I have had an unusually full reader response to my two-part essay on Der Fliegende Holländer, which began with a consideration of some of the ideas incorporated into the François Girard production that had just begun its Metropolitan Opera run when the pandemic descended upon us; continued with a discussion of this opera’s plunge into modernity at Otto Klemperer’s Kroll Oper, and of that conductor’s later recorded interpretation of it; and concluded with attentions paid to a sampling of the pre- and post-WW2 interpreters of its major roles. Some of the respondents were answering my invitation to corrections, since I’d released the second of these posts without the usual proofreading and cross-checking. And indeed there were several corrections needed—mostly misattributions or inconsistent references to dates and venues, but including one genuine gaffe, the designation of the highest note in Erik’s Act 3 Cavatina as a B-natural, when it’s actually a B-flat. That’s embarrassing, especially inasmuch as I had the score before me as I wrote. Late-night drear or not, one wonders how such things can happen.

All these factual face-plants have now been set straight, with my thanks to the readers who alerted me to them. But since I had in any case intended to add a footnote clarifying my reference to the tenor aria in Verdi’s Ernani and expanding the discussion of Wagner’s concern over the very phrase that contains that same high note, and since three of the responses have dealt with substantive matters of interpretation, I’ve decided to post a brief addendum on them here, rather than trying to squeeze them into a future post on unrelated subjects.

F. P. Walter has written to point to what he sees as a “sharp disconnect” between my partial description of the Dutchman’s character (as heard in the music) and my evaluation of the suitability of certain singers for the role. He finds my observations about the “monstrous” aspects of the Dutchman’s psyche “insightful” and “original” (thank you, F. P.—I rather liked this passage, too, and haven’t seen that connection made elsewhere), but then finds it odd that I should cite Friedrich Schorr, with his “smooth, round, benevolent sound” that suggests “a kindly man with a streak of melancholy,” more suited to Wolfram or Sachs than to a figure of  demonic configuration. He has some of the same reservations concerning my admiration for Joel Berglund and Herbert Janssen in this music, and wonders if I may not be under the lingering influence (as we all can be) of my first loves among Wagner baritones.

As to this last, I have to concede that one can never eliminate that possibility, and that to pretend to do so would be to assert a power of objective judgment on a question that is inherently subjective. I’d say that I can only trust my ears, evaluative skills, and listening experience, and hope they’re enough to add up to plausible preferences. I’d also concede that all of us who are voice professionals (singers, teachers) are apt to be more concerned with what we might call purely vocal attributes than are many other listeners. If a voice seems truly “right” for the music, and the singing meets the standards we’re accustomed to applying (the combination is rare), we’re mighty satisfied, and if not, not so much, even if we recognize other virtues at work. One can call this a bias, but of course I think it’s a salutary bias, the setting of a base point of reference before we go on to other attributes of artistry. And a final concession: F. P.’s point about Schorr’s timbre is well taken. There is little we would call demonic in it, and from that standpoint the Dutchman was not quite hand-in-glove for him, as were several other Wagner roles. Also (though I did not dwell on this in the article), with even primetime Schorr,  we are always aware that while the top Es and Fs at forte are secure and imposing, there is not the sense of much room above them. Until his last few years, he could sing F-sharps and even Gs (in Wagner’s writing for baritone, these are almost never sustained), but other singers, including Hotter and London at their best, released these pitches more freely. Here, though, it’s well to keep two things in mind. One, which I cite in the post and which is applicable to these Holländer extracts, is the constant admonition heard in the course of acoustical recording to step back from the horn for full-voice top notes, with the result that we never hear the whole impact of these in relation to the rest of the voice. The second is the testimony of many qualified listeners as to the sheer power of Schorr’s voice—in my book I refer to Hugh Thompson’s recollection of it pealing through the house “like a trombone.” Some of that comes through on Schorr’s best recordings, e. g., from the Walküre Wotan, but again we have to infer some of the live-performance effect.

In last Monday’s post, I mentioned thinking about Der Fliegende Holländer in the light of its small share of opera’s journey through what we loosely designate as “The Modern” and on into our present “Postmodern” condition, in the course of which the artform seems to have gotten lost. And some of my thinking was occasioned by a look back through Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. This impressively researched, well-written book traces the production histories of Wagner’s operas, from the practices of the theatre world into which they were born down to those of our own, with thoughtful efforts to contextualize them artistically, politically, and socially. Any such history will tend to organize itself around emblematic statements or movements of “reform,” and for Wagnerian stagecraft one such is the short but eventful life (1927-1931) of Berlin’s Kroll Opera, where Otto Klemperer was the music director. Carnegy devotes an entire chapter to the Kroll, and within that chapter pays significant attention to the company’s production of Holländer. For any in-depth understanding of the Kroll’s place in its cultural milieu and of Klemperer’s stature over the long span of his life and career, I would refer you to Carnegy’s work and to Peter Heyworth’s splendid two-volume biography of O.K. Here, I’ll only note that the company was rebelliously modernistic and anti-Romantic, very much influenced by the revolutionary trends in the Weimar culture, with all their cross-pollinations among artforms, and that Klemperer, though steeped from childhood in the older musical and theatrical assumptions, was by this time a strong advocate of that newer spirit. He had experienced a “revulsion against anything that smacked of exaggeration or emotional indulgence” (Heyworth), and had turned away from Wagner (thenceforward, he preferred R.W.’s early operas to the later ones). He leaned now toward Bach and Mozart among the classics, and Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Krenek among his contemporaries.

At the same time that I was dipping into Carnegy and Heyworth, I re-acquainted myself with O.K.’s recording of Der Fliegende Holländer. It dates from some forty years after the Kroll production, so we cannot assume that it represents what he did with the score then. Still,  I was curious to find if I could hear in his conducting and work with the singers some musical correspondence to the modernist elements of that long-ago event, and—apart from the question of liking or disliking that aesthetic—get some sense of whether or not there was the kind of eye/ear unity that is notably lacking in so many contemporary productions. Klemperer’s standing in the postwar decades was lofty—especially in the UK, where much of his effort was concentrated—but among record-buyers and connoisseurs worldwide, as well. The revolutionary of the ’20s was now, along with Furtwängler, Walter, and Erich Kleiber (all of whom he outlasted), a grey-eminence connection back to the Wilhelmine days and all that had happened in the interim—and a complex, strong-minded personality, to boot. As a young critic assigned in the early 1960s to review the operatic portion of his growing discography, I approached the task with deep respect and, perhaps, some hesitancy to buck the unchallengeable credentials and established wisdom.

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.

Displacements and re-arrangements necessitated by the health crisis, including setting myself up to do some online teaching, have forced me to postpone publication of today’s post till Monday (April 6). Then, I’ll be discussing Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer—the work itself; some of the ideas about it set forth in François Girard’s production of it; a smattering of the production history that brought us to such ideas (hint: Otto Klemperer and the Kroll); and some of the singers who have essayed the opera’s juicy roles. 

Thanks for your patience, and stay safe and well, all.

C.L.O.