San Francisco Classical Voice

Nina Stemme has become the Senta of choice on the international operatic scene for reasons that became immediately clear in the course of the second act, dominated as it is by this intense, obsessional character. It can be an unrewarding role, offering relatively little opportunity for “beautiful” singing, and tending toward the dour and frumpy. Her one “aria” to speak of, the Ballad relating the tale of the curse of the “Flying Dutchman” and the salvation he can only find through one woman's eternal fidelity, forms the keystone of the opera, but it's no showpiece. In fact, it is difficult not to make the number come across as heavy, labored, and a bit harsh. Stemme, however, manages to bring both warmth and intensity to this music, and to the whole role. The brief cabaletta-like gesture at the end of the Ballad, when Senta breaks away from the “text” to declare that she will be the faithful woman to redeem the Dutchman from his maritime wanderings, rang out with heroic conviction but without shrillness.

Juha Uusitalo as the Dutchman, on the other hand, never really made enough of the character's “big” moments, such as the concluding phase of the great Act-1 monologue. In it he invokes the apocalypse of the Last Judgment to release him from his ambiguous condition between life and death, symbolized by his endless voyaging. Uusitalo was simply in no position to compete with the full force of the early Wagnerian orchestra unleashed here. At the other end of the spectrum, the exposed, declamatory recitative style of the monologue's beginning, as the Dutchman makes his first tentative steps ashore, was delivered with exemplary clarity of diction and dramatic feeling, aided by his positioning far to the front of the stage. By contrast, the similarly exposed declamation of the Dutchman's leave-taking in the final scene, which requires a more stentorian delivery, was underpowered, like too much of the role.

Lehnhoff and Bauer's production seems at first to liken the Dutchman's fate to a condition of nuclear contamination, the threat of perpetual toxicity and bizarre, unpredictable mutations of the natural world. German Wagner productions have toyed with the threat of nuclear disaster and the consequences for a long time, since the Ring cycles of Chereau, Kupfer and Götz Friedrich, for example. The trend echoes (probably unconsciously) nineteenth-century fears of the pathological influences of Wagner, the morally and psychically “degenerative” effects his dramas and their music were thought to exert. But causes and effects are complicated in the Lehnhoff Dutchman, if not downright confused.

In place of the Dutchman's ship we see a “portal” that, in its windmill-like rotations, assumes the form of a nuclear radiation warning sign (the familiar trefoil of inverted triangles radiating from a central point). Brilliant white light and steam emanate from this portal, making for an effective entrance and silhouetting the Dutchman, appropriately, as an ominous shadow. The threat of enduring radioactive contamination makes a reasonable modern-day analogue to the Dutchman's unhappy plight. Indeed, the sailors start out Act 1 outfitted for work at a radiation lab rather than on a merchant vessel: floor-length metallic-gray coats girded around the torso with a kind of protective armor that might double as a life-preserver, as suggested when the Steersman detaches his. (Later falling asleep on the job, he becomes in this context a Wagnerian Homer Simpson.) The stark unit set is framed by massive, riveted steel girders that could imply a nuclear power plant or some other late-industrial workplace, while the ribbing of a ship's hull is faintly hinted at, too.

In the course of the opera it appears, however, that the ostensibly happy, healthy, “normal” environment of Daland's Norwegian village is itself already subject to some kind of toxic mutation. The spinning maidens are bald, apart from bobbins of yarn they knit up painstakingly during their “Spinning chorus” and fasten to their heads with knitting needles. Rotating slowly in their metallic hoop-skirts and severely corseted Victorian blouses, they suggest automata (human gyroscopes, or perhaps the Stepford Wives of Sandwike?) or products of cultic brainwashing, enacting a bizarre, unintelligible ritual with zealous determination.

Celebrating their homecoming at the beginning of Act 3, the Norwegian sailors become white-faced zombies dressed in a parody of the “Old Dutch Master” outfit of the Dutchman himself, while performing a macabre cakewalk with metal canes circling slowly around a sunken bonfire. Daland doesn't get this white-face treatment, but does have a shock of “troll hair” (a Norwegian detail?) rearing up from the back of his head, and the housemaid Mary (Susan Gorton) has a version of the same, wound into a pair of severe buns, as if they are in some transitional state of mutation. Andrea Schmidt Futterer's costume designs are striking enough (less bland than her contributions to Lehnhoff's futuristic Parsifal seen here in 2001), and she creates an effective, immediately legible contrast with the conventionally human look of Senta (a plain, loose gray dress) and Erik (more a nineteenth-century bourgeois than a rustic hunter). The old-world look of these two aligns them both with the Dutchman (outfitted in a dignified black cloak with old-Dutch white collar and black top hat) in opposition to the cartoonish sci-fi mutant appearance of the supposedly human community they inhabit.

