On Monstrous Men, and Why Opera Still Slaps

Opera likes dead women. This isn’t a new idea. But it hit me in the middle of the Vancouver Opera’s recent production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.

The Flying Dutchman is an early attempt from Wagner, the 19th century German composer and polemicist. But the overwhelming tsunami of sound that would become The Ring Cycle, Wagner’s epic Gesamtkunstwerk, is well in evidence. From Dutchman’s famous overture, the titanic stuff roars and soars. And it’s good old female sacrifice that brings everything to a towering conclusion, with a young woman casting herself into the sea to prove her undying faithfulness to the idea of redemptive love.

She joins a long line of women in the operatic oeuvre who meet untimely ends.

Almost every grand opera one can think of ends with a woman sacrificed. At the end of the eponymous opera Norma, a druid priestess walks into the ritual fire. Tosca leaps from the parapets of Rome in Giacomo Puccini’s rape and revenge drama Tosca. Cio-Cio-San commits ritual suicide in Madame Butterfly. In La Boheme, Mimi coughs herself into a consumptive grave. In Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, the heroine is willingly entombed alongside her lover in ancient Egypt. Brünnhilde rides her horse into the immolating flames at the end of Götterdämmerung, essentially bringing down the world and ending the Norse Gods themselves.

A lot of folk are serious Wagner haters, but for the opera fans and stans out there, it’s near impossible to turn away from this stuff, despite the grim outcomes for so many of the characters. I include myself.

What’s the attraction? Well, listen here, that’s all. Just listen.

The very essence of seduction

Based on an ancient maritime legend, The Flying Dutchman tells the tale of a sailor doomed to wander the high seas for eternity after falling afoul of the devil. The Dutchman can only escape his fate if he finds the love of a good and faithful woman. Feel free to roll your eyes a little here. If you extract the plotlines of operas from the actual music, well, they tend towards the goofy. But really, there’s no point in doing that, because the music is everything.

Before we get to drama mama jama, the stage must be set. Aboard a Norwegian ship on its way into port, a group of sailors espies a mysterious vessel in the distance, black with blood-red sails. As the music heralds the entrance of an ominous figure, all of the sailors fall into something resembling a state of zombie unconsciousness. Meanwhile, the mysterious figure explains who he is and how he came to be damned.

Despite this rather unsettling introduction, the mysterious mariner is offered a place to stay by the Norwegian ship’s captain Daland (played by Richard Wiegold), and then the pair makes an additional deal: in exchange for oodles of treasure, the captain promises his daughter Senta’s hand in marriage to the Dutchman.

Meanwhile back on land, Senta has already fallen under the spell of the Dutchman’s legend. As she carries around a painting of him looking all doomed and tragic, the rest of the young women make fun of her obsession. But Senta is damned and determined. In that order.

As the titular character in the Vancouver Opera’s production, baritone Gregory Dahl is fearsome and seductive in slightly terrifying fashion. Dahl plays the Dutchman like a biker of the sea — bald, tattooed, pierced and wearing a giant black frock coat that he hurls off at climactic moments to reveal his bare, tattooed chest. He makes for a pretty enticing figure, to be honest. Accordingly Senta, played by soprano Marjorie Owens, falls hook, line and sinker.

The other principals, including Senta’s former boyfriend Erik the huntsman, sung by tenor Wookyung Kim in a clear strong voice, are equally compelling.

Brian Deedrick’s production does a lot of clever things, from the animated sequences that introduce the story to stagecraft that communicate the stakes at play. Everything takes place on an angle, with twinned ramps meant to suggest the rolling deck of a ship on the high seas. At the centre of the action stands a grand wheel. Sometimes it is a ship’s helm, other times, a spinning wheel, braiding together the twinned destiny of the two main protagonists.

Undead sailors and spooky ghost ships are suggested with eerie lighting meant to invoke the supernatural stuff. The discordant pangs of musical dread conjure up the implacable forces of fate.

The Flying Dutchman uses leitmotifs — recurring musical compositions — and each main character has a musical signifier of sorts. Slithering into the deeper regions of one’s brain, supplanting all logic and reason, and rewiring synapses towards terrible romantic dissolution, these musical motifs summon the very essence of seduction.

This most explicit is when the two principals first set eyes on each other. Silhouetted in a shard of light, the Dutchman appears to the woman to whom his fate is bound like an apparition. It works a charm. I have to admit that a little girlish breath came squeaking out of me at the sight.

On fictional and real-life bad boys

Written at a particularly turbulent point in the composer’s life, The Flying Dutchman was one of the first of Wagner’s operas that eschewed more conventional structures in favour of a more free-flowing drama. The set pieces are still there: there are the grand choruses and the standalone arias. But the story itself is more the thing. And yes, that hoary old notion about the redemptive powers of true love is the big narrative arc.

But can contemporary audiences put aside the facts that Wagner is problematic in all kinds of ways?

Wagner was an antisemite embraced by the Nazis, a womanizer, a towering egotist, an all-round not great guy. In an age when the art of monstrous men has been put on a shelf, consigned to the dustbin of history, why does it prove so hard to give up Wagner’s music?

The Vancouver Opera hasn’t performed any Wagnerian operas for over 20 years. In the background materials about the production, considerable effort is put into providing context and analysis not only of the opera itself, but of the attendant complexities in restaging older, more contentious works.

It isn’t only Wagner that requires this kind of contextualizing. Opera in general is under constant pressure to address its core challenges. No matter what novel reinvention or clever production idea, it’s tricky to contend with some of the fundamental problems. The dead women motif is only one thing. Racism, misogyny and cultural appropriation are just a few of issues embedded in the genre that we shouldn’t be quick to shake off.

It’s tempting to give some works a pass, or a rationalization for why we continue to love them, despite the warts and bumps. Some folk refuse to listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanni because of the sexual violence. But the titular character gets his just comeuppance, dragged down to eternal damnation by a chorus of full-throated demons.

Wagner’s opera of cursed men and noble women isn’t quite as clear cut. Is the Dutchman really all that bad? Or is he just misunderstood?

Like a great many fictional bad boys, does he really just need the love of a good woman to put him back on the path of righteousness?

In a solid portion of the western cultural canon, male fantasy plays a central role in the story. This is especially true in many of Wagner’s operas, where the men are often titanic heroes, wielding swords, smiting dragons. The women too ride giant horses, carrying fallen warriors to Valhalla.

Yes, opera is more than a little over the top sometimes. Can you still enjoy it with a slight compunction? Yes.

Life is about balance, as well as flying seamen, after all.

The Vancouver Opera’s production of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ runs at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver until May 7.