfully. The absence of conventional ‘action’ in many of the scenes can be made a virtue, especially the intense but largely static encounters of Senta and the Dutchman. Words and music put all the focus on the character’s emotions; no conventional stage poses and gestures are needed, as Wagner shows in his instructions to the actors. But Dutchman is a demanding and concentrated piece, and can be discouraging to the casual opera-goer. All I can remember of my first encounter with it, in Sydney’s now vanished Tivoli Theatre, is a succession of lengthy monologues for deep male voices, and the stomping dance of the sailors.
After only four performances The Flying Dutchman was withdrawn from the repertoire in Dresden, but it soon established itself in other German houses. Wagnerians prefer to regard it as the first of Wagner’s music dramas, but it can equally plausibly be considered as his first successful contribution to German Romantic opera, whose tradition, in fact, Wagner did much to establish. Rienzi was an imitation of the cosmopolitan style – which in 1842 meant Parisian fashion. But Flying Dutchman’s predecessors were The Magic Flute, Fidelio, and Der Freischütz, and it has something in common with each: myth in Mozart’s entertainment, a folk-tale in Weber, and in Beethoven redemption by love in the selfless devotion of Leonore, who saves her husband. In 1829 Wagner had been overcome by emotion when he saw, as Beethoven’s heroine, the singer who was to be the first Senta, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient.
But Wagner learnt most from the symphonic writing of Beethoven, also evident in his only opera. Not at first: as a young man Wagner had disparaged German opera and rated superior the Italian style based on melody. In Paris, just as The Flying Dutchman was hatching in his imagination, Wagner heard his first adequate performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In ‘A Pilgrimage to Beethoven’ (1840) Wagner imagines a pilgrim who describes to Beethoven a performance of Fidelio he had attended. Beethoven’s reply shows how Wagner’s own thinking about opera was changing. Says Beethoven
‘I am no opera composer – by which I mean that there is no theatre in the world for which I would willingly write another opera. Any opera that I would write after my own heart would make people run away. Operas today are patched together out of arias, duets, and terzettos, which I would replace by music no singer would want to perform and no audience would want to hear…why should not vocal music be regarded as equally great and serious as instrumental music?’.
Wagner’s Beethoven also says that the Ode to Joy of Schiller is a very uplifting poem, yet a long way from expressing the ideas represented in the music. Wagner, when he wrote the libretto for The Flying Dutchman, had in mind a new art: music fertilised by poetry, which would be the dramatic elucidation of the emotions implicit in the music. ‘In comes a method’ writes Richard Osborne, ‘that leaves a text relatively raw and rough-edged, into which the music can seep and thence inseminate the drama’.
In The Flying Dutchman Wagner’s musical language wasn’t yet able to keep pace with his dramatic instincts. He had to resort to old forms, arias and ensembles, not sitting comfortably with the originality of the overall conception. Wagner’s already greatly enhanced role for the orchestra is symphonically inspired and interweaves motifs for reminiscence and dramatic development.
The power of The Flying Dutchman’s seascapes, the brooding and doom-fraught atmosphere more than compensate for more conventional passages, especially as they are allied to psychologically acute characterisation of the Dutchman, in his encounters with Daland and above all Senta. In one sense the whole scenario is a projection of the inner world of Senta, who is fixated on the picture of the legendary Dutchman. Yet Wagner was already a master dramatist, well able to bring to life how the ‘real’ Dutchman bursts into Senta’s life. Productions diminish this, rather than illuminating it, if they apply anachronistic psychological theorising to Senta’s experience.
Precisely because of its Romantic underpinnings, Wagner’s musical and dramatic vision is best taken at face value, and his music has the power to make that possible. That is evident from the start in the powerful overture, where all the themes of the opera are presented with conviction. That conviction is enough to override any residual clumsiness that may survive in this amazingly prophetic opera. It may invite parody, but it survives it. Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman is really no laughing matter.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2003
