Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman' Overture

Another of my program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

The Flying Dutchman: Overture (1860)

Pursued by creditors, the 26 year-old Richard Wagner and his wife Minna fled for London in 1839 from Riga in Latvia, where he’d been music director. Their ship, the Thetis, was battered by storms and took shelter in a Norwegian cove. There, said Wagner in his memoirs, the idea for his fourth opera, The Flying Dutchman, took root. Listening to the overture’s stormy opening you could believe this. The real inspiration for the opera however, may have been Heinrich Heine’s The Recollections of Herr von Schanbelewopski (1834), which contains a version of the Flying Dutchman tale.

The Flying Dutchman concerns the old legend of a ship’s captain (the Dutchman) and his ghostly crew, condemned by a curse to sail the seas unless, and until, the Dutchman can find the redeeming love of a selfless woman. In Wagner’s opera, that woman is Senta, who sacrifices her life to save the Dutchman’s soul. The overture was written in November 1841, after the rest of the opera. Rather like the overtures of Weber whom Wagner admired, it foreshadows the opera’s concerns in its juxtaposition of tempestuous passages, the pacifying effect of ‘Senta’s Ballad’ (cor anglais solo) and the dance-like middle section based on the Scene 7 chorus, ‘Steuermann! Lass die Wacht!’ which Wagner claimed to have been suggested by the calls of the Thetis’s crewmen echoing round the Norwegian cove’s granite walls.

The Flying Dutchman was the earliest work that Wagner later acknowledged as part of his canon. Senta was the first of the ‘redeemer heroines’ he portrayed, and although Wagner was still decades away from the Music Drama with which he changed operatic history, The Flying Dutchman points the way to those operas in its dramatic sweep and insight into human motivation. It still features a stand-alone overture of course, but that overture is a superb example of 19^th century nature portraiture.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

    

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:
 
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