Wagner Without Fear

by William Berger

  Comment: Since many operas are based on love triangles, the final trio is a logical and exciting way to wrap things up. Wagner later discarded this practice as too traditional, but here he shows us what he could do with the genre when he put his mind to it. Although very brief, this trio provides both a climax and an emotional catharsis.

  The Dutchman turns to accuse Senta. She had sworn her fidelity only to him, and not before God. If she had, she would be eternally damned as well, like so many other women before her. He bids farewell to her and to hope. Erik calls for help. Senta tells the Dutchman she knows who he is and accepts the fate of loving him unto death. Daland, Mary, and others rush down to try to help her. The Dutchman denies that Senta knows who he is. He points to the red sails of his ship as they unfurl, and declares he is the Flying Dutchman, whom all sailors know. His crew begins their ghostly sea song. Daland and Erik hold the struggling Senta as the Dutchman bounds aboard his ship like lightning and instantly puts to sea. The villagers beg Senta to get hold of herself, but she struggles free and climbs up a cliff overlooking the sea. She calls after the Dutchman, telling him to praise his guardian angel, for she has remained true! She flings herself into the sea.

  The Dutchman’s ship sinks and instantly disappears. In the distance, the villagers see the Dutchman and Senta, embracing, soaring to heaven. They are transfigured. The curse is ended.

  Comment: Such an ending compensates with excitement for what it lacks in subtlety. The Dutchman’s farewell address is stirring, and Senta gets to cast off some soaring phrases as her answer to a “suicide aria.” No wonder the greats jostle to play the Dutchman and Senta.

  As difficult as Senta’s leap into the sea may be to pull off on stage, it’s nothing compared to what Wagner has ordered up to follow that. Sinking a ship on stage and depicting the lovers’ transfiguration is a tall order for any house, and few productions attempt it at face value. (Any that did would look downright ridiculous.) Expect a great deal of lighting effects and abstract expressionism instead. Small matter. After the Dutchman’s theme sounds for the last time (read: “He’s sinking”), the redemption theme, which has been prepared throughout the course of the evening, soars through the strings, well ornamented with harps. As we have already noted, no one in the audience will be able to misconstrue the harped-out salvific message, no matter what grotesqueries are happening on stage.

  BASICS: WHEN TO EAT, DRINK, AND VISIT THE RESTROOM

  One of the reasons for Dutchman’s continuing popularity with audiences could be that it is short. Unless the one-act version is used, this is your only opportunity to enjoy a Wagner opera without preparing your body as if for a triathlon. Act I is under an hour, Act II just about an hour, and Act III a scandalously short half hour. You can attend a performance of Dutchman, eat, drink, visit the restroom as your body dictates, return home with a head full of glorious music, and probably still catch the late news before bed.

  But you may not always be so lucky with this opera. The one-act, no-intermissions edition is often used these days. The rationale for this is that Wagner originally wanted it done in this manner, and the one-act version was used when Dutchman finally arrived at Bayreuth in 1901. This is all true, but Wagner wanted many things done that we conveniently find easy to ignore (like most of his stage directions, for example). The fact of the matter is that hard-core Wagnerians don’t feel like they’ve had an authentic experience unless they’ve suffered at least a little. Sitting through two and a half hours without appearing to have a thought for any carnal needs is considered a sign of devotion.

  Perhaps. In any case, Dutchman still represents a laughably minor challenge to your constitution, and the one-act version is good, manageable practice for the real marathons, like Götterdämmerung and Meistersinger. Just approach it as you would a long movie that begins at eight o’clock, minus the popcorn and trips to the restroom.

  ROUGH SPOTS AND HOW TO GET THROUGH THEM

  If you have major trouble staying attentive in this one, you’re dead meat for any other Wagner opera. Still, it is an opera, and some moments will interest you less than others. The Flying Dutchman uses much of the classic operatic form of recitative, aria, ensemble, chorus, et cetera, and Wagner never really mastered recitative until he rethought it all on his own terms. (These are the “talky” sections in between the showstoppers.)

