Richard Wagner died in Venice in 1883, in a rented apartment in the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, above the city’s historic casino and its watery entrance from the Grand Canal. Today, the rooms are decorated with assorted memorabilia (Wagner’s widow Cosima vacated the flat after his death and sent all the furniture to their home in Bayreuth, Germany) and can only be visited on tours offered by appointment with Venice’s Richard Wagner Association. More than two decades before Wagner’s death, Venice had been his refuge from a desperate love affair with the wife of his patron Otto Wesendonck, a Swiss silk merchant, after it was exposed in a controlled, but dramatic scene. The compromised composer found Venice a congenial exile to continue work on his masterpiece Tristan und Isolde, a tale of impossible love that the realities of the world cannot allow to bloom.
Despite Venice’s heavy Wagnerian connotations, the Teatro La Fenice, the city’s rococo masterpiece, proudly stands across town in opposition to Wagner’s innovative ideas of music and theater. It was fully restored some 20 years ago, after a devastating fire set in 1996 by unscrupulous contractors who feared financial penalties for delivering late work. All the 18th century décor is back and maintained in dazzling beauty, while modern amenities were thoughtfully added. Seating just over a 1,000 spectators for opera performances, it hardly seems like a place to ponder the depths of the human psyche while taking in music dramas drawn from Nordic mythology.
Venice never fails to surprise, however. Although Der Fliegede Holländer only reached La Fenice’s stage in 1961, in a production by Wagner’s grandson Wieland, it has reappeared often enough to have a presence here. The opera is the first of Wagner’s œuvre to be counted among his ‘mature’ works. The composer proscribed his first three operas, which preceded it, as so flawed and derivative that he banned them from being performed at his festival at Bayreuth. The festival, now led by Wagner’s great-granddaughter Katharina (Wieland’s niece), maintains the convention to this day.
An adaptation of the tale of the Flying Dutchman—who is condemned to sail the seven seas for all eternity after losing a bet with the devil—the inspiration for Holländer came from an episode of Wagner’s youth. His start in music had been precarious. In his twenties, he held a series of itinerant conducting posts in lesser German cities. He also married an older woman, the actress Minna Planer, at a time when acting was not a respectable profession. Minna herself was no great catch. Temperamental and difficult, she had an out-of-wedlock child from an earlier relationship and, amid countless humiliations and rows, twice left Wagner for the same man before coming back to him. She is said to have been the inspiration for Fricka in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, a shrewish, controlling goddess who browbeats her husband Wotan into doing her will.
The late 1830s found the unhappy couple in Riga, then a German port city in the Russian empire’s Baltic provinces. Spending beyond his means, as he would do throughout his life, Wagner was sued for repayment of his debts. He hoped to move to Paris, the capital of European culture, where he might find his fortune, but the Russian authorities confiscated his and Minna’s passports to prevent them from fleeing. Through an acquaintance, Wagner got in touch with smugglers who offered to get them across the Russian border into Prussia, whence they could secure sea passage to England. After a perilous land voyage, which included a carriage accident that reportedly flung Wagner into a pile of manure and caused Minna to suffer a miscarriage, they were allowed to board the schooner Thetis, despite lacking documentation, for an eight-day journey to London.
The eight-day transit ended up taking 24 days due to fierce northern storms. At one point, the ship took refuge in the bay of Sandvika, Norway, where Wagner later claimed he was inspired by the sailors’ songs as they echoed off the sheer walls of the fjord. He may have resorted to poetic license, but upon arrival in Paris he certainly did begin working on a new opera set in those seas while pursuing other projects. According to the libretto, which Wagner wrote, his Dutchman literally is encountered in Sandvika bay—a connection of which the Norwegian town remains immensely proud. The literary inspiration was Heinrich Heine’s story The Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelepowski, which told of the Dutch sailor forced to travel the seas. His only possible redemption was to go ashore once every seven years to find true love.
Heine and most of his audience understood the story to be a satire of the ‘eternal feminine’ and Romantic sensibilities that had sprouted around it. Not Wagner. He took the story not merely seriously, but as spiritual guidance. From Holländer on, most of his works would involve a man’s salvation through female self-sacrifice. In this early effort, which communicates the story musically through leitmotifs representing specific characters and ideas, salvation is born of disappointment. The Dutchman encounters Daland, a sea captain whose daughter Senta is beyond available, having long been obsessed with the Dutchman’s legend. They meet amid great hope and Senta jilts her fiancé, the huntsman Erik, who has had a terrible dream foretelling these events. Overhearing them, the Dutchman misunderstands Senta’s devotion and sets off, only to be saved in the end by her suicide. The opera ends with a combination of their motifs to represent their souls ascending to heaven.
One wonders if this production’s director Marcin Łakomicki and conductor Markus Stenz really know the opera’s history or its meanings for Wagner. In program interviews, both men suggest that Holländer is really about sexism in modern society and a reinforcement of gender roles that they find undesirable. Devoid of much else by way of insight or frame of reference, a modern European man educated in what passes for the humanities today might think so. But the deeper contexts are ignored. Stenz added that Holländer “does not correspond to any kind of logical and rational thought.” But then again, neither does most opera, nor most of the history of the world since Wagner’s times.
No one can fault Stenz’s almost bombastic conducting, which drove the work along at a solid pace and with an enjoyable indulgence of the brass section. But Łakomicki’s concept did little to serve the work. To begin with, it proceeded unusually, with an intermission after the first act, whereas normally the opera is performed without a break. Even in Wagner’s times, there were often two intermissions, but having just one these days seems not only outdated but careless. The staging opens conventionally enough, with a ship’s hull standing in for both the Dutchman’s ship and Daland’s vessel. Cristina Aceti’s costumes suggest a downtrodden 1940s European anywhere, which persists as our most common metaphor for suffering people despite all the supposed innovation of contemporary theater. Later, the production becomes stranger, as the interior scenes are played against a beige baseboard that suggests the domestic scenes are happening within some sort of picture frame. To make it weirder, body doubles of the singers enter the action to allow for dramatic gestures that presumably won’t distract the artists. The effect was hard to follow and ultimately rather pointless.
Samuel Youn has been a celebrated Dutchman since he appeared in the role in Bayreuth in 2012. A talented bass-baritone, his vocal type can rise into the role’s relatively high tessitura while still landing its essential bottom notes. Dark but lyrical, he performed the title role with uncommon vitality and gravitas. Anja Kampe has risen to the highest rank of Wagnerian sopranos. She may have progressed a bit beyond Senta, however, and occasionally attacked that more lyrical role with a squally sound that it should probably be done without. Some of the high notes seemed more fit for Isolde than for a besotted girl. English tenor Toby Spence stood out as Erik, a character whose romantic laments often leave him whiny and annoying. In Spence’s stentorian gift, however, he achieved rare sympathy and conveyed legitimate complaint. Bass Franz-Josef Selig delivered a matter-of-fact Daland that might have been more. Annely Peebo and Leonardo Cortellazzi were respectively serviceable as Senta’s nurse Mary and Daland’s steersman.
Along with the house’s excellent orchestra, its chorus delivered a virtuoso performance. In this production it was joined by the chorus of Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre under its director Bogdan Plish. Its members sang with an energy and power so vital that one might wonder if Stenz discussed logic and rationality with them.
