Bow ties are de riguer among the spiffy elders at Indianola's Blank Performing Arts Center where the Des Moines opera presented The Flying Dutchman on July 20, 2025 -- the last performance of the summer festival. Angelica and I arrived an hour early and, so, heard a french horn player practicing scales behind a staff-only door in the corner of the upper lobby. Apparently, the door opened into not only rehearsal spaces but some sort of green room -- we saw singers coming and going including the burly, bearded gent who plays the Norwegian sea-captain Daland in the show; he was concerned about seating for a friend of his who had come from South Carolina to see the sold-out show. (The bass singer wore a white tunic and heavy black boots polished to a mirror-like sheen.) Efficient-looking young women in black blouse and dress, headphones tucked over their ears, carrying black I-pads scurried around on enigmatic errands.
The Flying Dutchman (1843) is the first opera written by Richard Wagner that bears all of the composer's signature devices: the music is continuous, performed notionally without interruptions with breaks only begrudgingly granted out of hygienic considerations; characters are identified with leit motifs, the Byronic hero is redeemed by love, and. after the fat lady sings, she hurls herself off a cliff into the torch of the raging sea. The opera's effect is single-minded, and, even, a bit monotonous. Wagner here is tinkering with his invention of the leit motif and, if truth be told, he uses the technique ad nauseam. It seems that there are only three musical themes in the opera: a surging fanfare that leaps up an octave in the horns signifying the Dutchman and his sinister ship with its blood-red sails, a jaunty sailor's jig ("Steuermann, lass die Wacht!), and Senta's motif, some ambiguous chords that melt into supernatural radiance as the music climaxes with the redemption theme. There's far more melodic stuff in an opera by Mozart or Rossini; Wagner rather mechanically screws his themes into your brain, deploying the same material over and over again. It's redundant, but, of course, given the kinetic dynamism of the melodies and their lush orchestration, ultimately, thrilling.
It's customary to present a pantomime during Wagner's brilliant and oceanic overture -- in this case, we see the death of Senta's mother in childbirth: she lies under a blood-stained blanket while Daland, her father, cradles the infant among mourning women; Senta grows up, essentially an orphan to the sea, since her mariner father is absent most of the time; she seems to displace her emotion for her father onto a picture of the Flying Dutchman that she tears out of a book and carries everywhere; then, the Dutchman's vessel surges into view, a projection of blood-red boat on a wild blood-red sea. In a tempest, Daland's own ship is in peril itself -- the sailor's wrestle with long snake-like rigging ropes that hang from the ceiling. Then, the storm ends and the Steuermann (ruddersman) falls asleep. The Dutchman, who looks like a pirate, comes ashore -- he has a bare chest, tattoos, and wears a black BDSM vest. The Dutchman, condemned to wander the sea unless redeemed by a woman's selfless and faithful love, is granted a couple days every seven years to search for this redemptive love. He seems to know that Daland has a marriageable daughter and, with trunks of gold and gems (when opened they give off a golden glow after the manner of the "great whatsit" in Kiss me Deadly), essentially purchases Senta from her father -- he's a willing seller. In the second act, the chorus of women (about 20) are spinning and sewing -- the music in this opera is very heavily and obviously gendered. Senta is prating about her boyfriend, the Dutchman whom she knows only from a picture she carries around with her. The Dutchman appears and Senta sings with him -- this is an archetypal Wagnerian love duet: it's less like lovers yearning together and more like some kind of cataclysmic celestial event, an alignment in the heavens or an eclipse, a vast, momentous cosmic occurrence. There's only one problem: Senta has a boyfriend, the feckless Erik the Jaeger (hunter). Senta is confronted by Erik about her obsession with the Dutchman and, after the two exit into a snowy forest, he warns her about the supernatural demon-lover; he has had a portentous dream. The sailors come ashore and party with the local girls in a massive choral scene (40 chorus members at least). The party turns into a battle of the bands when the undead sailors on the Dutchman's ship sing their rampant theme as a