Matti Lehtonen
LEGEND OF THE ACCURSED MARINER
The Flying Dutchman a forerunner of Wagner's inimitable art
 The premiere of the opera The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner at the Royal Saxon Court Theatre in Dresden on the second day of January 1843, following numerous dogged attempts to get it performed, proved to be but a logical prelude to the misfortunes that were later to befall the composer in his life as an artist.
Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for The Flying Dutchman in 1840-1841 but later revised the music on a number of occasions. His interest in the centuries-old legend of the accursed mariner had been aroused by the novel Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelepowski by Heinrich Heine. His imagination was fired by the tragic nature of the tale, the gloomy overall mood and its touches of melodrama - all features of his later works.
At the time of writing The Flying Dutchman, Wagner was eking out an existence in Paris, pressed by a constant shortage of money and his creditors. Everything he did at that time (1839-1842) was marked by a frantic need to establish himself in the operatic life of the city; in practice, this meant an untiring attempt to see his works staged in the French capital. He found a supporter in the most popular French opera composer of the day, Giacomo Meyerbeer, but not even he was ultimately able to win Wagner a place in the sun. Wagner rewarded Meyerbeer for his efforts in a most despicable manner, accusing him of treachery and of ruining his chances of success.
Consequently, The Flying Dutchman did not see the light of day until Wagner had moved on to Dresden, where he took up an appointment as Court conductor in 1843. That he was possessed with an artistic vision looking far into the future is illustrated by the fact that he sketched in all his later works even decades before he actually sat down to compose them, and some of them during the years he spent in Dresden. The good years in Dresden were, however, destined to end in the turmoil that swept Europe in 1848, when Wagner threw himself into the uprising and was later, as conditions became more stable, obliged to go into exile.
The three operas written by Wagner in his youth, The Fairies, the Ban on Love and Rienzi, represent the operatic conventions of the early 19th century, and Rienzi in particular comes very close to the traditional French grand opera in both its music and its historical topic. The Flying Dutchman, however, is clearly a step in a new direction, firmly setting a new course towards the operatic art he was to spend the rest of his life perfecting. This is apparent from both the libretto and the music. The plot displays such themes familiar from his later works as a woman's sacrifice to save a man, and love that rises above the mundane world and is consummated only in death.
As a composer, Wagner was not of course able to put his innovative ideas into practice all at once - the transition to the musical thinking of Götterdämmerung, a good 30 years later, would have been too great even for a genius such as Wagner to achieve at a single stroke.
The seeds of change were, however, clearly germinating in The Flying Dutchman. Although the music is to a great extent still constructed round such well-established numbers as an overture, arias, ensemble and choral scenes, there is a definite shift towards broader entities binding the individual numbers together. The opera represents a new kind of musical-poetic narrative given coherence by the budding new Wagnerian technique, the Leitmotiv.
The Leitmotiv means, briefly, that each character, event, idea, object, etc., in the opera is assigned its own musical motif that is heard whenever that character appears or is mentioned in the story. Not until his later works did Wagner finally perfect his all-pervading use of the Leitmotiv, but the musical phrase attached to the ghostly ship and the Flying Dutchman is as strongly marked and catchy as the Leitmotivs of his mature works.
Wagner himself reported that he hit upon the idea for The Flying Dutchman on being caught in a violent storm while travelling by ship from the port of Pillau (nowadays Baltisk) in Prussia to London and then to Paris. He spent 1837-1839 as musical director of the theatre in Riga, but conditions in the Livonian capital in time became too uncomfortable: having recklessly borrowed money from all and sundry, he found himself surrounded by creditors demanding payment until finally a hush-hush and extremely risky nocturnal flit proved his only means of salvation.
With his first wife, Minna, he thus fled overland through Prussia to Pillau, skirting Königsberg on the way, and there boarded a ship by the name of Thetis. The voyage was to last more than three weeks, because having navigated the straits of Denmark, the ship got caught in a storm in the Skagerrak. It sought refuge in a Norwegian fjord, where Wagner heard the shouts of the sailors echoing off the cliffs as a musical impression. This was, he claimed, written into the sailors' chorus at the beginning of the opera.
Keeping to the truth was not one of Wagner's greatest virtues in speaking of his life, as in his autobiography Mein Leben. He likewise had a tendency to mystify the origins of his works. The famous motif constructed on a broken E flat major chord in the overture to Das Rheingold had, he claimed, "come to him" in a dream. Such claims were in fact quite typical among artists of the Romantic era, which stressed the mystic and, in a way, divine provenance of the artist's achievements, and creative genius as something beyond the reach of the ordinary mortal.
The 20th century completely reversed this conception, placing the emphasis on rationalism, professional competence, development and processing. Joonas Kokkonen crystallised this in more or less saying that it is more useful for composers to do exercises in counterpoint than to wander through birch groves waiting for inspiration.
The Flying Dutchman immediately aroused both interest and artistic outrage and ran for no more than three performances. In addition to his creditors, clamouring for their money, Wagner now had on his back many colleagues and critics for whom his artistic innovations simply went too far.
Throughout his life, Wagner was to attract both unwavering, loyal supporters but also a legion of implacable opponents and enemies. Considering his lifestyle and carryings-on, this was hardly surprising. His pathological extravagance, his arrogant, self-centred attitude to life, the force with which he entered into public debate in a pointedly polemic manner and his stubborn belief in the supreme excellence of his own art were not conducive to endearing him to his fellow men.
On the other hand, only a person endowed with such qualities could possibly achieve what Wagner did. The Flying Dutchman was by no means the only one of his operas which many did their utmost to torpedo.
Tannhäuser was premiered in Dresden in 1845, but Wagner was not satisfied with it and later produced many further versions. The most important of these was first staged in Paris in 1861. On this occasion, enraged by his artistic intransigence (he had refused despite numerous entreaties to write in a separate ballet number), the local jockey club did its utmost to prevent the production from being a success, with the result that it, too, was withdrawn after only three performances due to a scandal engineered by the club. No fewer than 163 rehearsals had been held during the six-month period leading up to the premiere.
The next hurdle was getting Tristan and Isolde premiered in the early 1860s. Wagner had put the finishing touches to it in 1859, but its performance was postponed by countless setbacks until 1865. Nor were the difficulties at an end even after the premiere in Munich. For Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, the tenor cast as Tristan, fell ill and died only a few days after the performance, giving Wagner's adversaries an excellent opportunity to proclaim his music inhuman.
This is all to say nothing of the Ring tetralogy and the opera theatre built specially for it at Bayreuth under the patronage of the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria - a major political bone of contention. None of this could have been achieved except by a composer with an unshakeable faith in the uniqueness of his art.
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