The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first masterpiece, has had a rough passage in the UK over the past few decades. I recall a production at the Royal Opera in the mid-1980s which revealed to me for the first time the possibility that an insensitive director can completely destroy a great work, something which is now commonplace. In between there have been further productions, in London and in Wales, which have done nothing to penetrate the work’s grandeur and freshness, so that the idea of a concert performance was even more welcome than usual. Zurich Opera came over for one night to the Royal Festival Hall and can have left no one in doubt as to the stature of Holländer or the quality of the performers, with one minor exception.
Actually, the performance got off to a shaky start, with some ragged playing and uncertain fluctuations of tempo. The conductor, Alain Altinoglu, whom I haven’t come across before, put on an elaborately balletic display, but the results he got from the Philharmonia Zurich improved rapidly, and to thrilling effect. Altinoglu didn’t have a big orchestra, and the brass and woodwind often overwhelmed the strings, but that created the right stark, sometimes raucous effect. If the timpanist hadn’t been so discreet it would have approached the ideal. Wagner does show his complete mastery of the orchestra in Holländer, but the kind of sound he creates is quite different from any of his other operas, just as they are so different in that respect from one another.
The ideal entered in the shape of Bryn Terfel, whose footsteps as he moved to near-centre stage even matched the directions in Wagner’s score. He was on the best form I have ever heard him, surpassing or anyway equalling his finest efforts in the Ring a couple of months ago. I have seen him in two stagings of Holländer, both of which inhibited Terfel from realising his conception of the role. At the Festival Hall, his now enormous voice, which, Hotter-like, he can pare down to almost a whisper without seeming to be striving for effect, was used in the opening monologue to devastating effect. In their cheerfully paradoxical new book, A History of Opera: the Last 400 Years, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker claim ‘the strongest music in Wagner’s earlier operas is the most conventional’. Is ‘Die Frist ist um’ conventional? I can’t think of anything like it in any previous opera, with its alternation of passionate and brooding declamation and surges of yearning melody. And the queer duet between the Dutchman and Daland, the heroine Senta’s venal father — the one producing short, astonished phrases at the sight of some of the Dutchman’s riches, the Dutchman himself pouring out his heart in great arches of song — owes nothing to anyone except the Beethoven of Fidelio. The central duet between the Dutchman and Senta, in which he realises that it is not love that he feels, but the longing for redemption, while she is wholly bent on her redemptive mission from the start, does contain a bizarre cadenza at its central point, which shows how disconcerting the conventional is when it makes an appearance in this opera.
Terfel fortunately had a redemptrix to match him in Anja Kampe’s Senta. This soprano, who now travels the world rescuing doomed figures, usually tenors, is an electrifying performer, one of those artists who give the impression that they don’t care if they destroy their voice by the intensity with which they sing on a particular evening. They are the most rewarding, and one has to try, like them, not to think about what they will be like in a year’s time — especially a year in which artists of Kampe’s stature will be in extreme demand for Wagner and Verdi. Kampe launched her ballad to mesmerising effect and never looked back. As a worldly counterweight to the Dutchman’s eeriness and Senta’s Fidelio-like aspirations, Matti Salminen played Daland with just the right touch of humour, a loving but grasping father, more interested in his daughter’s wealth potential than in her happiness. Salminen is still in excellent voice, but he is so vivid a character that he hardly needs to be. The announced Erik, Senta’s truly conventional suitor, with music to suit, was sung by Martin Homrich, a late replacement but clearly a veteran of German early Romantic opera. The Zurich Opera House Chorus, divided into two for Act III — though a wider physical gap between the representatives of dreary normality and the lusty spooks of the Dutchman would have been still better — made much more noise than one would have guessed they could. Apart from an obtrusive interval after Act I, the work swept irresistibly to its climax — and to Wagner’s first version, as the Overture had too, a decision which set the seal on a really great evening.
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