| The Dutchman has landed (again) | for everyone |
In 1876 the Italian-born American artist John Singer Sargent finally crossed the Atlantic to visit the land of his parents- before returning to Europe to pursue his artistic career. In the course of one of these voyages the liner he was travelling on passed a derelict sailing ship adrift in the ocean and Sargent was moved to create the above work. It’s amazingly evocative- the half-wrecked sailing vessel drifting on its own random voyage through the stormy ocean, with a past one can only guess at and a future which is all too certain. According to the catalogue of the exhibition in which I first saw this work, at the time Sargent spotted this desolate image there were an amazingly large number of derelict ships adrift on the shipping lanes of the world- hundreds if not thousands at any one time. Sadly the catalogue didn’t reference this statement, which left one wondering how the figures were arrived at and just what stories lay behind these ghost ships afloat on the world’s oceans.
This background no doubt in part explains how legends like that of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the seas for ever after he swore he would round the Cape of Good Hope even if he had to sail on to Eternity to do so, got a start. ENO’s latest production of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” picks up on perhaps the most famous artistic appropriation of the myth.
In this version the Dutchman is allowed on shore every seven years in the hope of finding a woman who will be true to him unto death, in which event the curse will be lifted and he and his crew will find repose at last. The opera starts with the Norwegian skipper Daland being driven off course when about to make landfall at his home port. Pushed up the cost to another fjord, he falls in with a strange vessel whose captain appears to be the only visible crew member. The Dutchman (for this is his ship and his seven years have come round- and he is desperate to break the spell) is only too keen to tell Daland about the riches in his hold; Daland is quick to promise his daughter’s hand to this stranger in return for a share of the money.
The scene shifts to the Norwegian port, where it transpires that Senta, Daland’s daughter, is already besotted with the Dutchman, whose picture she dotes over. This rather irritates the women she works with, from whom she is already somewhat distanced by the fact that her real life boyfriend Erik isn’t a sailor but has a secure position on land. Erik, understandably, isn’t wild about Senta’s obsession with the Dutchman either. Daland’s ship returns, Daland tells Senta of the bargain he’s made and introduces the potential groom- and Senta is overwhelmed with joy. A rowdy homecoming party follows in which the Norwegian crew become more and more drunk and more and more puzzled by the absence of any apparent life on the Dutchman’s ship. Finally they start taunting the invisible crew- who respond with a thunderous and eerie chorus which causes panic on shore. Erik arrives to put in a final plea to Senta, the Dutchman thinks she’s betrayed him and prepares to sail again- at which point Senta kills herself and, we are led to suppose, the spell breaks (an engraving of the Dresden premiere in the programme shows her in mid air after jumping from a cliff with the Dutchman’s ship going down in the harbour- which must have been spectacular if the stage machinery actually worked).
It’s not actually clear just how “traditional” the Flying Dutchman legend really is- it’s curiously hard to date just when it appears though the underlying story is generally sited in the late 17th century when it first creeps on to the literary radar screen a hundred years or so later. There was a flurry of stories about cursed mariners of one kind or another in literary circles from the 1790’s onwards as part of the nascent taste for the Gothick and romantic (Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was just one of several).
The twist which is central to the Wagnerian version-the concession of a seven yearly break to seek redemption- certainly has some precedents in older traditions (if I remember correctly, in the course of his wanderings on the ocean St Brendan the Navigator discovered that Judas was let out of Hell on Easter Day) but Wagner seems to have got it from a story by Heinrich Heine, with whom he collaborated in Paris in the early 1840’s on the first version of the opera, designed as a one act opener to the serious business of the ballet. Later, when Wagner wanted to minimise his connection with Heine (who had become increasingly overt in his reversion to the faith of his Jewish ancestors as his health deteriorated just as Wagner became more and more strident in his anti-Semitism), he preferred to claim that he’d got the idea directly from the play referred to in Heine’s tale but there isn’t a lot of evidence that that ever existed. He also played fast and loose with other parts of the back story. He claimed that the idea for the sailors’ choruses and the Norwegian setting came from an episode when he had been stormbound in a Norwegian fjord. The voyage seems to have been genuine enough (fleeing creditors……) but the Norwegian setting was a very late change to a libretto which was initially set in Scotland- indeed it’s been claimed in Orkney that it was originally supposed to be set there after Wagner read Sir Walter Scott’s “The Pirate”, which has some very tenuous plot similarities to the opera. It seems Wagner wanted to distance his opera from a piece based on a scenario he sold to the Paris Opera during his collaboration with Heine which went into production as he was rehearsing the Dresden
So what about the ENO production? It managed to limit some of the inherent implausibilities of the storyline quite cleverly by making the portrait of the Dutchman which Senta gets so obsessive over a picture on the cover of a book which we see being given to Senta as a child by her father during the overture. This minimises the strange coincidence of the Dutchman pitching up somewhere which he must have already visited at some point in the past. It also perhaps gives some kind of psychological context to the bizarre implausibility of him being steered towards perhaps the only woman on Earth who is totally pre-programmed to fall for him and sacrifice herself to save him.
Other bits don’t work so well in my view. Daland, his crew and their home port are set in a vaguely late 20th century style- I’m sure I spotted a couple of reasonably current Arsenal strips being worn by crew members in the party scene, though the overall sense is a bit 1980’s. Fair enough, though this must make the Dutchman’s ship (whose prow makes an appearance in the first act and looks distinctly 18th century in inspiration) look totally bizarre and freakish and out of time even to the most obtuse and greedy skipper. Even more oddly, Daland’s home enterprise where Senta conspicuously fails to work isn’t the spinning workshop of the original but appears to be making miniature versions of the Dutchman’s ship (red sails and all) to go into bottles, presumably for sale on the tourist market. Indeed Senta makes away with herself at the end by, somewhat implausibly, stabbing herself with a broken bottle (surely in health and safety conscious Norway
In fact I have some reservations about the way in which Senta and her interplay with her environment are played. It’s easy to understand that she must be a real pain in the workshop at times with her endless vapourings about the Dutchman and her detachment from the lives of her colleagues. In the end, however, she is the boss’s daughter and I don’t think she’d be treated with quite the contemptuous hostility by her workmates that she attracts in this version- indeed this actually goes distinctly against the grain of the music, which suggests amused tolerance and even some sympathy when she’s encouraged to sing her big number about him. Even worse, I simply don’t believe that she’d be subjected to the thoroughly unpleasant and humiliating treatment meted out to her in the party scene (at one point it looks as if she’s about to be gang raped by Daland’s crew). If her relationship with the society she lives in is really so horrible then maybe a grand suicidal gesture does make some kind of sense- but again the stage business is quite gratuitous in musical terms and it requires some awkward gear shifts in the latter stages of the opera to bring the story back on track.
Musically the performance is good. Orla Boylan’s Senta is a lot happier when she can sing loud but James Creswell makes a suitably sexy Dutchman visually and vocally (his red and black outfit makes him look a bit like the more dandyish type of Wild West gambler-cum-gun slinger) and poor Erik, (turned into a customs officer of some kind) has no chance, especially when played by the amiable but slightly pudgy Stuart Skelton. The orchestra under Edward Gardiner is in good voice too.
A final thought- what about the Dutchman’s crew? It seems grossly unfair that they should have had to suffer collective punishment for the sins of their captain and they don’t even seem to get his allocation of shore leave (and the implicit scope for womanising) every seven years…….
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