Review: The Flying Dutchman
This Chris Alden oldie still has it. Marjorie Owens and Johan Reuter terrific as Senta and the Dutchman
What’s become tricky about Wagner in the era of Regie opera is that every new production of just about any one of his works is bound to be in some way about Nazism. Which, granted, gave us some marvellous productions that engage with the place his work and his family and the Bayreuth Festival had in the more noxious side of German history: Barrie Kosky’s Meistersinger and Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal are just two of the many in this mini-canon worth watching. (A YouTube account by the name of Bayreuth Vinylman has the entire wild Herheim Parsifal available here.) And here we have the Christopher Alden’s production of The Flying Dutchman revived by Marilyn Gronsdal, that is, not exclusively but also, about the Holocaust. To his and the COC’s credit, it’s a relatively older production in Regie years, and one of the first ones to put a clear twentieth-century layer onto an early Wagner. Too, it’s done skillfully and as organically as these things can be accomplished.
The original story in the libretto is about the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the ship and its captain condemned, after some long-ago evocation of Satan, to wander the seas never being able to anchor. An angel attenuated the Dutchman’s curse so that every seven years he is allowed to land and attempt to find a wife who would be true to him and “love him until death”, which is the only way to be released from the fate. The opera opens with an encounter between the Dutchman’s and another random ship, whose captain Daland (Franz-Josef Selig) just happens to have an unmarried daughter at home. Dutchman (Johan Reuter) offers Daland his ship’s treasures – gold and jewels drip from the pockets of his shabby coat – in return for being able to meet his daughter and ask for her hand.
Unbeknownst to the men, Daland’s daughter Senta (Marjorie Owens) has been neglecting her household duties (ie spinning) to daydream about the portrait of the Dutchman she’s heard about, yearning to meet him so that she could save him with his love. It’s Romanticism 101, quoi. Some productions have made much of this advance fandom and commitment to fantasy by the young Senta, but Alden largely leaves that path alone: Dutchman’s likeness appears in a single portrait carried around, an anguished figure in black in the German Expressionist style. Dutchman and Senta meet and “recognize” one another, and she is only too happy to marry him, but there’s a complication in the shape of her fiancé Erik the hunter who intrudes into various conversations demanding his due. Erik here is dressed in hunter green and carries a rifle and my first thought was of a character who wandered in from the first German Romantic opera, Weber’s Der Freiszchütz. I wasn’t far off: Wagner was influenced by both the Weber opera and Marschner’s Der Vampyr while writing the Dutchman. The idea was, say some music historians, to transcend the Erik-type regular romantic love of the early romantic opera, into something rather more “spiritual” and death-facing, like the ripe romantic, Wagnerian opera.
In any event, the Dutchman overhears the inter-fiancés dispute, decides he is doomed since she was promised to Erik, and leaves with his ship, reconciled to his fate. Senta throws herself into the sea, still determined to be faithful to him until death, and the curse is broken: she indeed was, until her death, true to him. The ship disappears and Dutchman and Senta (no giggling in the back now) rise to the heavens. But not in this production; Alden has Senta defiantly holding the Dutchman’s portrait and Erik shooting straight at it, taking Senta down.
The myth of the Flying Dutchman has over time developed an unsavoury kinship with the myth of the Wandering Jew, and this was Alden’s starting point. Is the Dutchman – effectively, Jewish? Or does he at least have all the necessary connotations? And was he, for Wagner? Alden’s production has the 1920s and 30s inter-war aesthetic, but is created for the contemporary, post-Holocaust audience. When the Dutchman introduces himself with his solo in act 1, the lower level of his ghostly ship is lighted to reveal the camp-like quarters with inmates with shaved heads dressed in striped uniforms. In the act 3 denouement, Dutchman slowly removes his coat to reveal that he too is in a striped uniform of a camp prisoner. The lower level of the Dutchman’s ship gets lighted once more, this time in act 3, in a chilling scene involving jewellery which should be seen and not described.
In this key, the story becomes the one of a society closing its ranks against the foreigners and intruders – something like Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon, which Alden’s production precedes. No wonder Alden militarized the chorus scenes, usually the islands of cheerfulness in this sombre opera. The sailors’ chorus, probably the best known “hit” from the opera which I’ve sung as a kid to the Deutsche Grammophon LPs of the Classical Music Greatest Hits, is here aggressively punctuated by the slamming beer kegs against the tables and chairs. The spinning women chorus at Daland’s house is also turned into a factory routine with the women uniformly doing same movements over and over. In this interpretive key, Senta is a lone anti-conformist.
Is this too neat? Possibly: Wagner himself had empathy for the Dutchman. Would Wagner’s other contributions on the topic warrant this approach? Yes. He did write “Jewishness in Music” and was on this topic, as the French would say, infrequentable. He also died long before actual Nazism appeared on historical horizons, and as a young radical took part in the 1848 revolution. His family and descendants cemented the ties of Wagner’s work to Nazi fandom. There’s a good recent overview on the scholarship on Wagner and Nazism in Peter Bloom’s review of Wagner antisémite. Un problème historique, sémiologique et esthétique by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (which can be accessed, like all the other links to journal articles in this review, with a TPL card). Are the ties there? Yes. Are they the whole story? No.
But in this production, the possibility that it is is used imaginatively.
Had the musical side been unsatisfactory, no amount of brilliant Regie would have upheld the production, but Marjorie Owens and Johan Reuter are two of the best Sentas and Dutchmen you can see and hear on any stage. The COC orchestra under its music director Johannes Debus gave its Wagner crisp, energetic and sober, a good path to take in an emotionally messy Romantic fare. There are bits of the production that are visually drab – there are longueurs during which the brown wood-paneled walls are the only thing to look at – but there was always the music to fall back on.
Returns Oct 9, 13, 15, 19, 21 and 23. In two parts with a 20-min intermission.
