I mentioned in my previous post that when the Dutchman comes ashore, he brings with him something of the monstrous. After all, he made a pact with the Devil. Senta knows this; it’s part of the legend. So how is it that the robust, naïve Northern girl’s monomania takes the form of fixation on a man who trails Satanic sulphur in his wake? It happens that the current (Spring, 2020) issue of The Hedgehog Review is devoted to monsters. Among several interesting articles dealing with monsterfolk from Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Mothman and the Loch Ness monster, there’s one by Paul A. Cantor called Inviting Evil In: Horror Stories and the Monstrous Double. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem Christabel as his keynote, Cantor elaborates on the observation that in many stories, High- and Low-culture alike, of this nature, it is a rule that the evil, the monstrous, cannot enter a dwelling of the good and pure unless invited. Further, though the invitation is extended in innocence, it is an indication that something is already not aright in the household. There’s a darker, repressed  something, or an unresolved conflict, that is the subconscious motive for it. Often, it’s a virginal heroine who innocently does the inviting, suggesting unacknowledged sexual stirrings. (And here we are, drifting back toward Freud, avant la lettre.)

Everything that’s powerful in the music of Der Fliegende Holländer tells us that though on the everyday level it’s Daland who invites the Dutchman into his home (he should know better, but then, he’s naïve and easily impressed), it is Senta’s call, her obsession with the Other Side and longing for union with it, that draws him to her. The trouble in the house is this motherless, hypersensitive child’s extreme dissatisfaction with the shallow, chattering girls around her; the long absences of her simple, hard-working, materialistic father to whom she must pay respect; and not least, the promise of marriage she has carelessly made to Erik (according to him, and though she says she’s forgotten, we have no reason to doubt him), in whom she has no interest compared with her fantasies of the Dutchman. Erik, though, may be deeper than he appears. His dream recitation, in which he relates exact foreknowledge of what’s just about to happen, and which Senta is able to pick up on in a trance state as he relates it (what a wonderful passage!) tells us that he has contact with the Other Side, too. So his desperation to keep Senta in the “real” world may reflect his own fears about staying in it. For these dreams and trances to make any sense, they must of course occur in the otherwise everyday world, not someone’s dream already in progress. And, to get back to the matter of desirable voices, all this would suggest that while on the surface a bright, strong Jugendlich soprano with a pure quality may seem the obvious choice for Senta, an element of something darker and more complicated, with an inner tension in it, may prove more intriguing.