by Martin Geck
From the standpoint of operatic history, Wagner’s galley years in Paris were by no means unusual, with the result that they deserve neither pity nor gleeful gloating on our part. Anyone wanting to gain a foothold as an opera composer in what was then the cultural capital of Europe could not reckon on doing so overnight. It took Halévy eight years to make his breakthrough in his home city with La juive in 1835, while the two non-French composers Meyerbeer and Donizetti had both enjoyed successful careers in Italy before they made a name for themselves in Paris.
Nor do we necessarily have to admire Wagner for reacting to his own failures in the city by criticizing the whole of the Paris musical scene. In this he had at least two distinguished predecessors in Liszt and, to a certain extent, Heinrich Heine. Both Liszt and Heine had been impressed by the Saint-Simonians, who took their name from their père suprême, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. Throughout the 1830s everyone who was anyone in Paris flocked to the Salle Taitbout, the headquarters of the movement, where they swore their allegiance to a doctrine aimed at belatedly realizing the goals of the French Revolution. These goals included a greater degree of social responsibility, moral commitment, true religious beliefs, and a love of art. At least in theory the Saint-Simonians demanded the redistribution of property in order to ensure that no one person was exploited by his or her fellow human beings.
It would be interesting to know if Wagner was ever directly involved in the activities of a movement whose ideas he undoubtedly found sympathetic. More fascinating, however, is the show of artistic strength that allowed him to drag himself out of the morass and transcend his “deep shock” at prevailing conditions, leading to a “violent change of direction” as an artist.2 Of course, Der fliegende Holländer does not mark Wagner’s definitive farewell to the world of grand opera, for his libretto to Die hohe Braut (WWV 40) stills draws on this tradition, and he continued to champion Rienzi. But within his output Der fliegende Holländer has a revolutionary force comparable only to that of the Ring and Tristan und Isolde.
Today’s music industry appropriates and absorbs whatever it wants, making it hard for us to imagine what it meant for a composer to break out of the order of things with a work like Der fliegende Holländer and to swim, as it were, against the tide. Every age has its own specific rhythm, and grand opera was part of the underlying rhythm of the years between 1830 and 1850 in France, when a spirit of restlessness and motley color typified French society. With Der fliegende Holländer Wagner abandoned this complex design completely. As he was later to explain in his essay “Music of the Future,” “the glamour of the Paris ideal” was now “fading” before his eyes, “and I began to draw the laws of form from a source other than the sea that was spread far and wide before me for general public use.”
Even while he was writing the poem, he went on, he had “no longer felt” as he had done when “tossing off the libretto for Rienzi, where the only thing I had in mind was an ‘opera text’ that I could fill as far as possible with all the pre-existent, normative forms of actual grand opera—namely, introductions, finales, choruses, arias, duets, trios and so on.” At the same time his choice of subject meant turning his back on the sort of “historical convention” that demanded untold “circumstantial” and “abstruse” details. Instead, he embraced the world of “legend,” with its “purely human content”: “A ballad, a popular refrain is enough to acquaint us with this character in its most vivid form, and to do so, moreover, in the twinkling of an eye.”3
In short, Wagner spurned the sort of historical subjects on which grand opera drew its themes in an attempt to demonstrate its seriousness of purpose, an attempt motivated by its desire not just to pay homage to the world of beautiful appearances but to treat “authentic” historical events and in that way provide contemporary society with ample food for thought that would contribute to its own understanding of itself. From this point of view the libretto to Les Huguenots is no historical monstrosity. To take a single example: the tragic figure of Marcel indicates the hopelessness and risibility of the defiant attempt to cling to Jacobin ideals in the bourgeois, liberal world of 1830.4
The Wagner of Der fliegende Holländer, conversely, not only despised the bombast of grand opera, he also refused to share its general tendency to lard its librettos with historical details. Rather, he sought truth in the oceanic depths of legend, where he was drawn to the fate of the mariner who because of his godless existence is obliged to sail the seven seas until the Day of Judgment. Wagner calls him the “Ahasuerus of the seas.”5 His source was Heinrich Heine’s version of the legend in his fragmentary picaresque novel From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski, according to which the Dutchman is redeemed by the love of a woman. But if Wagner borrowed from Heine, he did not do so slavishly. For him, it would have been unthinkable to echo Heine’s cynical comment on the climactic redemption motif: “The moral of the tale is that women should beware of marrying a Flying Dutchman; and we men should see from the piece that at best we shall be destroyed by women.”6