  Daland and the Dutchman engage in a bit of less-than-thrilling recitative in Act I before they settle into a duet. Watch the performers carefully. Even if their voices are similar in tone, are they convincing you of the completely alien natures of these two archetypes? Act II has no real lags unless the Erik is a clod. Even so, it’s often as interesting to watch Senta reacting to Erik’s words as it is to focus on Erik. And there’s no need to worry about Act III. Even though some see Erik’s intrusion as a wet blanket, his cavatina is very brief and quite lovely. Although it sounds supremely oxymoronic, just remind yourself that any longueurs (see the Glossary) in this opera will be very short.

  PRODUCTIONS: WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO SEE

  First of all, you’re lucky if you see anything at all, since everybody likes to produce Dutchman pretty much in the dark. (You know, it’s supposed to be, like, spooky.)

  If you can see the stage, there’s no telling what will be there. Every production likes to play games with this old favorite. Updating the action to the twentieth century is one of the most common practices. (Updating is what directors do when they have run out of other ideas. It’s all the rage at the moment.) There’s no real reason why Dutchman shouldn’t be updated—Wagner’s setting the story in the eighteenth century was a rather random choice—except the Dutchman’s ship as oil tanker might lose a little of the romance that’s so crucial to the tale. On the other hand, you won’t have to listen to the nautical types in the audience carry on about errors in the rigging and sails.

  The supernatural element of the story presents a challenge. Dutchman does not take place in an entirely supernatural space, like, it could be argued, Parsifal. The supernatural is always framed within the here and now. Witness the ghost chorus scene in Act III. Only the Dutchman’s ship tosses in the storm, while the rest of the stage is calm. The score makes this as clear as the stage directions. Capturing the contrast of the two worlds is a lot harder than staging an infernal dance of death.

  A controversial production by Jean-Pierre Ponelle (San Francisco, 1975, later seen also at the Metropolitan in New York) circumvented this by casting the whole story into the realm of the unreal. The story was presented as a dream of the Steersman, which would certainly explain his dozing off while the Dutchman’s ship parks noisily next to him. The balance of the action took place on Daland’s ship, with random details representing other places, in the manner of dreams. The Forty Fat Fräuleins had helms for spinning wheels. God knows what that was meant to signify, but it looked cool. Audiences had strong reactions to this production, pro and con, and it is still fiercely debated by partisans. The same year also saw an important production by Harry Kupfer at Bayreuth, where the drama was presented as Senta’s hallucination. This is quite credible. Mary even warns Senta that bad things will happen if she continues to stare at the Dutchman’s picture.

  Whatever other concepts are paraded across the stage, a Dutchman production is successful if it (1) allows the characters of the two leads to come through, (2) creates a genuinely compelling weirdness around the Dutchman and his world, (3) can be convincingly moving, rather than kitschy, at the end, and (4) is sung gloriously.

  PERFORMANCE HISTORY AND ESSENTIAL LORE OF DUTCHMAN

  The Flying Wagners (1839) How much of the Dutchman is a direct result of the Wagners’ own harrowing voyage to London in 1839? All of it, if you believe the mythographers, and almost none, if you prefer the dry-as-dust scholars. The truth is probably in between. Wagner had already conceived of the Dutchman from various sources before leaving Riga, originally setting the action in Scotland. When the ship Thetis (whose dimensions match those Wagner
indicated for Daland’s ship) sought shelter in the fjord of Sandvigen, Wagner remembered the place and set the first act of the opera there. (It’s called Sandwike in German.) He records in his autobiography that he made note of the sailors’ song and its echo from the cliffs of the fjord, and there’s no reason to doubt this. Also, anyone who has crossed the North Sea can attest to its inherently menacing feel. A calm, midday sky can turn pitch black in an instant when a sudden storm arrives, or forms out of nowhere (as in Act III). Either Wagner took this from firsthand experience or his powers of imagination should be more celebrated than they are.

