Three themes have been presented: Simplicity, or naïveté; removal from reality; and fatherly greed, a/k/a challenging misogyny. In addition, as Woolfe observes although it doesn’t seem to have come up in his conversation with Girard, there is the repetitively cited Wagnerian theme of redemption. In two of Wagner’s operas, that involves the redemption of a man through the intercession/sacrifice of a woman, and so could be seen as another instance of “antiquated gender dynamics.” In my judgment, however, the supposed pervasiveness of this theme in Wagner’s works is a highly suspect hunk of received wisdom. Consider: in Lohengrin, a man tries to clear a woman of a false charge (to “redeem” her) and appears for a time to succeed, but ultimately fails; in Parsifal, a man redeems a woman (in a sense, for like the Dutchman, Kundry’s “redemption” lies in being released from endless life—another point Girard felt called upon to fudge); in Tristan, a man dies a self-willed chivalric death and his beloved eulogizes him to transfigurative music that ends very like Holländer‘s—intensely moving and resolving, but in what sense redemptive?; in Meistersinger, a social-accommodation comedy, the whole question is really n/a, but if anyone “redeems” Walther from his low-grade transgressions, it is Sachs, not Eva. The Ring is a more debatable matter of interpretation. Brünnhilde does sacrifice/fulfill herself, riding into the flames to put the seal on the end of the gods and the rise of mankind. It’s again emotionally powerful—but I cannot see the oft-preached “Redemption Through Love” as anything more than shakily grounded wishful sentimentalization.This leaves only the two earliest of the mature operas, Holländer and Tannhäuser, as clear-cut examples of this supposedly ruling idea—that through self-sacrifice, a woman redeems a sinning man—in Wagner’s oeuvre.

Naïveté: I’ve been musing on and off about our directors’ horror of being thought of as anything short of hypersophisticated at least since Mary Zimmerman’s 2009 Met production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. A choicer cut of operatic naïveté and simplicity cannot be found; naïveté and simplicity are La Sonnambula’s saving graces, and must be warmly embraced by its interpreters. Zimmerman, though, wanted “some additional complexity,” and so resorted to another common removal feint, the pretense that the opera is being rehearsed by  contemporary performers. This saves singers and director the admittedly difficult task of having to directly penetrate the extreme innocence and credulity of the characters in their situations, as if that were “real life,” and present it so persuasively that we are ourselves drawn into it. Instead, we remain at our superior distance, pondering and perhaps chuckling at the work’s “dated” simplicity. Zimmerman had smart observations about stage reality, sleepwalking, etc. to rationalize all this. But they’re just a dodge. At the opera’s end, for Natalie Dessay’s “Ah, non giunge,” Zimmerman allowed the rehearsal to become the performance, and so for a few moments brought her show to what should have been its starting point.

Much more recently (see my last post, in fact), I spent time in a world of naïveté more culturally immediate to Holländer‘s, that of Weber’s Der Freischütz. How close the two works are, both musically and dramaturgically! In both, the given natural surroundings and what happens in them (the forest, hunting, the casting of magic bullets in Freischütz; the sea and seafaring, the Dutchman’s eternal wanderings in Holländer) are numinous and determinant, well beyond what we usually mean by “given conditions.” In both, the frustrated male protagonist has entered into a pact with the Devil or his surrogate, and is on that account accursed; in both, the dreamy female protagonist’s fidelity, of sacramental depth, lifts the curse. In both, a fairytale spookiness pervades what is otherwise a folksy, mundane way of life, and is presented in childrens’ storybook terms (“Uhu—i! Uhu—i!” call the Invisible Spirits of the Wolf’s Glen; “Hui! Wie saust der Wind!“, etc., cries Senta in each of the three verses of her ballad—and much more in that vein).