Der Fliegende Holländer

WAGNER DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER Theo Adam Anja Silja Martti Talvela Gerhard Unger Ernst Kozub Annelies Burmeister BBC Chorus New Philharmonia Orchestra OTTO KLEMPERER THE HOME OF OPERA Klemperer conducts Der fliegende Holländer With The Flying Dutchman was born the modern musical drama. Ernest Newman On 29 July 1839, the small, London-bound merchant vessel Thetis, running before a fierce storm in the Skagerrak, took shelter in a Norwegian fjord. As the anchor was dropped and the sails were furled, the shouts of the crew echoed around the fjord’s granite cliffs filling one of the passengers with what he later described as an indescribable contentment. Strictly speaking, the 26-year-old Richard Wagner, his wife, Minna, and their Newfoundland dog were stowaways, smuggled across the Russian border to the port of Pillau [present-day Baltisyk] under the noses of armed Cossack guards. They had to be smuggled because the passport of the debt-ridden young music director had been confiscated by the Riga authorities. It is a sobering thought that, had the Thetis foundered, the Wagners would not have reached Paris (their eventual destination) and Western music would not have taken the course it did in the wake of Wagner’s revolutionary influence. We have no way of knowing whether the figure of the Flying Dutchman presented itself to Wagner as the Thetis heaved and wallowed off the Norwegian coast. He knew the story, and in later years was unperturbed when connections were made in people’s minds between the legendary Dutchman and the young vagabond Wagner: outcast, world-wanderer, seeker of the love of the ‘infinitely womanly woman’. One thing we can be sure of is the abiding sense Wagner took away with him of the power of the sea. The 1 German composer Franz Lachner famously grumbled that the wind blew out at you the moment you opened the score of The Flying Dutchman; and, it is true, the sound and feel of the sea permeate the score. The overture alone is a revelation: not, as Ernest Newman once claimed, ‘the first real sea-picture in music’ (Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture pre-dates The Flying Dutchman by nine years) but certainly the fiercest and most uncompromisingly graphic. Much has been written about the sources for Wagner’s libretto. Since the legend itself gave him the two things he most needed – a concentrated theme and a terrific atmosphere – to make the leap from Italianate grand opera to symphonic music-drama, identifying the literary sources is more an academic matter than a material one. Suffice it to say, second in importance to the legend itself is Heinrich Heine’s From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski (1834), for it is there that Wagner lighted on the idea of the Dutchman’s redemption by a woman’s love, powerfully (albeit ironically) presented by Heine. Wagner began work on the opera before he had a text for it. In the spring and early summer of 1840, with the Thetis experience still ringing in his ears, he set the sailors’ choruses and the opera’s seminal number, Senta’s Ballad [CD1, 21–3]. It was not until May 1841 that he completed the libretto, but by November of that year the whole opera, including the overture, was finished. Wagner believed that his new work would be accepted by the Paris Opéra, which had paid 500 francs for the rights to the libretto in July 1841. In the event, the Opéra took the idea but shelved the libretto, preferring instead an in-house adaptation of Captain Marryat’s novel The Phantom Ship (1839) in a setting by the Opéra’s resident chorus-master, the composer Louis Dietsch (1808–1865). Wagner should have 2 known better than to get involved with the Opéra’s fustian regime. Like Daland in The Flying Dutchman,he was misled by power and the show of money. In any case, most Parisians would have hated the opera. The set-piece arias allowed to Daland and Erik would have gone down well enough; but what is important about The Flying Dutchman is the fact that it was composed in accordance with a radical new aesthetic. Out go formal set-pieces – ‘those bravura arias, those insipid duets fatally manufactured on the same model’, as Wagner put it to Rossini during their conversation in Paris in 1860 – in comes a method of writing that leaves a text, relatively raw and rough-edged, into which music can seep and thence inseminate the drama. The work was eventually accepted by the Royal Opera in Dresden, where Wagner himself conducted the premiere on 2 January 1843. In 1860, he partly remodelled the score, revising the orchestration and infusing the idea of the Dutchman’s redemption with a Tristan-like afterglow. Not all revisions are improvements, but cultures in which progress is venerated find them hard to gainsay. After 1860, the revised Dutchman