  Minna’s metamorphosis (1840) In his first drafts of Dutchman, Wagner had named the heroine “Minna.” Whether this was a tribute to his long-suffering wife or a suggestion that she throw herself off a cliff as a sign of devotion, we’ll never know. In any case, he decided to name the heroine “Senta” when he moved the action to Norway. (Is Wagner lying again here? How many Scottish lasses are named Minna? What difference did the locale make?) As we have already seen, Wagner had been impressed by the sound of the word “Tjenta!” which is a Norwegian name for a housemaid, and came up with Senta. Interestingly, “Chencha” is the common Mexican name for a housemaid as well. Perhaps there really was more pre-Columbian transatlantic traffic than we usually assume after all!

  A low-budget debut (1843) Opening night in Dresden was less than Wagner hoped for, despite the presence of his favorite soprano, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, as Senta. The production was dreadful, with sets borrowed from the theater’s other productions. There were no “cliffs” available for Act I, which must have made the “echo” seem rather gratuitous. Wagner complained bitterly about this, and his mania for being personally in charge of all aspects of production really started with this experience, culminating at Bayreuth toward the end of his life. The audience was pleased anyway but somehow bewildered by the musical difference between Dutchman and the previous season’s Rienzi. In any case, Wagner’s early biographers, who saw their idol as even more of a victim than he saw himself, maintained the premiere was a fiasco. This was not the case, although it was less of a success than Rienzi.

  Revisions (1850–64) In later years (in Zurich in the 1850s and particularly at Munich in 1864, when King Ludwig gave Wagner the means to present “model” performances), Wagner changed a few details of the score of Dutchman. The Overture and the finale now ended with Senta’s themes rather than the Dutchman’s, and the noisiest passages were toned down, the mature Wagner having learned to create effects with fewer such tricks as cymbal crashes. Occasionally, a new production today will use the original 1843 score in some search for authenticity on the assumption that any revisions a composer makes are concessions to bourgeois-pig audiences (as if Wagner ever made any concessions to anyone!).

  Very foreign productions (1870s) Dutchman cruised across Germany in a stately fashion in the 1860s and finally made it overseas, although in a slightly altered form. Its London debut was at Drury Lane in 1870, given in Italian as L’Olandese dannato, or, quaintly translated, “The Damned Dutchman.” This was the first production of a Wagner opera in Britain. It must have worked on some level, since in 1877 it was staged again at London’s grand Covent Garden (then called the Royal Italian Opera House) in Italian, which was the language of all productions there at that time. The prevailing theory was that singers had to sing in their native languages or risk sounding “false,” a theory that Wagner had once propounded. The American premiere was in Philadelphia in 1876, in (you guessed it) Italian. No wonder people still refer to Dutchman as Wagner’s most “Italian” opera.

  Cosima’s Bayreuth production (1901) Wagner’s intention was that all of his works from Dutchman to Parsifal should be performed in his private shrine at Bayreuth. To complete the canon, Cosima presented Dutchman as the final new production of her “reign,” having already done each of the others.

  The 1901 Bayreuth production, presented in one act, as Wagner had originally wanted, was widely praised by critics. Another reason for the success that year was the Dutchman of Anton van Rooy, who was a real live Dutchman himself. Rooy was later “banished” from Bayreuth for participating in the unsanctioned 1903 Metropolitan Opera Parsifal. Destroyed he wasn’t, staying on in New York and making a good deal more money there than he would have earned in Germany. His performances of the Dutchman at the Met through the first decade and a half of the century have become legendary, and solidified this opera’s status as a star vehicle.

  Longest ovations at the Met (1959–60) In case there are any doubts about this opera as a star vehicle, let it be noted that the record for the longest ovations at the Metropolitan belongs to George London and Leonie Rysanek for their performances of the Dutchman and Senta during the 1959–60 season. Of course no one can say exactly how long the applause ran (even accounts among those who were supposedly there vary), but most agree on about thirty minutes.

  TANNHÄUSER

  UND DER SÄNGERKRIEG

  AUF WARTBURG

  PREMIERE: DRESDEN, 1845; REVISED VERSION, PARIS, 1861.

  THE NAME

  What to call it The official name of this opera, as written above, means “Tannhäuser and the Singing Contest on the Wartburg.” Never attempt to call it that, in English or German. A simple Tannhäuser will do.

