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Programme notes
Richard Wagner (1813–83)
The Flying Dutchman (1840–42,
rev. 1846, 1852, 1860) – overture
The Flying Dutchman is the first of Wagner’s
operas to have retained a steady place in the
repertoire, and rightly so. Of the three operas
that preceded it, the first two, Die Feen and Das
Liebesverbot, which take German and Italian
styles as their respective models, both deserve
occasional revival, and not only to see how fast
Wagner progressed as composer and dramatist.
The third, Rienzi, is a blowsily overblown
piece, though with a terrific overture. But the
gap between its windy rhetoric and hollow
gesturing, and the intensity and fervent
conviction of The Flying Dutchman, which
Wagner began writing very shortly after it, is
very striking.
That is in large part due to the fact that The
Flying Dutchman relates to Wagner’s own
experiences in a way none of his previous works
had. In 1839, two years before he began the
composition of Dutchman, Wagner and his wife
had experienced an appalling sea journey from
Riga to London, with what should have been a
brief passage taking three weeks. Wagner was
also deeply interested in the idea of a cursed
figure wandering until ‘redeemed’ by the love
of a pure woman, a theme which he discerned
in, or imparted to, the old legend of the Flying
Dutchman, especially as it had been reworked
by Heinrich Heine in his Memoirs of Herr von
Schnabelewopski (though Heine’s treatment of
the subject there is ironic in a way that Wagner
would have found impossible).
sings in Act 2, which incorporates both the
wild theme of the Dutchman himself and, as a
refrain, that of his redemption – a redemption
the girl sees herself as bringing about before she
has even met the Dutchman (though she already
worships his portrait). In the overture, which
Wagner composed last, we have a brilliant
potpourri of themes, but it is these two which
dominate. The key of the opening is D minor,
that of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a totemic
work for Wagner, and one he had arranged for
piano at the age of 17. The Dutchman’s theme,
too, bears a striking resemblance to the main
theme of the first movement of the Ninth, both
in its intervals and its rhythms. The evocation of
a storm-tossed sea journey marks an astonishing
advance on anything Wagner had composed
earlier. It is followed by the pastel shades of
wind instruments in Senta’s melody. Then
the surging and tossing take over once more,
with a variety of themes, including the sailors’
hornpipe, before, at least in the original, the
Dutchman’s theme brings the overture to its
end. Wagner tinkered a lot with it, both its
orchestration and its conclusion, and decades
later substituted a ‘Redemption’ ending, in line
with the end of Tristan and Isolde.
Programme note © Michael Tanner
Michael Tanner is the opera critic of the ‘Spectator’.
His most recent book is ‘The Faber Pocket Guide
to Wagner’.
The germ of his opera was, Wagner tells us, to
be found in the ballad that Senta, the heroine,
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