countermelody to the more banal, and cheerful, jig sung by the women in the town and their seamen sweethearts.. The townsfolk are affrighted and, with the girls, they flee. Erik confronts Senta about her love for the Dutchman. It seems that Senta has allowed Erik to court her and he has risked his life picking "special flowers for her on the high cliffs." But, as Senta observes, she never gave him her vow -- it was, so to speak, an informal and ephemeral relationship. Unfortunately, the Dutchman who is lurking around (and highly ambivalent about being saved by Senta) hears the huntsman's confession of love, accuses Senta of being unfaithful, and leaves in a huff. (The Dutchman justifies his pique by saying that, if Senta turns out to be faithless, she'll be condemned to hell himself and so he's breaking up with her "for her own good.") The Dutchman sets sail in the tempest. Senta proclaims: Hier steh ich, treue dir bis zum Tod! ("Here I stand -- faithful to you to the death!"). She hurls herself off a cliff -- although this bit of stage business is obscure in this production. The redemption through love music swells through the orchestra as a trap door opens and an elevator lifts Senta and the Dutchman, a hunky fellow now shirtless with elaborate nautical tattoos on his shoulders, up into what is supposed to be the heavens but is, in fact, to floor level on the stage. The ending is rushed and its accelerated concatenation of calamities comes as a surprise -- you can't really digest what is going on until you're on the way to the exit. The hasty conclusion to the opera also comes as a surprise in light of the rather leisurely and verbose development of the libretto (written by Wagner himself) during the preceding two hours -- it has lots of hefty people belting out high decibel notes at one another while the orchestra repetitively churns through the opera's three basic leit motifs.
There's a lot of overreaction to various things in the opera -- it has a hysterical, frantic edge. The Dutchman is condemned to his endless sailing over the stormy seas because, once while attempting to round the Cape of Good Hope, he said that he would keep trying to make this passage "even if it took (him) an eternity." Someone heard this oath and, accordingly, condemned him for it -- a punishment that seems grossly disproportionate to the crime. Similarly, the Dutchman flees Senta's embrace on the basis of a half-heard fragment of her conversation with the Huntsman -- this also seems an absurd overreaction. On the other hand, the demeanor of Senta and the Dutchman suggests that they have some serious reservations about one another. In this staging, the two principals circle one another warily on the stage, rounding the open orchestra pit between them like caged tigers pacing back and forth. The Dutchman says he has had many women turn out to be disloyal to him -- probably, due, I suppose, to his propensity of buying his girlfriends from their fathers with chests of treasure. There's an unsavory, mercantile aspect to the Dutchman's courtship of Senta, at least, initially, and, perhaps, I am hallucinating, but I had the distinct sense that the Dutchman most likely preferred his free life of damnation among the raging sea and stars to the rather cozy Biedermeier domesticity offered by Senta -- it's more fun being damned than stuck at home in a cold, grey Norwegian harbor-town.
The production is handsome with towering flats on which raging blood-red seas are projected, lighting causing waves to seem to surge and topple onto the stage itself. Most of the effects are accomplished by projection on the flats. In the final scene, Senta stands against a blaze of brilliant lights that seems to represent the very opera stage on which this action climaxes. The chorus performs fortissimo and the large forces fill the relatively small theater with deafening sound. The orchestra was brilliant and the singing by all of the performers was suitably Wagnerian, a mighty din resounding through the room.
In several productions of this opera that I have seen the pantomime during the famous overture is lackluster -- that was the case in this production as well. I would suggest that the pantomime show the idyll between the huntsman and Senta -- it's soundless after all which foregrounds Senta's argument: she may have acted as if she loved the huntsman, but, in truth, she never gave him her vow; she didn't announce her love for him in a high decibel aria and, hence, the lovemaking with the climbs up the cliffs didn't really account for anything.
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