  How to pronounce it The umlaut (those two little dots above the second a in Tannhäuser) is a distinctly German pronunciation indicator. You will sometimes see it spelled Tannhaeuser, which is the correct way to spell it if your typewriter or computer has no umlaut (see also Götterdämmerung). This is not a problem for English-speakers. The sound of äu is the same as our oy. Pronounce Tannhäuser to rhyme with “John Hoyzer.” The s is voiced, like our z. Linger over the double n for full effect.

  WHAT IS TANNHÄUSER?

  Tannhäuser shows us a romantic look back to an idealized Middle Ages, complete with castles, lusty troubadours, saintly ladies, and pious pilgrims who sing superbly. This cultural nostalgia pervaded Wagner’s era as the Industrial Revolution rolled across Europe. It expressed itself in such diverse places as the popular novels of Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe and others) and King Ludwig of Bavaria’s proto-Disneyland castle, Schloss Neuschwannstein.

  The story of Tannhäuser bounces between the reckless sensuality of the Grotto of Venus and the refined Christian court of the Wartburg Castle atop a hill. Allegorical interpreters and Jungian analysts are permitted a field day with this one. The net result is a tale of a man caught between his conflicting ideals of women—saintly virgin and seductive whore. This being a mid-nineteenth-century work, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

  For this libretto, Wagner blithely plundered medieval mythology, conflating several different legends and gaily mixing historical and fictional characters. Literary scholars of the time were appalled, but the quiltwork nature of Tannhäuser gives the audience a wide selection to enjoy, including earthy sex, sacred love, court formality, despair, and redemption, all painted in the broadest possible strokes. It is one of Wagner’s most approachable creations.

  It is also one of his most uneven. This is the opera Rossini had in mind when he supposedly made the famous observation that “Wagner has great moments and lousy quarter hours.” On first hearing, there are undeniable longueurs. But the flip side is that the longueurs are never too longue—the dullest spectator can count on being woken up with a brisk tune every several minutes. Tannhäuser does not present any musical difficulties to the novice Wagnerite. There is no need to study harmony or leitmotivs ahead of time in the way one prepares for Tristan or the Ring. The contrast of moods in this piece is depicted in such a clear and broad manner that the most unmusical member of the audience will be able to follow. Other delights making Tannhäuser ever popular are an unforgettable chorus, which pops up whenever the action gets too slow, a rip-roaring soprano aria, a great baritone aria (for which baritones are truly grateful; much of Wagner’s music for them in other operas is demanding and thankless), a thrilling “nar
rative” for the tenor, Wagner’s only real ballet scene as curtain raiser, and some excellent ensembles.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  TANNHÄUSER (tenor) A knight whose real name is Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Tannhäuser is a troubadour, which in Germany was called a Minnesinger. These knights were noble, unlike minstrels, and were expected to be equally at home in battle or composing verses and music.

  ELISABETH (soprano) The lady of the Wartburg Castle, virgin niece of the Landgrave Hermann. This character is history’s Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. While the historical Saint Elizabeth wore clothes of the poor and avoided court ceremony, our diva is invariably clad in high-medieval kitsch and seems quite at home presiding over court functions.

  HERMANN, LANDGRAVE OF THURINGIA (bass) The lord of the Wartburg Castle and uncle of Elisabeth. Under the historical Hermann, the Thuringian court became famous for its refinement and piety. The Wartburg Castle exists to this day, near the city of Eisenach, and can be clearly seen from the Munich–Berlin train.

  WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH (baritone) A troubadour at the Wartburg Castle and (a rarity in Wagner’s works) a rather nice guy. The historical Wolfram wrote a medieval epic called Parzival, which Wagner would later plunder as a source for his final opera.

  WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE (tenor), BITEROLF (bass), HEINRICH DER SCHREIBER (tenor), REINMAR VON ZWETER (bass) All troubadours at the Wartburg Castle. Although they have interesting legendary and historical sources, all we really need to know about these guys with confusing names is that they are always there together and they always burst into song.