Wagner's Flying Dutchman - a turning point

Those who know me - and most of you reading this blog do - know that I can't let a day such as today pass without writing something for the 211th birthday of arguably the most influential German opera composer of all time; I wanted to celebrate by an insight on one of Richard Wagner's works, which holds a special place among his many masterpieces. The name of Richard Wagner, the "Master of Bayreuth" stands quite alone in the History of great composers, mainly because he was never merely a composer. His shadow over the latter part of the 19th century and all of the 20th, looms even more over the other arts, from literature to philosophy, cinema, and all the visual arts, than it does over music. But even in music he is known chiefly as a reformer, although his writing style was deeply imbued with all the influences of the more traditional composers on whose works he learned his own craft. This is because Wagner never wrote music for music's only sake, but to make of it the leading thread into a framework that brought together all the arts for a perfected and sublimated artistic expression, the Drama, the utterance of Man's highest and loftiest creative power. His work was not revolutionary because of its music, but because of its purpose.

This blog is aimed at analyzing Wagner's first true breakthrough as a composer, which heralded what he was to become in the latter part of the century in which he was born, and set an unprecedented standard for opera writing for the decades to come. Wagner's first successful opera was Rienzi, based on a novel by Bulwer-Lytton, a grand opera in 5 acts written in the style of Marschner and Meyerbeer. The first composer was a great influence on Wagner, the second was the dominating force on the operatic scene at the time. Ideologically however Rienzi can't be considered as a typical Wagner work, and Wagner was famously more ideological than practical in his theatrical aspirations. When Wagner built his own opera house in the late 19th century he had disavowed Rienzi, called it "a sin of his youth" and forbade its production in Bayreuth.

Final scene from The Flying Dutchman. Postcard illustration.

In 1843 a year after the production of Rienzi, Wagner conducted his second success in Dresden. In its full German title Der Fliegende Holländer, known as the Flying Dutchman in English and Le Vaisseau Fantôme in French, the work was first drafted in prose in 1840 and based on Heinrich Heine's satirical The Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski. Inspiration for the stormy, dark chromatic tones of the overture and the overall atmosphere of the opera, was provided by a dreadful voyage Wagner had to undertake by sea to London to escape his creditors in Riga, where he had gotten a conducting post. The overture has been called one of the most wonderful tone-paintings ever written, constituted of the main themes of the opera and depicting the struggle of the Dutchman against Fate and his curse. This opera marked the turning point in Wagner's career not only as a musician but more importantly as a dramatist; it was the first utterance of the new standard which he intended to set for his future stage works. Let us explore the reasons why.

First of all let's recapitulate the storyline of the Flying Dutchman. When compared with Rienzi, or indeed any other grand opera of the early 1800s, the plot of the Dutchman is strikingly simple. The Norwegian ship of the sympathetic but haplessly greedy Daland, caught in a storm, is forced to put down in the bay of Sandwike. Almost simultaneously another ship approaches the coast. It is revealed to be the vessel of a Dutchman, who comes down on land to utter a strange complaint. Because he had once invoked Satan instead of God to have a fair wind to carry his ship, he has been submitted to a merciless chastisement. For an eternity of distress he has been forced to roam the seas without ever touching land, except once every seven years. He is then allowed to seek a maiden on land who will be true to him unto death, as his only possibility of salvation. He has lost hope that this is ever to happen. Providentially he establishes communication with the intrigued Daland, to whom he offers as much of the fabulous treasure he has gathered on his ship, if only he will give him shelter for the night. Daland is hospitable enough, but he becomes even more generous when he is shown the pearls and precious stones, and turns euphoric when the Dutchman furthermore asks for his daughter's hand in marriage. Both ships excitedly repair to Daland's home, where we catch the first sight of Senta, the Norwegian captain's daughter, who is spinning with her friends and her nurse. It is revealed that Senta is obsessed with the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which she has heard of in a ballad sang her by her nurse. She has a portrait of him on her wall, and spends her day dreaming about the poor man's fate and lamenting his hardships. She sings the ballad to her friends, who are moved by her obvious suffering and compassion.

