WAGNER The Flying Dutchman, Romantic Opera in three acts (complete concert performance)

Sunday, March 13
James Levine conducting
Juha Uusitalo, baritone
Elizabeth Byrne, soprano
Alfons Eberz, tenor
Mikhail Petrenko, bass
Paul Groves, tenor
Jane Bunnell, mezzo-soprano
Tanglewood Festival Chorus (John Oliver, conductor)

March 13 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

Performing an opera - by definition a stage-work - in concert has its own special dynamics. Without the scenery and costumes, much of the drama is left to the audience's imagination. And the brilliance of this cast shone partly in such vivid singing and delivery, that one scarcely required stage trappings to feel the salt spray. Strange to say, in this day of excessively "creative" stagings by certain directors who feel that an opera without severed body parts flying across the stage in Act II, is somehow an opportunity missed - one great advantage to concert performance is, that the singers can give all their heart to the singing, without the additional shackles of executing the eccentric Vision of some stage director anxious to generate publicity.

This performance received an enthusiastic ovation, leaving Levine and the BSO in little doubt as to whether the audience might welcome 'concert opera' as a regular component of the season.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, may yet come to be recognized for pioneering the New England practice of over-analyzing things, rather. Noting that Romanticism's most obsessive themes were Death, and The Beautiful Woman, Poe did the math, and reckoned that the ultimate in Romantic Art would turn upon the death of a beautiful woman. Wagner might have taken Poe's correspondence course, as The Flying Dutchman attests.

The Flying Dutchman might almost be subtitled Revenge of the Basses, since the tenor (Erik) loses the girl (Senta) to a brooding, mysterious bass (the Dutchman). But before the basses wax too jubilant, we point out that one principal bass (Daland, Senta's father) winds up losing both his daughter, and his hopes for a prosperous son-in-law; and the other principal bass is the Dutchman himself - who in his last appearance on stage manages to misjudge the woman whose love saves him. Worse, he storms off in his ship, and the upshot of his misprision is, that the woman who loves him truly casts herself into the sea. It would be dull-witted, even for a bass, to find occasion for exultation there.

Yet, there is a happy ending to the opera.

Only it isn't sung.

It feels a bit tacked on, and deus ex mechanical; but Senta's self-immolation saves the Dutchman from his wandering doom, after all; and stage effects are summoned to show the Dutchman's ship sinking, and the spirits of Senta and the Dutchman ascend to heaven in a lasting embrace. It is, of course, a curious prefigurement of Tristan and Isolde; and indeed, the final cadence of the Overture to The Flying Dutchman, will later be brought into slightly modified service, to bring Tristan to a close.

"Tacked on," because the last scene is a full ensemble, in high-strung tragic vein; and yet, scarcely has Senta sung, "Here I stand, true unto death!" ... when the opera ends on an apparently undeserved positive note. You can almost hear Pangloss (Voltaire's wicked parody of Leibnitz) saying: "You were led to expect that this is a catastrophically bad ending - bad for the Dutchman, bad for Senta - but surprise! - it is actually the best of all possible endings." One cannot be too careful about suggesting that Wagner ought perhaps to have written more; yet it is hard to feel other than that this (literally) uplifting conclusion is a shade abrupt.

But after all, any cavil at the ending is a small detail; and opera is an unwieldy, complex genre, whose mastery is generally acquired only over time and through multiple assays. And an opera which is entirely logical, were almost not an opera. The chief fact remains that The Flying Dutchman is a great evening of theatre, and James Levine led a thrilling performance. The audience at Symphony Hall responded with especial warmth for Finnish baritone Juha Uusitalo, who sang a magnetic Dutchman. (Senta's character is miraculous, indeed: she falls in love with the mariner, plights her troth to him, dedicates herself so entirely to redeeming him from his curse that she hurls herself off a cliff on his behalf - and she never does learn his name. That's the Romantic era for you.) Elizabeth Byrne did an excellent job, in a late substitution for the ailing Deborah Voigt. Others in this international cast were Mikhail Petrenko of St Petersburg (Daland), Alfons Eberz of Germany (Erik), and Paul Groves of Louisiana (the Steersman) - every man-jack of them energetic and musicianly.

Apart from the magnificence of the presentation at Symphony Hall, The Flying Dutchman is a fascinating amalgam of many predecessors. In a panel discussion at Harvard's Paine Hall, James Levine aptly remarked, "There are very few examples of absolutely original music - whatever that might be." Earlier that day, Alexander Rehding of the Harvard Music Department explored parallels between Max in Weber's Der Freischütz, and Erik's cavatina in Flying Dutchman. Which is not much to be wondered at: a nine-year-old Richard Wagner met Carl Maria von Weber, and the composer politely inquired whether the boy wished to become a musician. Whereupon Wagner's mother informed the maestro that her son was completely enchanted with Der Freischütz.

Brahms's First Symphony has famously been nicknamed "Beethoven's Tenth"; but the Overture to Flying Dutchman opens with its own subtle homage to the beginning of the Beethoven Ninth. Both are in d minor, and both begin with a tremulous open fifth; in the Beethoven, it is soft and low, in the strings and horns; in the Wagner, loud and high in the strings. A melody appears after a bar or so, outlining the open fifth: in Beethoven, this is a descending figure in the first violins (echoed in the double bass); in Wagner, a rising figure in the horns.

And there are gestures which presage later works of Wagner's own. We've already noted the Flying Dutchman/Tristan cadential bond.

In his discussion of Erik, Alexander Rehding spoke of four succeeding drafts of the scenario; but it was only in the last that Erik became a hunter, something of a throwback to a pre-Wagner type in German opera. At this performance, one of my strongest initial impressions was the musical character of the Dutchman's motif, essentially a horn-call on the open fifth: a hunting call. So, perhaps, Erik's quarrel with the Dutchman was partly because the latter made off with his girl, partly because he made off with his characteristic music.

With a little imaginative adjustment, the Dutchman's motif might be converted to the Ride of the Valkyries. But that is a task, Gentle Reader, for a composer, rather than a reviewer.