Still, to the timbral suitability question: this demonic, or monstrous, quality would apply primarily to the Act 1 monologue, and not to all of it. The prayerful “Dich frage ich” episode is of a quite different character, for which Schorr’s tone and musical guidance are ideal, and in the final episode (beginning with “Vergebne Hoffnung!“) the demonic fury is bonded with anguish and an almost nihilistic longing for apocalypse—a combination that returns, along with the bitterest fatalism, in the final trio. (Regrettably, Schorr and his colleagues recorded none of the last scene. It’s the only part of his role that is missing.) (I) As I note in my piece, soon into the following scene with Daland, the Dutchman is moving eagerly into the everyday human sphere, where he remains for the rest of Act 1 and throughout Act 2. His music clearly reflects that, and so the question of the appropriateness of a voice’s basic coloristic properties (which will not change, regardless of what sort of inflectional variations are employed) assumes a different aspect. To what extent, if at all, a performer elects to incorporate my notion of a demonic element into his characterization and to allow it to shade his vocal and physical expression throughout these long stretches of singing, is a matter of interpretive choice. And this is as much an idea for Senta, the one who “invites the monster in,” and for helping to define the nature of their shared longing, as it is for the Dutchman himself. The monologue establishes, very powerfully, the Dutchman’s predicament, in the context of the—how to put it, his semi-supernatural sphere, perhaps like the in-between realm occupied by the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten?— brought to land. But the Act 2 scenes between, first, Senta and Erik, and then between Senta and the Dutchman, are the heart of the opera, and they belong very much to our natural, domesticated world.
I know of no perfect mind’s-ear, mind’s-eye Dutchman. That would truly belong to another reality. Any artist is bound to miss something, being human. Granted that Friedrich Schorr, as we hear him on century-old recordings, may not bring us a full measure of the quality we’ve been debating, and that other singers may have caught it, or some other aspect of the whole, more compellingly, he’s still my this-life model of a Wagnerian Heldenbariton. Naturally, I’d have to hear and see him in person to be sure.
Footnotes
| ↑I | Wagner suggests that it is only in the final section of the monologue that the singer’s emotional expression should be really unleashed. He tells us that even the vehement “Niemals der Tod, nirgends ein Grab!” (“Never death, nowhere a grave!”—the climax of the second of the four episodes, and R.W. has reversed the order of these two exclamations as they occur in the score), belongs “rather to the description of his sufferings than to a direct, an actual outburst of his despair.” Wagner was directing his attention chiefly to the performer’s mimetic work—but surely that must be integrated with the vocal/musical expression—and as usual was in search of simplicity, dignity, restraint, and proportion. |
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