was hugely popular with conductors and audiences. Not so with Otto Klemperer, whose view of Wagner was that ‘he developed backwards’, that The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were rather more appealing than Siegfried or Götterdämmerung. As an apprentice Kapellmeister in Prague, Klemperer had conducted the revised Dutchman with ‘inspiration and idealism’. But it was the production he mounted in 1929, when director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin (1927–31), that took the musical world by the ears. The earliest contributor to this historic event was Richard Strauss, who, on hearing that Klemperer was planning a new Dutchman, suggested that the 3 original Dresden version be used. The orchestral material was in Zürich but the score Wagner himself had prepared for a production at the Schauspielhaus in 1844 was closer to hand, in the Berlin State Library. Strauss’s suggestion was very much grist to Klemperer’s mill, and to that of his collaborators: the designer Ewald Dülberg (1888–1933), the producer Jürgen Fehling (1885–1968), and his programme annotator, the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977). All four men were Wagner sceptics, keen to strip away the kitschy transcendentalism and pious traditionalism that had hung about the Dutchman for the best part of 70 years. The production was driven by Klemperer’s conducting. (A manic-depressive, he was in wholly manic mode during the rehearsals and performances.) ‘Lucid and tumultuous’, it was the perfect complement to Dülberg’s controversially spare, rectilinear sets, and to Fehling’s production, which upset conservative taste and outraged right-wing opinion. (The production would feature in the Nazis’ 1938 Düsseldorf exhibition of ‘degenerate art’.) It was an easy target for the press. The seamen were dressed like dock workers; the unshaven Dutchman looked less like a gloomy Spanish grandee, more like a Bolshevik agitator; Senta, played by Moje Forbach as a red-haired visionary, would have had no difficulty driving a tractor on a collective farm. Her women did not spin, they mended nets. Her room was more like a factory floor than a cosy Norwegian parlour. Wagner would have approved of much of this. Senta, he said, was no fair-haired ingénue but a physically robust obsessive with salt sea in her veins. Musically and theatrically, the Kroll production helped concentrate the mind wonderfully. Ezra Pound once said that great literature was ‘news that stays news’, and the same can be said of a great theatre production. The Kroll Dutchman was being talked about 40 years later and is still referred to as a trail- 4 blazer for the post-war style of Wieland Wagner’s ‘new’ Bayreuth. ‘Old’ Bayreuth did not approve. After the dress rehearsal, Wagner’s son, Siegfried, appeared in Klemperer’s dressing-room. ‘Well, you all look a bit crazy,’ he announced. Responding with an untranslatable German pun, Klemperer invited him simultaneously to take a seat and to blow his top. Siegfried died the following year. Klemperer went to Bayreuth for the funeral – more out of a desire to hear Toscanini conduct Tristan than to pay homage to his erstwhile visitor – after which circumstances conspired to keep Klemperer away from Bayreuth for the next 37 years. When he did finally return in the summer of 1967 it was to hear Pierre Boulez (a conductor he admired) conduct Parsifal (an opera he loathed). He also heard two old favourites, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and fell under the spell of one of the most extraordinary singing-actresses in Bayreuth’s post-war history, Anja Silja. Klemperer immediately instructed EMI’s Peter Andry to engage Silja for the recording of The Flying Dutchman he was scheduled to begin in London the following February. Silja was a ‘Kroll-style’ artist if ever there was one, and her Senta was already legendary. Though two other sopranos had already been approached by EMI, Klemperer’s demand was duly met. Klemperer was happy to accept Theo Adam (‘AAAdam!’ as he called him) as the Dutchman. Adam had sung the role opposite Silja in Wieland Wagner’s 1966 Hamburg production of the opera and though he did not have the rapport with Klemperer that Silja enjoyed – ‘unconventional and saucy’, writes Adam in his book Ein Sängerleben (Berlin, 1996) – he had much of what was required in terms of artistry, intelligence and vocal strength to realise Klemperer’s uncompromising view of the Dutchman. After a 5 playback of the Dutchman’s Act 1 monologue [CD1, 4-7], Klemperer muttered – as much to himself as to anyone present – that he hadn’t heard the monologue sung like that since the days of Friedrich Schorr in Berlin. Klemperer assumed, correctly, that Martti Talvela would be his Daland. He also expected to have the ‘vorzüglich’ (‘excellent’) James King as Erik.

Load more