Not a ship far and wide. In the new production of Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” at the Hamburg State Opera, director Michael Thalheimer relies entirely on the situational and imaginary, emphasizing the invisible, the absent, so to speak. Senta, the lunatic, staggers into the middle of the overture, which sounds subdued from the orchestra pit of the Hamburg State Opera, tears her hair, falls to the ground and cannot rest. At the end she pushes aside the floor-to-ceiling steel cables, which act like bars, and looks back at the audience. what does she see
The music creates unrest, the whole opera is one big unrest. Ultimately, it is Senta’s fight for salvation, for psychological survival, even if the story revolves around him, the desert, gloomy “Dutchman” who flies across the seas in his ship and finds no home anywhere. Director Thalheimer impressively shows that she is immediately fascinated by this inscrutable figure. He lets Senta (stably penetrating: Jennifer Holloway) and the Dutchman (somewhat wobbly voice, but the only one who can really understand the text: Thomas Johannes Mayer) freeze to a pillar of salt, while the father (Daland: Kwangchul Youn) mediates jovially. She is no longer, as Wagner writes, “the one who cares about her home” but “the woman of the future”.
Daland, however, had promised the stranger his daughter in the old way, as if he could dispose of the woman like goods. The loser is Erik (Benjamin Bruns), Senta’s fiancé. It’s almost excruciatingly embarrassing when he insists on fidelity and redemption from his confused mental state. He does not succeed in transfiguring this, in mythically exalting it – only the Dutchman can do that. He too must be redeemed from the curse of restless wandering, his homelessness.
Escape from a narrow world: Jennifer Holloway as Senta.
(Photo: Hans Jörg Michel)
But the vulnerability of the man alone, as the musical drama shows above all, is not the sole reason for the sheer willless devotion of the Senta. There is also the urge to break out of the narrow-minded petit bourgeois world, to rather throw oneself at a stranger who promises adventures in life than to seek happiness at home with the good Erik. It is only with the Dutchman that Senta feels human, feels a free spirit, freedom, even when she submits unconditionally. Only he sets conditions: she has to be faithful. This is the promise of salvation: a faithful loving wife. That’s what she wants to be, she’s so sure of the man, so happy is the encounter that overwhelms both of them.
Musically, these are also the most intense moments, even the composer Wagner seems to be carried away by what is happening. And then? It’s all over. Love breaks apart under the painful howling of the orchestral sounds, the trombones from hell are also on the spot, and a wild thunderstorm reigns in the strings. Conductor Nagano knows how to keep him in check, because there is still a lot to be sung in order to gain clarity before it finally descends into the abyss. The Dutchman cannot free himself from his curse, it drives him on, he considers himself irredeemable, does not want to drag her down with him, casts her out of love or decency. “You don’t know me” – he is now a Satan after all, “Terror of all the pious”. Faithful unto death, she throws herself into the sea, the Dutchman’s ship sinks, in the distance they emerge from the water, “both in a transfigured form” and tightly embraced.
Both alone again, both caught up in their visions and depressions again
That’s how Wagner wanted it, but director Thalheimer offers a different reading: Holländer is bent forward, his arms raised to the sky, as if he wants to take off. Senta at a clear distance, hunched over, weighed down by a garbage bag on his shoulders. Both alone again, both caught up in their visions and depressions again. Nothing is solved, nobody redeemed. Wagner calls his “Flying Dutchman” a “romantic opera”, which can mean different things, even a political-activist theatre, as the anarchist Bakunin praised at the time: “It’s music on barricades and on fire”. Nevertheless, the story as a purely psychological narrative does not catch on, even if this approach is a fruitful approach to almost all Wagner operas. The theatrical only emerges in connection with the tradition of fantasy and magic operas, as they were so popular in the Baroque period and long afterwards, up to Benjamin Britten’s gothic fairy tale operas and contemporary music theatre. Wagner’s “Dutchman” is also a horror story, but the comforting shudder is no longer as natural as it was in times of widespread belief in ghosts and esoteric interpretation of the world.
Conductor Kent Nagano looks for poetic inflections instead of big orchestral effects
How powerful they were at the time is shown by Franz Liszt’s assessment that, since Byron, “no poet has conjured up such a pale phantom in such a gloomy night as Wagner with his Dutchman, none that shows such magnanimity and strength of soul in the face of excessive suffering”. Only with this understanding, Liszt writes, can one understand the poetry of the individual scenes from the music. And for this one can hardly imagine a more ideal conductor than Kent Nagano, who constantly seeks that poetic tone even where one would put up with large orchestral effects. This goes wonderfully with Thalheimer’s direction, who completely dispenses with the usual images of romantic catastrophes – they only appear as abstract hints.
The musician Nagano seems to be less interested in presentation than in the inner drama. He digs deeper, often moves with the excellent Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra in the penumbra of the feigned noise of the action on stage – not much happens after all. Especially when the opulent swaying choirs enter the scene, the ship’s crew, which this time was hired from the choir of the Kyiv National Opera. The singers take the matter very seriously and very loudly, reminding them how much the music revolutionary Wagner occasionally squinted at the popular, and not only in this opera.