Hans Hotter (1909-2003) as the Dutchman in the Metropolitan opera's 1950 production.

It is then that we learn that Senta is betrothed to Erik, a young hunter, who enters the house at that moment. He reproaches Senta her indifference, to which she answers evasively. He narrates a dream in which he beheld the distressing sight of the very man on the portrait on the wall, putting to shore and then disappearing with Senta in the sea. A timely - or not - interruption is provided by the arrival of Daland, with... the man of the portrait himself. Daland greets his daughter, and urges her to accept the mysterious newcomer as her husband, which will make her fortune and his own. He shows her the treasure, but she needs no persuasion to consent. In a duet which is perhaps the most beautiful passage in the whole opera, the Dutchman and Senta are left alone together, and Senta promises to be faithful to the unfortunate stranger unto death. In the second scene an impressive interlude is provided by a scene between Daland's and the Dutchman's ship, during which the Norwegian sailors realize the crew of the ship berthed next to them in the harbour is a ghost crew. The end is the most stirring part of the opera. Senta comes out of the house, pursued by Erik who reproaches her again. The Dutchman catches sight of the argument, and loses faith in Senta, mistaking the scene for a lovers' quarrel. He prepares to put back to sea; but she, before the assembled sailors, Erik, her friends, and her father, hurls herself into the sea, promising eternal faith. The Dutchman and Senta are then seen ascending to heaven in an embrace.

This simple story is much unlike the complicated plots of Rienzi, or Les Huguenots or Robert le Diable, two immensely popular operas of the time by Meyerbeer. This simplicity is one of the main features that can be observed in Wagner's later operas, in any case those which constitute his most celebrated and characteristic output. So why did Wagner thus simplify his storylines, when he had been fed on Meyerbeer and Halévy, and all the grand opera composers of the time? His essays are a marvel of complexity and profoundness of thought and one can hardly infer that he merely was reluctant to go into details. In fact, Wagner simplified his plots because he was no longer interested in the accurate description of politico-historical events between identifiable characters; his aim had become to create archetypal characters whom audiences could identify as abstract yet very real values, such as faith, despair, curse & salvation, good & evil, living symbolic adventures that had a deep spiritual and philosophical meaning. The Dutchman is not a real-life character but one taken from a legend. Daland is the archetype of the greedy father who has only worldly aspirations for his daughter's future weal, which he strictly considers in association with his own. Erik is the heroine's young lover, and in parallel he also represents, one might infer, a safe life of convention on land, away from the appealing danger of the Dutchman and his curse. And Senta, as the heroine, is the very embodiment of that reform which Wagner wanted to herald in his new work.

Kirsten Flagstad as Senta (1895-1962) in the Met's 1937 production.

In Senta we have the first "official" apparition in Wagner's work of a theme which was to recur ever after in all of his other works: Salvation, and more precisely, salvation through love. In Tannhäuser, the hero is saved from damnation by the woman who's always loved him, Elizabeth. In Lohengrin the knight is Elsa's salvation, even though she betrays him at the end. In Tristan the lovers find salvation in death. In Parsifal, it is the hero's compassion which redeems the eternally agonizing king Amfortas. In Meistersinger the knight Walther von Stolzing finds some sort of salvation from his pride by both the friendship of Hans Sachs and Eva's love. And of course in the great Ring Cycle, salvation from the original sin of greed of Alberich, the Gods and the Giants is brought by the warrior maiden Brünhilde, who throws herself on Siegfried's pyre after having returned the stolen ring to the Maidens of the Rhine. But Senta, who plunges to her own death to grant the Dutchman release from life, is the first heroine in Wagner's work to embody this principle with such power, so fully and so magnificently. Rienzi's sister Irene remains faithful to her brother to the end, and dies with him; but she has no power to save him. While Senta, like most female characters in Wagner's dramas, has a true redeeming power because of the purity of her love. Thus in the Flying Dutchman, Wagner's second successful opera, we witness the first apparition of the later ever-recurring theme of curse & salvation, which makes it the Bayreuth master's first ideological breakthrough.

