Wagner viewed the Dutchman himself as very much the central figure—”Upon the happy issue of this title role depends the real success [R.W.’s emphasis] of the whole opera”—and the extended Act 1 monologue, “Die Frist ist um,” as the key to all that follows. If the monologue, he instructs us, “has thoroughly attuned and touched the hearer, the further success of the whole work is for the major part ensured—whereas nothing that comes after could possibly make up for anything neglected here.” His vocal setting clearly indicates a low dramatic baritone, commanding full sonority from the low G to the top F, capable of vehement or ecstatic outbursts, but for the most part dwelling on a restrained legato line of great eloquence. Such a voice in such a range would need depth of timbre and would be prevailingly dark, but must also be differentiated from the true bass of Daland, with whom he has sustained interchange and duet in Act 1. To Senta Wagner gives surprisingly short shrift, considering her character “hard to misread,” and cautioning only against “a modern, sickly sentimentality.” She’s “a robust Northern maid,” he says, and (see part one of this article), “thoroughly naïve.” Her obsession with the Dutchman is, he goes on, “an active monomania  . . . found only in quite naïve natures.” He set her role on the higher side of what we think of as the Jugendlich voice type, with repeated high B-naturals that must soar over everything else, and because it is somewhat more mobile and vertically active than other such parts, it can seem higher still. Nevertheless, even if the Ballad is restored to its original key (it was transposed a full step down for its original soprano, Schröder-Devrient, and has tended to stay there), the writing demands a firm middle and lower-middle range, and more power than even a full lyric voice will provide.

How does the tug of war between the worlds of the everyday and the supernatural express itself between Senta and the Dutchman? The first message from the supernatural comes from the wispy runs in the strings, over a slight harmonic unsettlement, between lines in the second verse of the Steersman’s song—a perfect aural analogue for the gentle blowing of light curtains in the heroine’s bedroom just before the entrance of someone very bad in many a horror movie. And sure enough, almost immediately, here he comes, stepping into the rough-hewn, storm-wracked everyday that has to this point been our level of reality. Though now on land, the Dutchman sings the great monologue very much from his Other Side self; it dominates and closes out the everyday as he describes his fate, intones his prayer, and invokes the crack of doom, when all the dead will arise and he will find oblivion. But not long into his exchanges with Daland, the musical tone brightens and opens up as he is pulled, unresisting, back into the life of ordinary humans. That’s where he is, once again hoping to stay a while, at the end of the act. At the opening of Act 2, we meet our robust but naïve Northern maid. The domestic scene could not be more mundane, and its spinning-girl music could be straight from Flotow’s Richmond Fair. Senta is staring at the Dutchman’s portrait and the girls are needling her about it. But then she always does that, and so do they; nothing out of the ordinary there. We must always ask of a dramatic situation, though, what is out of the ordinary? Why is this particular night the occasion for a dramatic event? We in the audience know—Senta’s father and the Dutchman are on their way. But what is different in the lives of the characters? It’s this: after Senta has begged Mary to sing again the Ballad of the Flying Dutchman, as she has many times before, Mary has declined, and Senta sings it herself. Something makes her do that, evidently for the first time, and makes her end, to the horrification of her companions, with her passionate vow to be the woman who breaks the Dutchman’s curse.