Elemental force

The new production of Wagner’s first indisputable masterpiece The Flying Dutchman by English National Opera is a decided success, the best account of what contemporary producers make strangely heavy weather of that I have seen in decades. For some reason they find it hard to focus on the title role, and make it all a dream of Senta, or the Steersman. Jonathan Kent presents the Dutchman on Wagner’s terms, even though he can’t resist beginning the opera — and during the Overture, absurdly — with Senta as a small child being put to bed by her father Daland, and reading the story of the Dutchman, while projected mighty waves and a vast hulk loom excitingly. She hangs around for the rest of the Act, and then metamorphoses into the adult, vocal Senta in the form of Orla Boylan. It doesn’t do much harm, but it is redundant and slightly distracting.

The hero of the evening is conductor Edward Gardner. He launched into the Overture, when the lights were hardly down, with tremendous attack, on a level with the weather conditions in St Martin’s Lane. And he continued it with deliberate coarseness, strident brass, shrill woodwinds, thwacking drums and ferocious strings. He went on like that, too, emphasising both the elemental nature of the score, and the crudity of some of Wagner’s writing, a good idea; he even played the original ending of both the Overture and the whole opera, with none of the ‘redemption’ stuff which Wagner later infused into it. His tempi were on the fast side, so that the whole work took about two hours and ten minutes. Laudably, it played without an interval.