This is not all. Together with its symbolic power and its depth of meaning, as well as its themes as we have seen, Fliegende Holländer is Wagner's first through-composed opera, which makes it an artistic & structural breakthrough as well. Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, (earlier unsuccessful operas) and of course Rienzi are all written in the traditional recitative-aria style, but in the Flying Dutchman we can see only a continuous musical line that narrates as it were the story without interruptions. No pauses are marked in the rhythm and continuity of the story: thus showing that for Wagner the only important element in opera-composing had become the drama, to which he subdued the music. Note: this is a theoretical remark but technically there is always a clear preponderance of the musical element in Wagner's stage works, and he seems to systematically have prioritized it over the other elements. But the choice of a story about the sea, in that sense, is revealing: inconstant, ever on the move, ever tortured and furious, like the music itself that evokes it, the constantly shifting tones of the composer's later works, where no end of phrase can be anticipated, nor calculated. The music is striving to break free from its conventional harmonic rules, to evoke more freely the complex abstract values of which the characters are the archetypes. The Dutchman as a cursed man doomed to eternal suffering longs not for the material happiness which is the pursuit of so many opera heroes, but for death, his only deliverer, and if he seeks love it is only to be reunited with his beloved in the afterlife.

Daland and the Dutchman: "Farewell! To-day thou shalt my daughter see!" Illustration from the Victrola book of the opera, 1917.

As stated above, the opera contains all the themes that were to recur in Wagner's later operas: curse & salvation, redemption through love, eternal faith, longing for death and salvation in death. There is another irregularity in the plot of the Dutchman. The traditional comic opera story is drafted on the comic play of the time of Molière, with usually two young lovers threatened by the plotting of a greedy father to marry off his daughter to a wealthier, often older man. The father is most of the time thwarted by the unfortunate youths and a cunning friend (such as Molière's Scapin) who works towards the happy resolution. Now in the plot of the Flying Dutchman the situation is strangely reversed. The father is also greedy like the classic villain-father of comedy, but his proposal is accepted by his daughter, who reveals herself to be genuinely moved by the plight of the cursed man. This makes it clear that rather than being an obstacle to the happy ending, the so-called villain is in fact an instrument of destiny to unite the two main protagonists, who perceives the advantage of the union without perceiving its full importance: only the material advantage is apparent to him. Daland thus seems to represent the worldly man who while only being able to perceive and understand material gain, still works towards the greater good without fully realizing it; while the Dutchman and Senta act on a spiritual level. Senta's compassion is first kindled by her nurse's tales, but the latter then attempts to take the heroine's thoughts off that "pallid man" and his curse, which she fears, while Senta is fascinated by it and by the Dutchman. And even more strangely, the libretto never makes it clear whether she loves him or simply feels compassion for him; a compassion which would make her forsake Erik, her initial lover, towards an uncertain plight, or rather, certain death..?

As can be seen from all these elements the storyline as well as the music are imbued with a mystery that was never so deep or obvious in the other preceding operas. The Flying Dutchman today is usually the opera which is always recommended for those seeing their first Wagner opera, because the style is still very classical for its time although as we discussed it is a good instance of the development of the late Wagner style. And indeed the very theme of the Dutchman's curse is reminiscent, so it seems, of the theme of Brünhilde, the Valkyrie, who was not to make her apparition on stage until about two decades later. All of these things make the Flying Dutchman one of Wagner's most dramatic, poetic, and enjoyable operas. So next time you listen to it, keep it mind that it was the first genuine Wagner which the 1843 Dresden audiences ever heard!

The creator with his creation. A Romantic impression of Wagner with a scene from his opera in the background, from a 1913 colour lithograph.