But even for Wagner the “redemption” that the Dutchman is vouchsafed lacks a utopian element: in keeping with his artistic leitmotif, it is “redemption through destruction” that is the work’s underlying message. In the original one-act version of the piece this ultimately dark ending is brought out more clearly than in the version that is generally familiar today, lacking, as it does, the harp sonorities that cast the later endings in a more transfigured light. In the original version, the action, too, is similarly bleak—the prose draft of spring 1841 ends with Anna, as Senta is still described here, “calling after the departing Dutchman: ‘I know full well that you can be redeemed only by a woman who is faithful to you unto death! Behold! I have been faithful to you until now, until my death!’ She leaps into the sea, and at that moment the Dutchman’s ship sinks in a trice.”7 Even a decade later, in A Communication to My Friends, Wagner was still stressing that Senta was able to redeem the Dutchman “only through her own destruction and his.”8
In this early version, then, the Dutchman draws Senta down into the watery depths, whereas their roles are later reversed: “Senta raises the Dutchman, pressing him to her breast and pointing heavenward with one of her hands and also with her gaze. The rock has continued to move slowly upward, imperceptibly assuming the shape of a cloud.” Thus Wagner’s revised stage direction.9 And yet the harps that enter at this point cannot persuade us that this new ending is anything other than questionable, for the action of the opera includes no sense of development that might justify an apotheosis. Quite the opposite: the existential shock that it triggers is based on a single factor—namely, the doom of the Flying Dutchman, who until then has been condemned to a life of endlessly restless wandering.
Writing to one of his friends in Dresden, Ferdinand Heine, Wagner insisted that the work was “copied from that same nature of which we are all a part” and that it had nothing in common with “modern requirements for piquant situations and unexpected surprises.” The result was “so unlike anything we now understand by the term opera” that he had “difficulty explaining” how such an anti-opera might ever find favor with an audience.10
Wagner eschews every kind of intrigue of the sort that was felt indispensable in stage works at that date and that was to be an important element of his own later output—at least to the extent that we interpret the term intrigue to mean a bringing together of the various strands in a plot and building to a climax. In Der fliegende Holländer—a work whose libretto was bound to be regarded by all connoisseurs of French grand opera as démodé—Wagner was uniquely concerned with the truth about modern men and women and, hence, about himself. He says little about the failing that led the Flying Dutchman to curse God but describes him variously as a “fallen angel,”11 an “Odysseus” figure, and an embodiment of the “Wandering Jew.”12 It is this last-named characterization that probably suits the Flying Dutchman best. All of these metaphors describe members of a society that has lost its way
and, plagued by sundry feelings of guilt and anxiety, is good for nothing except its own annihilation. This was a subject that was bound to fascinate Wagner in the “swamps and billows” of his own life.13 Even during his Zurich period, while Liszt was preparing to give the Weimar premiere of the opera, Wagner was still able to write to his friend: “Good luck with the ‘Flying Dutchman’! I can’t get this melancholy hero out of my head! I keep hearing ‘Ah, spectral man, who can tell when you’ll find her!’ together with ‘One chance remains to gain this poor man his peace and salvation!’ But it’s too late for this now! For me there’s no longer any possibility of redemption, except in death!”14
It is in Der fliegende Holländer that Wagner’s artistic leitmotif of “redemption through destruction” is first formulated in all its clarity. Although he still avails himself of the legendary motif of the redemptive woman who brings about his hero’s death, this motif progressively loses its force in the following operas and music dramas. And yet even here the phrase about Senta as the “woman of the future”15 seems like a bill of exchange that is redeemed neither in the Ring nor in Parsifal. Unlike their counterparts in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde, neither the Dutchman nor Senta demonstrates one jot of affection or love for the other person. Rather, they are at each other’s mercy, their only aim being to die together. And whereas the Dutchman remains from start to finish in his state of existential impotence, Senta’s “feat” in this initial version of the opera consists simply in leaping after him and throwing herself in the sea. If Senta is the glorious “woman of the future,” is it only because she finds fulfillment in perishing, spectacularly, with the Dutchman rather than engaging in a “worldly” affair with Erik?
