The Dutchman does not proffer Daland “some gold,” and initially does not proffer it for Senta. He overwhelms Daland with a full chest of “jewels, priceless pearls,” and the promise of much more, and asks in exchange but a single night’s lodging. Daland, already sympathetic with his fellow seafarer’s plight, agrees. It’s after that deal is in the bag that the Dutchman inquires about a daughter and, leaping at his chance of salvation, cries “She must be my wife!” Daland, brought up short, does not immediately assent. After several bars of a hesitant little string figure, he begins his calculations. Is he hearing aright? His daughter, this rich stranger’s wife? Is he awake, or dreaming? If he prevaricates, will the stranger start to waver? Is any likelier son-in-law at hand? He’d be a fool to let such luck slip by . . . And he repeats all this, in sprightly comic-bass fashion (note Wagner’s warning on the comic tone, below), while the Dutchman, to a long-lined melody full of longing, urges him to accept. Daland then tells the Dutchman that his daughter is his comfort and joy, more precious than the Dutchman’s jewels. After the Dutchman assures him that she will continue to cherish and honor him (you’re not losing a daughter, you’re gaining a son), Daland grants his daughter’s hand. In Act 2, it’s clear that Daland feels he needs Senta’s consent, and that she must be carefully cajoled into giving it. What his behavior might have been had she refused, we don’t know. It’s moot, because Senta recognizes at first sight that the Dutchman is her fated mate. Her father’s wishes are purely coincidental.
It’s possible to see Daland as little more than a hypocritical money-grubber, his hesitations and reservations just self-exculpatory tokens. That’s not at all how Richard Wagner thought of him, or what he wrote into his words and music.(I) But it was how Wieland Wagner saw it when, in 1959, he got around to bringing Der Fliegende Holländer into the New Bayreuth repertory. And from all reports, in the person of the characterful bass Josef Greindl he found a performer to argue that interpretation convincingly. It’s also possible to morally censure all the fathers in history (and a few mothers as well), from heads of state cementing their power to humble working people following folk custom (from Don Carlo to The Bartered Bride, in operatic terms) who gave away daughters in arranged marriages (and in some societies still do), often with men they’d never laid eyes on, and to see characters in dramas of previous centuries only as representatives of whatever in their cultures we now find objectionable. But as my readers know (and I won’t pound on the argument again just now), I find that way of thinking artistically misguided and unprofitable. In any event, to leap from Daland’s negotiations to the “challengingly misogynistic” seems to me ludicrous.
Footnotes
↑I | ” . . . a rough-hewn figure from the life of everyday,” said R. W., “a sailor who scoffs at storm and danger for the sake of gain, and with whom, for instance, the—certainly apparent—sale of his daughter to a rich man ought to not seem at all disgraceful: he thinks and deals, like a hundred thousand others, without the least suspicion that he is doing any wrong.” Naïve, we might say, though of course like many naïve people, he thinks himself shrewd. R. W. also beseeches “the exponent of Daland to not drag his role into the region of the positively comic”—an indication that with some performance experience gained, he’d learned that this was a danger. |
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