I think it was seeing Lars von Trier’s Tristan-infused masterpiece Melancholia (for anyone who’s interested, my full write-up will be posted on the Starburst website on the 14th of this month) that reminded me I was long overdue for a Wagner fix. By happy coincidence Der fliegende Hollaender had just opened at the Royal Opera House and I was lucky enough to snag a ticket for just £13. I see that some reviewers have been complaining about the lack of an interval in this production but I couldn’t disagree with them more. To my mind, there would have been nothing worse than to have the taut, emotional and thoroughly mesmerising performance I saw last night disturbed by the aimless chatter and shifting about that an interval seems to encourage. What’s the point of it? There’s not even enough time to get to the bar. The only complaint I would make about the timing is that the slightly late start meant that instead of luxuriating in that unique post-Wagner glow I had to leap out of my seat and dash like buggery up the Strand in order to avoid missing my train.
I’d say that Dutchman is undoubtedly the most readily approachable of Wagner’s operas, and the one I’d recommend to anyone wanting to have a stab at getting to grips with him. What’s less often said but that came home to me again and again last night is that the Dutchman is also the opera for fans of things gothic. The story is chilling enough to give you goose bumps, as insanely impassioned as a novel by one of the Bronte sisters. The opera contains drama, magic and monstrousness in such concentrated potency that the two hours of its duration seem compressed into a single bright ball of manic energy. It’s hard to pick a favourite moment when the whole thing was so sstisfying, but the ‘duelling chorus’ between Daland’s jolly sailor boys and the Hollaender’s ghost mariners was something that will rise to haunt me many times as I walk along the seafront this winter I am sure.
The greatest Dutchman of all time would have to be Hans Hotter, a singer I have loved so long I can still barely come to terms with the fact that he is no longer with us. But Egils Silins’s performance last night was delivered in that same spirit of natural musicality and utter commitment to the role. And Anja Kampe’s radiant Senta did much to remind me of her great near-namesake in the role, Anja Silja.
Travelling home on the train, I found myself wondering why ghost ships haven’t featured more in film. For a subject so rich in symbolism and mythology it’s sad that recent attempts to capture something of the Dutchman ambience – Ghost Ship, Triangle – haven’t done more than brushed at the surface. It came to me then that the closest modern art has to offer in replicating the terror and splendor of a voyage on the Wagnerian high seas may well be Wolfgang Petersen’s WW2 drama Das Boot, another German epic in which doomed sailors endlessly circle the ocean, imprisoned in a hell not easily imagined by others, fated never to land, never to truly rejoin the society they left when they signed on with their mad captain…..
Is The Flying Dutchman a story of war then, after all? The war of the self against the other, the heart against the mind?
Anyone who can should get a ticket.