Welsh National Opera’s ‘Flying Dutchman’: a musical triumph

Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman marked the change from his three earlier operas to his ten music dramas. In a stunning musical performance by Welsh National Opera at their Cardiff home under the baton of Tomas Hanus, you could sense how the composer graduated from conventional opera of the day to his later inimitable style. WNO has been lucky indeed to have Hanus as their music director for the last ten years, since the 2016/17 season, though he moves on to Iceland after this new production. During his time at the WNO he has directed the orchestra in works by Britten, Janacek, Richard Strauss, Mussorgsky and other well-known composers, leaving an impressive legacy.

As is the custom these days, stage director Jack Furness, who has also worked as a designer, set his mark on the production by beginning and ending with Senta. She is the slightly batty heroine who yearns to rescue the Dutchman from his fate, sailing the oceans of the world without respite. Only pure true love and the absolute fidelity of a woman can save him, and although Senta has these qualities, he is unconvinced and sails away. Only when she deliberately sacrifices herself for him is he finally saved. In this production we see her embrace the young man Erik, who is desperately in love with her, and as the Dutchman witnesses their kiss he is convinced that she is not what he needs. That seems to me a strong mark of the production, where any intimacy with Erik is sometimes completely absent, leaving the audience a bit nonplussed.

On the other hand, Furness has made Senta very much the central character, and has her dead body placed in the same bed on which we see her born. During the magnificent overture we see her mother lying on the bed in agonies of childbirth before producing a tiny baby that grows up and runs around the stage. The modern style, in which directors accompany grand overtures such as this one with their own concepts, is not one I favour. Indeed the mother’s agony seemed so realistic that it could well convince younger female audience members to avoid childbirth altogether. Perhaps the director had in mind Wagner’s final music drama, Parsifal, where the hero’s mother dies before he starts to achieve his destiny. Here the depiction of Senta’s birth doesn’t seem appropriate, except that we are meant to understand that the girl has no mother to restrain her sacrificial impulses.

The main character, to my mind, is not Senta but the Dutchman himself. Simon Bailey exhibited a quietly mesmeric presence in the role, with James Cresswell a strong bass as Senta’s father Daland who invites the Dutchman to their house, only too pleased to pair off the captain of this indestructible ship and its huge treasure with his daughter. As Senta Rachel Nicholls, who has sung Wagner heroines before, gave the role a forceful presence, verging on the edge of being somewhat strained, and Tristan Llyr Griffiths sang beautifully as the Steersman. The ladies occasionally seen in the background presumably represented the Dutchman’s previous potential partners, but this production was really all about Senta, who was front and centre in the Act II chorus where the women get on with their work.

In their terrific service to the public enjoyment of opera, the WNO are performing this again in Cardiff on Sunday, followed by Plymouth, Birmingham and Milton Keynes on April 24, May 7 and May 15. It deserves to go further to other venues, but lack of funding has prevented this.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.