A Note about the Staging
Der fliegende Holländer San Francisco Opera, 1979
From the Executive Editor:
As its name suggests, this section will be devoted to documenting notable productions, including (as in the following pages) directors’ notes and production photographs, but also (in future issues) designers’ notes, dramaturgical notes, reviews, and other materials.
In this issue, we present materials from two particularly significant and controversial productions of Der fliegende Holländer: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production at the San Francisco Opera in 1979 (remounted in the same year at the Metropolitan Opera) and Herbert Wernicke’s 1981 production at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Our thanks to Claire Myers and Micah Standley at the San Francisco Opera Archives, to Dr. Ulrike Hessler, Michaela Nothelfer, Michael Brommer, and Ingrid Zellner at the Bayerische Staatsoper Pressebüro, and to John Pennino and Robert Tuggle at the Metropolitan Opera Archives. Thanks also to Wolfgang Willaschek for his assistance, to Mareike Uhlig for graciously permitting the reproduction of Wernicke’s directoral notes, and to Anne Kirchbach for allowing us to publish her photographs from the Wernicke production.
A contemporary stage director in opera must, first of all, remain absolutely and totally faithful to a work as it was originally conceived by the composer–that is, to the musical score. On the other hand, even the most theatrical of musical geniuses, whether Mozart, Verdi, or the most revolutionary of them all, Wagner, were nevertheless dependent on the theatrical fashions and styles of the period. With all that Wagner was able to bring to opera in the way of theatrical innovation–and he was a great avant-gardiste–he was still a child of the nineteenth-century theater, whereas his musical innovations are timeless. Today, therefore, we can get beyond what the composer was able to imagine in theatrical terms during his lifetime and still remain faithful to his work. Furthermore, the scientific knowledge that we possess today also allows us occasionally to interpret a work beyond the express desires of the author. All of the analytical methods at our disposal, be they Freudian, Marxist or whatever, permit us to scrutinize, under x-rays, as it were, the music and the characters clothed in that music in order to discover what the author reveals of himself through his treatment of those characters in his score.
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As stage director, I have taken the liberty of interpreting the legend of the Flying Dutchman, not going against Heine’s story and Wagner’s treatment of it, but adding to the Wagnerian dramaturgical concept. I view the work as a whole as the dream of the Steersman, who, in a kind of nightmare, sees the events of the opera taking place before his eyes. A young sailor of Wagner’s time had to spend ten or eleven months of the year fishing for mackerel out in the North Sea. He naturally dreams of what is awaiting him upon his return home, that is, money and a woman. Given the fact that his horizons are limited to the boat on which he lives eleven months out of the year, the Steersman fixes upon the captain’s daughter in his love fantasy. Furthermore, he imagines himself as someone he wishes he were, but cannot be, because he is restricted to life on board the boat–a hunter who roams freely twelve months out of the year on land. Since he is subconsciously aware that his dream is a kind of fantasy projection, he feels a certain uneasiness, an uneasiness which is the fear of the unknown–what really is awaiting him in port–intensified by all the shipboard chatter and personified in the figure of the Dutchman.
In Wagner’s original concept there is a clash between the real world–the world of Daland’s boat, with the Steersman on it, returning to port–and the unreal, legendary world, which is everything surrounding the mythical character of the Dutchman and the idealized, exalted love which Senta bears him through the catalyzing agent of his portrait.
In my concept I make no attempt to analyze the psychology of the Dutchman or to explain the motives behind Senta’s behavior. To me, Senta and the Dutchman are complete characters who stand as they are, characters who do not evolve throughout the course of the work because they are creations of the Steersman’s subconscience [sic]. We are presenting the opera without a break according to Wagner’s original wishes. There is another reason for this, however. We are dealing, in my version, with a dream, and dreams have a beginning and an end, but no intermission.
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