The Met’s Ill-Fated “Dutchman” on PBS

At the beginning of this month, PBS released the seventh installment in this season’s series of Great Performances at the Met broadcasts. The offering was The Flying Dutchman, the earliest of the operas of Richard Wagner to be performed regularly in opera houses around the world. The Great Performances videos are generally taken from the Live in HD transmissions to movie theaters. However, this particular Live in HD offering was scheduled for March 14 and was cancelled due to the shelter-in-place response to the outbreak of COVID-19. Instead, Great Performances at the Met presented a video recording made on March 10, which was probably the last performance of this opera before shelter-in-place restrictions were imposed.

The staging was by François Girard, who had previously staged Wagner’s Parsifal for the Met in 2013. Readers may recall that I wrote about this production this past April, when it was given free access through the Met Opera on Demand video archive. In writing about that experience I confessed my strong attraction to traditionalist interpretations of the Wagner canon, and Girard’s approach definitely did not fall in that category. However, while my usual approach to poorly-conceived revisionism is sustained grumbling, Girard’s Parsifal merely left me yawning. As I previously wrote, he seemed more interested in projections and lighting, rather than interpreting the narrative through staging; so at least I did not have to endure some of the more outrageous revisionist approaches to Parsifal, such as the abundance of Nazi symbolism found in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film version.

My reaction to Girard’s Dutchman, on the other hand, definitely crossed the threshold into grumbling. One of my traditionalist mantras is that what you see on the stage should not involve violent contradictions of the words being sung. Thus, I suspected that I would be in for a rocky journey as soon as I realized that Daland’s helmsman was not at the helm of his vessel. That opening gesture was an omen that Girard would not miss an opportunity to provide visual impressions that consistently opposed the libretto, primarily in the texts assigned to the characters but also in the descriptive passages.

The most outrageous opportunity took place during the second act, when all the women of the village are busy at their spinning wheels. This setting was replaced by eliminating all artifacts except for a curtain of individual ropes which would tangle and untangle over the course of the act:

from the Live in HD Web page created for The Flying Dutchman

Another annoyance was the prevalence of large precious gems, the first of which suggested that the Dutchman was more interested in purchasing Senta, rather than loving her. By the third act, everyone in the village is carrying around those gems, rather than hoisting the steins of grog that went with the drinking song in the music.

Ultimately, the primary saving virtue of this video was the conducting by Valery Gergiev. This was not my first encounter with him conducting Wagner, so I went in with high hopes. I was not disappointed. If Girard did not care what the vocalists were singing or how their texts were reflected in the music, one could still count on Gergiev to tell the story that Wagner wanted to tell.

If the crowd scenes were consistently disappointing, there were at least a few virtues in the interpretations of the individual roles. Evgeny Nikitin did his best to deliver the personality traits of Wagner’s Dutchman, rather than Girard’s. Franz-Josef Selig’s Daland, on the other hand, was basically a good capitalist, who would not have been out of place in the “dark side” staging that I saw in the summer of 1988 in a Santa Fe Opera production directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff. Anja Kampe’s Senta never seemed to have figured out what to do with herself and tended to fall back on overwrought gestures. Finally, there was Sergey Skorokhodov as Erik, who seemed to be playing Don Ottavio at his most clueless (without the benefit of the wonderful tenor arias composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart).

As Vladimir Nabokov once observed, one can still find amusement in one’s own grumbling; so I should probably thank heaven for the small favors of those amusements!