The idea of Senta holding on desperately to her “human” identity while those around her are transformed into soulless mutants and finding in the mysterious Dutchman a fellow human being to rescue her from the de-humanized fate of her community, makes for a nice inversion of the opera's nominal premise, in which the Dutchman is a quasi-vampiric visitant from another world. It's a reading that could even make more sense of Senta's instinctive affinity with the “dark stranger” and of the intensity of their emotional bonding in the long duet-scene of Act 2.

But in other ways, it lapses inevitably into incoherence. The opera clearly presents the Dutchman as the uncanny outsider seeking salvation through human love. Lehnhoff's production still trades on his identity as a dark and threatening intrusion into the world of the Norwegians in the manner of his arrival or in the looming silhouettes projected on the front scrim between acts. With the Dutchman's dramatic entrance and exit through the “nuclear radiation” portal, it is not possible to say what is the nature of “his” world and exactly how it relates to or contrasts with the one we see on stage.

The Halloween party atmosphere of the sailors' chorus in Act 3, amusing enough in itself, made nonsense of the opera's greatest dramatic effect, when the invisible chorus of the Dutchman's ship responds to the provocations of Daland's crew and overwhelms them with its ghostly singing. There was no apparent reason for Daland's cavorting zombies to feel threatened in any way by the violence and strangeness of the music of the Dutchman's crew. Despite these discrepancies, the Dutchman's departure, sinking (on foot) into a misty blue horizon, made a simple and compelling gesture. Even more so was Senta's exit after him: instead of any hyperbolic display of self-sacrifice, she resolutely shrouded herself in a black shawl (invested with symbolic meaning in the course of their earlier duet) and followed the Dutchman with calm determination into the blue “beyond.”

There was no need to revert to the flat-footed conventional chords of the orignal 1843 ending here, as Runnnicles and Lehnhoff opted to do; the revised ending with “transfiguring” harps and plagal cadence would have suited the gestures far better, while the stage image would still have fended off the threat of cheap sentimentality. The staging made no particular use of the restored musical transitions that link the three acts into one continuous performance, apart from the effective detail of Senta emerging from underneath the projection of the Dutchman's shadow at the beginning of Act 2.

Walter Fink's Daland ignored these confusions and rendered the part in the usual manner of an affable bourgeois father keen to make a lucrative match for his daughter. (The Dutchman's “treasures” were displayed, incidentally, like a set of new age crystals within a translucent obelisk rising up though the floor.) Fink has a suitably big, round bass that he wields with clarity and nuance. In his duet with the Dutchman in the first act, the separation of the contrasting parts was unusually distinct and audible, matching the stylistic contrast with which Wagner invests them.

Susan Gorton seems like a natural choice for Mary, making as she does something of a specialty of matronly character roles, and she was given some extra stage-business of this sort during the Senta-Dutchman duet. Vocally, though, she made far less of the comic-fussy character elements than, for example, Jill Grove in the 2001 San Francisco Symphony semi-staged production, who made a real star turn out of this seemingly negligible role. British tenor Christopher Ventris (who debuted here as Parsifal in 2000) rendered Erik's scene with Senta in Act 2 and the cavatina of Act 3 with an appropriate lyric intensity, imploring but not whining. As a last-minute replacement for tenor Nils Olsen, the Adler fellow Thomas Glenn performed the Steersman's role in Act 1 (and briefly again in Act 3) with graceful aplomb, ingratiatingly mellifluous in the “Südwind” song that precedes the Dutchman's arrival, but also ringing out forcefully as he announces the fair breezes that will waft them into port at the end of the act.

Ian Robertson's opera chorus sang with precision and robustness, as usual, though I would have liked somewhat stronger amplification for the offstage chorus of Act 3 (whose role was already undermined by the production). Runnicles' tempos were, as usual, brisk but sensitive. The serpentine string figure that suggests the Dutchman's endless sea-voyaging emerged with remarkable clarity from the stormy textures of the middle of the overture, a small example of the sort of genial light Runnicles and the opera orchestra are capable of shedding on old, familiar scores. But too often the orchestra sounded underrehearsed, and some potentially great moments, such as the big swell that signals the final phase of the great Senta/Dutchman duet, were undermined by flaws of ensemble and intonation.

Like Lehnhoff's Parsifal, this Dutchman tries to open up the mythic world of Wagner's opera into too many, ultimately-confusing or contradictory directions. As in the earlier production, a few striking ideas emerged out of a larger confusion that was, in both cases, too often unnecessarily drab and static as theater. With the apparent notion of inverting the status of the Dutchman (as a survivor from a lost “human” order) and the human world (turned mutant), Lehnhoff was a step closer to reaching a cogent reading than he got with the more challenging material of Parsifal. But in both cases, the desire to work against Wagner's notions of “redemption,” elusive enough in themselves, leaves the audience too much in the dark as to what motivates these characters and why they sing the kind of music they do.