Baudelaire was unequivocal in welcoming Wagner’s decision to opt for a somber ending, and in his essay on Tannhäuser—his artistic testament—he describes the creator of Der fliegende Holländer as a kindred soul, cut off from God, torn between the world of dreams and real life, and condemned to achieve at best a negative goal in the guise of death.16
That in his revisions to the work, Wagner—afraid of his own courage—at least hints at the possibility of a visionary ending does nothing to alter the fact that there is a magnificent godlessness to the earlier version that has its counterpart in Byron’s monodrama Manfred, a work which Schumann was later to set to music and, much to Nietzsche’s annoyance, likewise invest with a conciliatory ending by having God-fearing monks recite the words “Requiem aeternam” over the eponymous hero as he dies a godless death.17 In Wagner’s Ur-Holländer, “black” romanticism is taken to such lengths that if the work were to be staged in this spirit all sense of metaphysics would vanish as if into a black hole—in the hundreds of other adaptations of the subject there is ultimately at least a faint trace of a merciful or just God looking down on all the horrors of the story.
We can propose a psychological interpretation of the story of the Flying Dutchman, as Liszt did in 1854 when he drew a parallel between Wagner’s Senta and Honoré de Balzac’s Marie-Angélique de Vandenesse in his novel Une fille d’Ève: “Each is bound to a kind and loving man whose qualities appear as if they must surely contribute to her happiness,” and yet both women abandon themselves
first to a dreamy sympathy, but then to a violent passion for a human being who, feared by all and shunned like some doom-laden apparition, stands outside their own particular world, offering them only fear, anguish, and renunciation, his bold spirit holding them in thrall as if by some spell so unbreakable that they are willing to suffer pain and misery and even death for him.18
The reader may care to go a step further and see the Dutchman as “Senta’s vision,” as the director Harry Kupfer has done. When staging the work in Berlin in 2001, he argued that “the piece is a psychological bourgeois drama, not a grand romantic opera.”19 But is this anything more than a bon mot? After all, Wagner knew very well why—in spite of his opposition to the current operatic scene—he described the work as a “romantic opera” in his autograph libretto, his autograph score, the first lithographed edition, and consistently thereafter: for him, the character of Senta was just as much a part of the legend as the Dutchman, a legend whose truth is independent of the fate of a single individual. In writing Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner made no attempt to invest the plot or the music with a psychological dimension, as he was to do in the Ring. And if it is a “psychological bourgeois drama,” how would it be if we were to reverse the roles and stage the work in such a way that the Dutchman appears wearing Wagner’s mask and Senta is seen as his “vision”? And if we are to believe a study published in 1911 by one of Freud’s pupils, Max Graf, Senta would have to appear wearing the mask of Wagner’s mother, Johanna Rosine, whom Graf claims was the object of the young Wagner’s Oedipal desires, desires that the adult artist then transferred to the figure of Senta.20
Ultimately attempts to distinguish between dreams and reality do not advance us one iota, for the bewildering interaction between two categories that are only apparently unequivocal is all part of the romantic outlook to which Wagner subscribed in Der fliegende Holländer more uncompromisingly than at any other time of his life. Which of the characters is “more true to real life” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s unfinished novel Tomcat Murr: the bigoted tomcat grumbling about education or the insane kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, who sports a collar in E major to go with the wardrobe disaster of his coat in C-sharp minor?
