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Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman)
Kind: Serious opera in three acts
Language: German
Location: Norway
Time: Non-defined
Hits: Traft ihr das Schiff
Wagner is the only composer in history whose operas, all
eleven of them, are still performed, constantly, from the day they were
written. "The Flying Dutchman", his first big drama, was composed
after a naval trip in 1839, a journey when Wagner left Riga, the city where
he worked, and traveled all the way to France. In the course of the voyage,
accompanied by a storm, Wagner decided to write "The Flying Dutchman"
according to Heinrich Heine's version of the ancient myth.
 The
poetic opera tells us of the captain of the haunted ship with the black
sails, doomed, as a punishment, a curse, to sail the seas until the end
of time. Once every seven years, the captain is allowed to go onshore,
to look for a wife. If he finds a woman who is willing to love him, in
spite of her knowledge of his terrible secret, his redemption will come.
The damned seamen finds the weird Senta, who waited for him because of
an early sensation that told her he would come, but after he falls in love
with her, he suspects she is unfaithful to him, and sails away. She jumps
off the highest cliff into the sea, calling her lover's name. Then, light
glows through the skies and the happy lovers, free of the horrible curse,
fly up towards the sky.
Wagner wrote this opera with a lot of enthusiasm and astonishing
passion. He created a new sonic language describing everything in the opera,
from the waves of the ocean shattering at the Dutchman's ship, to the sailor's
melancholy monologue and the ballad of loving Senta. He composed this opera
in the most difficult time of his life: the young genius was lingering
in Paris, poor and humiliated. He had already understood he was a genius,
but nobody around him recognized it. He turned all of his strength and
energy into writing this opera, and it indeed gained him the success he
wished for so long. He presented "The Flying Dutchman" in Dresden,
Germany, and its success was so big that Wagner left Paris and settled
in Dresden, having received the office of the local orchestra conductor.
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