As we all deal with the grip of global mortal illness, with silence and absence, I’m going to try to sustain a small something of the nourishing presence of our art, and of the stimulation of critique. Today’s post was to be devoted to the Metropolitan Opera’s co-production time-share of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer. And its first few performances did in fact take place, but since I held tickets for the canceled one of March 18, I can’t write about that. I can, though, write about the nature of the work itself, and the views of it set forth by the production’s creators, principally its director, François Girard. And I can relate those to some of the important ones advanced by others, and those in turn to how they have been, or might yet be, realized in performance. While we anxiously await the return of living art, a combination of writings, recordings, and recollections may yield some useful thoughts.

Girard was responsible for one of the most widely lauded Met offerings of recent years, the Parsifal that had its premiere in 2013. I wrote extensively on that production in Parsifal Lite and the Afterlife (3/9/18, q.v.), wherein I argued that although the production was impressive for its skill, invention, and technical command, it had to be rejected for its auteuristic contradictions of the work’s given circumstances. On the basis of its success, Girard has been brought back for Holländer and, we are told, a near-future Lohengrin. That last would replace the Robert Wilson production, which was my “enough, already” kickoff point for Opera as Opera—so in prospect, Girard has plenty of upside to play with there.

In Zachary Woolfe’s preview article in The New York Times, the auteurial trope that emerges as central to Girard’s concept is a removal from reality. He observes that whereas Parsifal is set in a “world of unreality and we tried to pull it back to reality,” Holländer is the opposite, and must therefore take the reverse journey. This kind of thinking has become so common that its peculiarity is no longer recognized: whatever a work’s creator has stipulated as fundamental to its stage world (and after all, this is only Richard Wagner) must be contradicted—it’s the director’s solemn mission. But of course, Girard has his reasons, and as in most such cases, these have to do with bringing the work’s cultural assumptions, its Weltanschauung, more into agreement with our own. This is first so that audience members will not be troubled by sneakily enjoying, or even finding themselves endorsing, once-presumptive attitudes we claim to have transcended, and second so that the director and his collaborators cannot be held guilty by association with them. Betrayal of the work’s integrity does not figure on the ethical balance sheet.

If pulling Parsifal back to reality was Girard’s aim with that work, his shot group landed well wide of the target—that is to say, the realm he depicted was far weirder, more “unreal” than the one Wagner describes. Stage worlds don’t work that way. Once the mythical medieval Kingdom of the Grail is established, as is stipulated in the work, things seem “real” according to how closely character actions and events follow its laws, not ours. Now, for Holländer, which is set in a world of everyday reality, Girard finds it advisable to take it somewhere else. “When you play it too realistically,” he tells us, “you expose its simplicity or naïveté” (my italics). Further, according to Woolfe, there’s the “challengingly misogynistic” matter of “antiquated gender dynamics” (Daland promises Senta to the Dutchman for “some gold [he] is carrying”). So if we can whisk the whole piece off to another level of reality (“Senta’s fevered imagination,” for instance), we can designate the shady deal for assignment there. “It’s like in a dream,” says Anja Kampe, the production’s Senta, thus placing it in the now-hoary succession of re-writes (to which Holländer has been especially susceptible) that dispose of perceived embarrassments that way. Virtuality—film and projections—will help transport us there, and since Girard began as a film director, he knows how to handle them, as he demonstrated with his Parsifal. (I much enjoyed the only one of his films I’ve seen—which, come to think of it, was about an artist, Glenn Gould, who chose to distance himself from the reality of live performance and dwell in the secondary orality of the recording studio.) Near the end of his article, Woolfe states that “About Mr. Girard’s sensible symbolism and visual flair . . . no one takes serious issue.” On “visual flair:” right. On “sensible symbolism:” wrong. Read on.