Finally, the music comes into play—and for Hoffmann and for Wagner’s contemporaries, music was the romantic art par excellence. According to the romantics, paintings had the disadvantage of being a mere copy of nature, while the idea of an alternative “as if” invariably and inevitably colored our views of every stage presentation. Music, conversely, was simply that which it was at the very moment it was heard. And it was in the immediacy of its presence that its higher reality was to be found. For now, Wagner was still unable to translate this conviction into actions in the fullest sense of the term, but even so—and for the first time in his output—he glimpsed an idea to which he was to give theoretical expression only a few years later in Opera and Drama, where he writes that no one wanting to create a musical drama should abide by the conventions of “opera” as a genre and pour his or her musical ideas into the rigid forms of recitative, aria, duet, ensemble, and so on. Rather, such an artist is faced by the challenge of bringing the action to the listener’s “feeling” in a way that is both more direct and more flexible than can be achieved by either the spoken theater or by traditional opera, with all its formal, shackling requirements.
Wherein lies the difference between Der fliegende Holländer and pre-Wagnerian operas like those by Mozart? On the one hand, Wagner pays almost unqualified homage to a composer whom he described as “the spirit of light and love,”21 insisting that in his eyes works like Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni were “perfect” in every way22 and never for a moment tiring of the arias that Lilli Lehmann would sing for him at musical soirées in Bayreuth in the 1870s.23 On the other hand, much about Mozart’s operas is conventional. On those occasions where this conventionality “suits the subject” and reflects the “noisy confusion of the high-spirited comedy of intrigue,”24 as it does in Le nozze di Figaro, then it is not disruptive. But a composite work like Die Zauberflöte, created for a suburban theater in Vienna and thus a product of its age, could no longer be galvanized back into life: “To what torments of existence is the departed soul of such a masterpiece exposed when dragged back to earth by a modern theatrical medium for the delectation of a later generation!”25 And in the case of Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner found it altogether impossible to revel in traditional forms: no one wanting to stage not just one particular message but the only message capable of moving the world should rely on outmoded, schematic models.
In 1871, in conversation with his second wife, Wagner explained that “the so-called genius of form” planned everything in advance and knew how one thing would follow another, allowing
the genius to work “with ease,” whereas he saw himself in the more difficult role of the “improviser,” who “belongs entirely to the present moment” and who would be lost if he had to keep thinking about what came next: “The peculiar thing about me as an artist, for instance, is that I look on each detail as an entirety and never say to myself, ‘Since this or that will follow, you must do thus and such, modulate like this or like that. [. . .] And yet I know I am unconsciously obeying a plan.’”26
A glance at the nineteenth-century symphony helps to clarify this idea: in Wagner’s view, as well as that of the New German school, it was impossible to add anything of any significance to Beethoven’s music, which traded in ideas, at least as long as the traditional four-movement framework was retained and, with it, the use of sonata form, with its predictable sequence of exposition, development section, and recapitulation, for every new idea, however novel, would be lost within the old-fashioned packaging. Moreover, the traditional symphony in the post-Beethovenian period flirted with an emotionality and even a sentimentality whose fluctuating feelings left the objective listener puzzling over what it was all about:
Our symphonies and the like are now all about world-weariness and disaster; we are gloomy and grim, then courageous and daring; we yearn to see our youthful dreams come true; demonic obstacles inconvenience us; we brood and even rage; but finally the world-weariness’s tooth is drawn, and we laugh and in a fit of high spirits show the world its missing tooth, hale, hearty, honest, Hungarian or Scottish—alas, to others it is simply boring!27
