Removal from reality: We say that Holländer is set in reality, which is to say in a stageworld conjured in realistic style. But there are two worlds involved, for a supernatural realm keeps intruding on the everyday one, bringing with it the musical atmosphere that accounts for most of the opera’s most memorable passages. The alternation of these worlds is established in the overture, wherein the two worlds arm-wrestle back and forth, with sudden swings of dominance, before coming to rest with motifs drawn from Senta’s salvific longings. It’s one of the best overtures ever written of the “Here’s what this is going to be about” variety (good company with Verdi’s for La Forza del destino), and one for which it is absolutely crucial to keep the curtain down and the mind’s eye, inspired by the ear, firmly in charge. (Girard’s staged overture, Woolfe relates, “introduces a heady mixture of painted elements, video and dance that continues throughout the intermissionless performance.”) Each of the opera’s three acts, intermissionless or not, opens in the “real” world, and is then penetrated by the supernatural one. The first two end with a return to reality, in celebratory mode; in the third, the supernatural overwhelms the everyday, and the story, like the overture, ends in the transcendence of reality. The entire progression rests on a presumption of the Christian belief structure, 19th-Century Northern European folk (“naïve”) variety, in which we are invited to emotionally invest for maximum payoff.

The Dutchman’s supernatural credentials are blurry. He’s not undead, a zombie, vampire, or revenant. Nor is he, like Kundry, back and forth between worlds founded on magical/mystical elements and powers. He’s alive in this world like the rest of us, struggling like the rest of us, but unlike the rest of us damned to remain thus to the crack of doom. He stands in for all—Sufis and other mystics, Romantic artists as self-perceived—who are “in the world, but not of it.” And because of his literally Devilish oath and the Sinner’s Burden he carries, there is about him an aspect of the monstrous, and when he steps onto land on his septennial shore leave, he brings the monstrous with him. I’ll elaborate a bit on that while glancing at the character of Senta, below.

Meanwhile, I’d have to ask of Mr. Girard (and a number of other directors, back at least to Jean-Pierre Ponnelle): isn’t it obvious that if we move the entire scenario of this opera over into an “unreal” world, a dreamland, we have forsaken a basic condition of the story, without which the verbal and musical narrative could not have come into being as they are, and have instead ensured an ongoing contradiction between what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing? And why don’t you-all care about that?

Greed/Misogyny: Folks sure are hard on poor old Daland. Let me reassure everyone: even if I were so empowered, I absolutely would not, ever, promise either of my daughters, or either of my granddaughters, in marriage to someone to whom she hadn’t given her willing consent—not for all the money in the world. But that’s me, us, in the here and now, and anyway I’m not empowered. Daland is in the there and then, and is. He does tough and sometimes dangerous work, and is not about to retire on a North Sea Seaman’s Union pension and Social Security. He is certainly a widower, and not a recent one, since we learn that Mary—housekeeper, spinning-girl foreperson, and nurse—has brought up Senta from childhood. No doubt he is, as Erik accusingly pleads with Senta, ever on the lookout for potential gain. It would be of primary importance to Daland—his fatherly duty, in fact—to see his daughter, in whom he takes great pride, “well married,” and Erik, salt-of-the-earth guy that he is, brings no trust fund with him.