Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-flying-dutchman"
"The Flying Dutchman" at Covent Garden
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have seen “The Flying Dutchman” in a lifetime of attending opera performances. There were ones in the Hungarian city of Szeged, the scene of my introduction to the genre in my earliest childhood. Then there were ones during the years of my adolescence in Budapest, sung in Hungarian and bearing the marks of the generally prevailing scarcity that defined life in those years, but we didn’t know any better and my memories of those evenings at the Opera seem lavish and grand to me to this day. -- In the New York of the early sixties and from then on to the present, and at many other venues all over the world, I had seen it too many times to count. Some of these performances were wonderful, some less so; some singers great while others in the same cast less so to produce an uneven final impression. Some of the staging rang true, some verged on the outer edges of “regietheater”. But of all of them, the greatest performance I have ever seen took place in Covent Garden in February of this year.
“The Flying Dutchman” is, as countless commentators point out, Richard Wagner’s first opera “where he becomes Wagner”. His prior ones still hark back to the formulas he would eventually completely break away from; and in “Dutchman” this becomes very clear. His lifelong obsession with redemption, preferably with the assistance of a good woman, manifests itself here for the first time. While the opera still has an occasional stand-alone aria as we have known it from the earlier styles of the nineteenth century, the integrated, seamless music, the leitmotifs, the very bones of Wagnerian orchestration here come into their own. The role of Senta, the woman destined to redeem the cursed Dutchman is a precursor to Brunnhilde in the “Ring Cycle” and Isolde in “Tristan und Isolde”. The passion that binds her and the Dutchman to each other has the desperation of self-preservation about it: each needs the other for their own salvation. It is a relatively short work, for Wagner at any rate, a mere two and a half hours of intermissionless, glorious music.
The Covent Garden production, conducted wonderfully by Andris Nelsons, was, above all else, an incomparable musical experience. Bryn Terfel, the great Welsh baritone sang the Dutchman. In all the past ten years or so that Bryn Terfel had been prominent on the international opera scene singing all the great baritone roles from Falstaff to Wotan, I have never heard him sound as magnificent as he did in this role. Senta was the Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, whom, though she had been singing internationally to great acclaim, I have never heard before. She was simply overwhelming. Her voice, full, penetrating but warm, made one long to hear her as Isolde. The two protagonists matched each other note for note, and there was never a moment, as so often happens, of one “outsinging” the other. But beyond the glories of the music, what was so astonishing about their performance was the total immersion of these two singing actors in their roles: I believed, beyond any doubt, that they were fatally, overwhelmingly attracted to each other, to the exclusion of all rationality. In fact, for the first time it had occurred to me that what is happening between Senta and the Dutchman is what must have happened between Judith and Bluebeard before “Bluebeard’s Castle” begins: a cursed man with a complicated, painful past is searching for, and finds, an infatuated young woman willing to leave all she had known behind and devote her life to his redemption. In neither case does this work out well.
Directed by Tim Albery, the production, a simple one with minimal staging – the deck of a ship, a workroom, the indication of the interior of a house, -- works well, and provides an unfussy background to the main event, the passion of Senta and the Dutchman. The single objection I had was the final scene when Senta’s death is not as clearly depicted as one would imagine it; but no matter, by then one is so emotionally exhausted, it takes an effort to start cheering and clapping.
“The Flying Dutchman” is, as countless commentators point out, Richard Wagner’s first opera “where he becomes Wagner”. His prior ones still hark back to the formulas he would eventually completely break away from; and in “Dutchman” this becomes very clear. His lifelong obsession with redemption, preferably with the assistance of a good woman, manifests itself here for the first time. While the opera still has an occasional stand-alone aria as we have known it from the earlier styles of the nineteenth century, the integrated, seamless music, the leitmotifs, the very bones of Wagnerian orchestration here come into their own. The role of Senta, the woman destined to redeem the cursed Dutchman is a precursor to Brunnhilde in the “Ring Cycle” and Isolde in “Tristan und Isolde”. The passion that binds her and the Dutchman to each other has the desperation of self-preservation about it: each needs the other for their own salvation. It is a relatively short work, for Wagner at any rate, a mere two and a half hours of intermissionless, glorious music.
The Covent Garden production, conducted wonderfully by Andris Nelsons, was, above all else, an incomparable musical experience. Bryn Terfel, the great Welsh baritone sang the Dutchman. In all the past ten years or so that Bryn Terfel had been prominent on the international opera scene singing all the great baritone roles from Falstaff to Wotan, I have never heard him sound as magnificent as he did in this role. Senta was the Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, whom, though she had been singing internationally to great acclaim, I have never heard before. She was simply overwhelming. Her voice, full, penetrating but warm, made one long to hear her as Isolde. The two protagonists matched each other note for note, and there was never a moment, as so often happens, of one “outsinging” the other. But beyond the glories of the music, what was so astonishing about their performance was the total immersion of these two singing actors in their roles: I believed, beyond any doubt, that they were fatally, overwhelmingly attracted to each other, to the exclusion of all rationality. In fact, for the first time it had occurred to me that what is happening between Senta and the Dutchman is what must have happened between Judith and Bluebeard before “Bluebeard’s Castle” begins: a cursed man with a complicated, painful past is searching for, and finds, an infatuated young woman willing to leave all she had known behind and devote her life to his redemption. In neither case does this work out well.
Directed by Tim Albery, the production, a simple one with minimal staging – the deck of a ship, a workroom, the indication of the interior of a house, -- works well, and provides an unfussy background to the main event, the passion of Senta and the Dutchman. The single objection I had was the final scene when Senta’s death is not as clearly depicted as one would imagine it; but no matter, by then one is so emotionally exhausted, it takes an effort to start cheering and clapping.
