Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Budapest Radio Chorus · Peter Erdei chorus master · Ronald Schneider musical assistant · ORF Symphony Orchestra (Vienna)
Der Fliegende Holländer
The Flying Dutchman
Romantic Opera in Three Acts. Libretto by WagnerThe Dutchman Alfred Muff
Senta, Daland's daughter Ingrid Haubold
Daland, a Norwegian sea-captain Erich Knodt
Erik, a hunter Peter Seiffert
The Helmsman in Daland's crew Jörg Hering
Mary, Senta's nurse Marga Schiml
conducted by Pinchas SteinbergNAXOS 8.660025-26
[69'16" + 68'37"] budget-priceCAUTION: Libretto in German only. This review is kindly sponsored by Rock Records.
THE FLYING DUTCHMAN is a poignant tale of blasphemy, love, obsessions and the supernatural - the tale of a sailor, condemned forever to sail the eternal seas till he finds true love during his brief sojourns on land every seven years. Set amongst dark Norwegian landscapes, it is accompanied by an atmosphere that is in equal parts, chillingly dark and wonderfully romantic. The conception of the story has uncanny similarities to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with a haunting, evocative atmosphere reminiscent of several of his short stories. Especially poignant is Senta's love for the doomed sailor whom she has never seen, and the Dutchman's prescient memory of her face that will set him free. The end is mixture of the tragic and the happy with Senta committing suicide to prove her loyalty, and this act setting both her and the Dutchman free to be together in the hereafter.
In the end, the tale is very much a story of stormy contrasts, with the dark and the light vying in equal measures, to make this one of the most powerful operas ever written. Bringing out this contrast is a formidable challenge for any that attempt to perform this work.
GIVING the performance under question, many-many run throughs, several extending into the wee hours of the night, indeed the morning (yes we do work that hard!), I am hard pressed to put my finger on anything that is wrong. In fact, by all conventional measures of performance, this CD is superbly rounded. Steinberg coaxes superb technical playing all around from the ORF Symphony Orchestra , with impeccable control over the brass line, which almost invariably tends to get a bit dirty in Wagner's scores. Especially notable are the woodwinds, with excellent mastery of line and form. The Budapest Radio Chorus is more than competent indeed and their sailor and townspeople get transformed into real entities rather than mere backdrops for the stars of the show.
My particular delight of this opera has always been helmsman, the slightly comic and yet utterly sympathetic character, dreaming of his lost love, and sleeping at his post. Jorg Hering does a superb job of bringing this character to life, his sensitive portrayal downplaying the comic element, but bringing out the longing for home in a most touching way.
Ingrid Haubold in the central role of Senta is extremely accomplished. Decidedly not a "sweet" soprano as the ones we have been getting used to in recent years, she has the power to evoke the slightly hysterical quality of Senta's obssession with the Dutchman's legend. If she fails at times to convey the sweetness of romance in her duets, we can put it down to her relative inexperience.
Alfred Muffhas sings a perfectly competent Dutchman, especially bringing out the elements of darkness in his character. But his Dutchman remains a bit one-dimensional and he does not attempt to offer a "deep" insight into the muddled psyche of the character. That is not to say that his singing is bad. It is not. Along with Seiffert as Eric, his singing is the major delight of the set. Seiffert steals the show with his passionate portrayals of Eric, bringing out all the tender elements of his love for Senta, and his frustrations at her obsession. Sadly, this character is rarely if ever performed well in any version of the Holländer, and this set would be worth buying for nothing else if for his magnificent performance.
LOOKING at how I am waxing lyrical over the strengths of this performance, you may be wondering why ever I took so long to review this set. After all its strengths were readily apparent. However, its weaknesses were not. And those took a long time to sink in. Subjectively, for me, this performance did not work. It did not work because there was something entirely wrong with it. In fact, I do not really remember ever hearing a version, which offers as many goodies as this version does, and Seiffert sets a standard for the performance of Eric that will not be challenged for quite sometime.
At budget price or indeed at any price, this set is a veritable bargain. It does not work for me because of how it does what it does, but because of what it fails to do. It does not bring out the contrast between darkness and light, beauty and ugliness, humour and seriousness, sin and redemption and love and disillusion that I so cherish in this magnificent work. In the end the finished work is more Kafka-esque than anything by Marquez.
Left: Wagner - detail from a painting by Franz von Lenbach, c.1875.
And call it preconceived notion, I cannot help wondering that deeper interpretations of Senta and the Dutchman's characters would have raised this performance from extremely competent to a classic against which all future performances of this work would have been judged.
As always, some nitpicking. The recorded sound is excellent with all the instruments in sharp focus, lacking only a slight presence of warmth. The soloists are a tad recessed and seem to be singing from the back of the stage, and that coupled with the fact that they do not move around in the soundstage (as they would in a "live" performance), may be mildly disturbing to some.
Naxos provides only the German libretto, and a fat lot of good it did to me! However, a short visit to the library quickly remedied this problem. Otherwise, if you happen to get this version of the work, well, just enroll for a crash course in German and pray very hard.
Hannu Salmi's Richard Wagner Archive | Wagner Society of New York | Der Fliegende Inkpot reviews Lohengrin (Decca/Domingo)
Der Fliegende Inkpot
Ring of Drama
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