“Will she be my angel?” asks the spectral title character in Richard Wagner’s first ‘mature’ opera, The Flying Dutchman. Condemned to sail the seven seas for eternity after losing a bet with the devil, the Dutchman is allowed to go ashore once every seven years to find true love. If he succeeds, his soul will be redeemed. As Wagner’s stormy music yields to the safe fjords of Norway, we find the tortured character at the end of his most recent seven-year term, introduced by a monologue in which he bewails his fate and invites the deliverance of Judgment Day.
By happenstance, the Dutchman’s ship has dropped anchor alongside a local vessel whose captain, Daland, has a daughter named Senta. After a brief conversation, it is agreed that the stranger, who has amassed enormous wealth in his travels, should meet and marry her, sight unseen and without even knowing her name. Senta, for her part, knows all about the Flying Dutchman: in a ballad delivered to the village girls and her censorious nurse Mary, she recounts the legend and the key to his salvation, fantasizing that she could be the woman whose love he needs to achieve it. After an argument with Senta’s fiancé, Erik, a simple huntsman who cannot possibly compete with the legendary figure, Daland shows the Dutchman in. An impassioned duet leads to their betrothal, which the townspeople gather to celebrate, though the Dutchman’s spectral crew terrorizes their party. Erik makes a final attempt to dissuade Senta from her redemptive role. The Dutchman overhears them and, assuming the worst, ruminates on his disappointment, declaring his intention to leave the scene, never to try to find love again. A distraught Senta pursues him and throws herself into the stormy sea. As the Dutchman’s ship goes down, the boisterous score yields to their love theme as their souls ascend together to heaven.
To say the opera is steeped in Romanticism is an understatement, to say the least. The Dutchman legend is an old one; it was retold in a story that Wagner knew from a novel by Heinrich Heine, in which the title character attends a fictional play based on the theme. The play within the novel mocks the character and his sense of grievance, but Wagner, having been inspired by a troubled ocean voyage of his own, pursued an operatic adaptation that rendered the Dutchman seriously and sincerely. After spending two years as the conductor of the opera theater in Riga, at that time a Russian port, Wagner and his actress first wife skipped town to escape his unpayable debts. Having had their passports confiscated, they paid smugglers to contrive an escape into bordering Prussia, during which Wagner was said to have been tossed into a pile of manure during a carriage accident that may also have caused his wife to miscarry a child. They secured passage to England on a merchant vessel, but rough Baltic weather caused the trip to take nearly three weeks instead of the expected seven days. Avoiding the frequent storms led the ship to take refuge in the Norwegian bay of Sandwicke (today Sandvika), a safe harbor where Wagner later recalled hearing sailors’ songs that he adopted for his new opera’s choruses. In Wagner’s libretto, Daland identifies Sandwicke as the place where he encounters the Dutchman’s ship.
Wagner embellished the story with Senta’s appeal to the eternal feminine, a powerful trope in German culture upon which Wagner and others drew by endowing women with powers to save and redeem men. Redemption through feminine love and self-sacrifice would appear over and over in Wagner’s operas as his career continued, culminating in his epic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. Addressing the theme in the modern world, however, poses a challenge to the creative class, much of which rejects belief in salvation, is bothered by women cast in self-sacrificial roles that cater to the needs of men, seeks to “redefine” masculinity as something inoffensive to the delicate sensibilities of the progressive Left, questions whether there is any difference between the sexes at all, and even has much-mocked problems defining what a woman truly is. In a program interview for this production at the Hungarian State Opera, which premiered in 2013, director János Szikora critiques the Dutchman’s quest for redemption as “almost childish” and the opera’s general plot as a bearer of “male chauvinism.” Few European directors disagree and, over the last half century, we have seen plenty of productions in which the Dutchman is portrayed as an unfeeling cad, with Senta a damaged and demoralized hysteric. The fashionable approach is to place the characters in dehumanizing or value-neutral surroundings and, despite Wagner’s intent and the music he wrote to convey it so beautifully, deny them any hint of redemption.
While Szikora toes the party line in his words, on stage his visuals are a bit more engaging. We do not see either of the ships as they struggle into Sandwicke bay, nor do we see the portrait of the Dutchman that Senta keeps on her wall. These are left to our imagination, while the characters perceive them on or beyond the fourth wall of a stylized set that features nautical ropes, a weaving loom, and costumes that recall a recent, rustic past. When ships are mentioned in the abstract, however, we are treated to a projection of a sailing vessel that navigates stormy seas. When the Dutchman storms off to his eternal fate, Senta’s salvation of him results in the projected ship burning and sinking. In the end, despite the director’s professed resistance to a traditional romantic interpretation, Senta and the Dutchman do end up together in some sort of afterlife, symbolized by a spotlight shining down on them as they embrace mid-stage.
Budapest uses Wagner’s original score of the opera, which has an appealingly more pronounced role for the woodwinds. It also breaks up the opera’s three acts with intermissions. This may grate on sensibilities more accustomed to the opera’s revised version, in which the acts flow together without interruption, but Wagner did score reasonable finishes to the first two acts. The libretto is the same. The young conductor Martin Rajna led a forceful effort that only improved as the evening continued. A slow and sometimes hesitant pace in the opera’s prelude and early scenes became a cogent orchestral effort in the critical moments of Acts II and III.
The veteran bass-baritone Michele Kalmandy is 64, but his voice still resonates with Wagnerian gravitas. At times, however, he had some difficulty marshaling the sheer sound that the part needs in order to be scary and loom over the Dutchman’s scenes. In the final act trio, he was outsung by his Senta and also by Erik, a cloying mess usually sung by a younger singer who often fades in his rival’s presence. Kalmandy had to project opposite the experienced heldentenor István Kovácsházi, who has appeared to great critical acclaim on the Budapest stage in Wagner’s heavier tenor parts, including Siegfried. Getting on in years himself, Kovácsházi was an older Erik but undoubtedly the most formidable exponent of the role I have ever encountered. Eszter Sümegi, one of Hungary’s leading sopranos, has had a splendid international career in Italian roles and Wagner’s more lyrical soprano parts, a category that tends to exclude the more dramatically demanding Senta, which is usually a stepping stone to Brünnhilde and Isolde. Sümegi, too, is now of a certain age, but the vocal technique remains powerful and required some modulation to avoid overpowering Kalmandy’s Dutchman. Her best singing emerged in the middle register moments. The high notes in the ballad were more effortful.
András Palerdi’s Daland offered solid bass resonances, but the voice was small compared to the other principles. István Horváth’s light tenor was well chosen for the part of Daland’s steersman. The German mezzo Christa Mayer, a regular and rightly valued performer at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, sang Mary. The Hungarian State Opera chorus sang compellingly in Wagner’s ensembles. With a diverse and interesting season of works, Budapest should be firmly on the operatic map.
