Wagner, The Flying Dutchman

From an 1876 production - this is how I imagined the opera would end [image: Wikimedia]

The story and how it ends

It might seem churlish after being overwhelmed by this opera full of damnation and redemption, but you have to ask the essential question: is the Dutchman saved or not? And is Senta saved? It’s not entirely clear in the libretto, let alone this production.

The story is an amalgam of various sources. The Dutchman, who is actually “fleeing” rather than “flying”, has a pact with the Devil, by which he is allowed to return once every seven years to see if he can find a woman to redeem him from his endless wandering. Everything seems to be going well, in this opera: the Dutchman finds a man (Daland) with a daughter, Senta, and Daland is happy to exchange his daughter for some treasure that the Dutchman offers. She is happy to marry the Dutchman; in fact, she knows all about his plight before even meeting him. She even has his picture in her home.

Nonetheless, the Dutchman expects the worst, even after she has agreed to marry him. This is where things get slightly complicated, and, for me uncertain. According to the script, even if Senta does not sail off with the Dutchman, she is saved from eternal damnation, because she didn’t plight her troth to the Dutchman in church: 

You plighted your troth to me, but not

Before Almighty God: this saves you!

Just to clarify, the Dutchman then states that those women who break their vow after making it are subject to eternal damnation. But in the same speech (Act 3 Finale) he states:                                                           

Learn the fate from which I save you!

I am doomed to the most hideous of lots …

From the curse, a woman alone can free me,

A woman who would be true to me till death.

So that’s clear, then. Her being true to him till death will result in his redemption. So does she have to die for him to be saved, or simply declare her love for him? In the end, according to the libretto, she “flings herself into the sea” and the two of them “rise transfigured”. I was waiting with anticipation to see how the director of this production handled that moment, but the actual ending was something of an anticlimax. It was quite inconsequential – and separate. The Dutchman crawls away by himself, ignoring Senta, while Senta puts her arms up seeming to implore heaven for some kind of conclusion, and by a simple coup de theatre, she disappears  -she is surrounded by the chorus and slips out without anyone seeing, so when the chorus members separate, she is gone – not, in this production, with him. This doesn’t make much sense to me – if there is any redemption, it’s not conveyed  

 

Is Senta too passive?

Many productions have worried about this aspect, according to the Overture Opera Guide (2012), Yet it is quite clear this is not simply one human submitting to another. Senta understands the story, and stares repeatedly at the image of the Dutchman hanging on the wall in her home. This is not, then, a response to human behaviour; she seems to have identified herself as the agent by which her sacrifice can bring about redemption. In other words, it’s not about him; it’s what he represents. This appears to be confirmed by the script, and certainly by this production.  The Dutchman is marked by his passivity. He makes no effort to seduce or even to appear welcoming. His attitude throughout seems barely concealed weariness and exhaustion. Senta’s willingness to sacrifice herself for his redemption is perfectly self-aware, and part of the world of myth rather than the world of the present-day. In a way, this devotion could be closer to what people do for immigrants. You don’t know them, but you can be compassionate.

This production

As usual, this was a mixed bag. I greatly enjoyed the set, which make little attempt to show a ship or even anything remotely resembling it,  the first two acts. Act three was set in a kind of surreal nightclub, which was a surprise.  

For the most part, the costumes were great. The Dutchman looked suitably crazed, as if he had just arrived from another world. He was dressed in a floor-length grey greatcoat and matching coloured hat that made him resemble a hippie who has been without sleep for six weeks. However, that excellence was dissipated somewhat. Senta, when she sings her big ballad, puts on an equivalent coat and hat, so stressing that she belonged in the Dutchman’s world, but when they come to sing an aria together, they looked like his and hers versions of the same outfit, which was cute, almost cosy, but not, I suspect, quite the intended effect.

I enjoyed the movement of the chorus. They grouped to resemble the movement of a ship, then, in Act 3, in the nightclub, they danced with a crazed stylized set of gestures, that collectively looked manic but which communicated the party-like atmosphere that the story intended, and from which Senta and the Dutchman were clearly excluded. 

The world of myth and the bourgeois world

It seems rather strange to have Wagner depicting present-day reality, but that is what seems to be the case with Daland and the sailors around him. There is a terrific contrast between the comfortable bourgeois world of Daland, Erik, and the chorus, compared with the wild, other-wordly (but threatening rather than pleasant) world of the Dutchman. The music switches powerfully from one to the other, most notably when Senta sings her ballad, in Act 1, and when the chorus taunt the newly wed couple in Act 3, until the couple themselves arrive, and the atmosphere changes utterly.

 

Disastrously, this production once or twice mixes up the two incorrectly. Daland is seduced by the prospect of a payment by the Dutchman in return for marrying his daughter. In this production, he takes a necklace that the Dutchman has given him, and places it on Senta, who then puts it in her pocket! It’s as if she accepts payment for the marriage, which is completely at odds with the opera and with her action, unconnected with money.

 

Sexual vs fairytale love

This opera straddles the world of myth and bourgeois reality quite effectively. However, the production makes some egregious errors. Senta’s love for the Dutchman is not sexual, at least, not in the way shown here. Senta wears hot pants (admittedly, she has the figure for it) but writhes on the table in front of him orgiastically, as if she is offering herself for one night, rather than for a lifetime.

 

Supporting displaced people

I am all in favour of trying to link art to contemporary issues. It is wholly commendable that Opera North makes a stand on behalf of displaced people, and you can see the link between the wild sea of the story and the terrible tales of people trying to cross the Channel by boat. So in principle I was happy that each act was introduced by a presumably autobiographical quote from a would-be immigrant to the UK. Unfortunately, the character on stage, who appears to be the personification of the person whose voice we hear, is clearly white, while the voice sounds African. This gesture doesn’t work.

At the start of the opera, someone from Opera North describes the displaced people as “our collaborators” in the programme “who have shared their life experiences”. I can see the link between crossing the sea and the Dutchman; but it should have been possible to have involved some of the displaced people to participate in the production in some way, rather than being recorded and then mimed by one of the cast. Art exhibitions are doing this kind of community engagement all the time, e.g. getting local people to participate in an collective project such as a tapestry.

I didn’t grasp, and I suspect that many people in the audience had similar problems, understanding why the opera opens with what appears to be a group of financial traders. According to the programme, they officials in the UK Home Office dealing with displaced people. According to this reading, therefore, the Dutchman is an immigrant seeking refuge  - but I don’t think the Dutchman strikes me as a displaced would-be immigrant .

Conclusion

 Fascinating opera, production with some good elements, but ultimately not helping to elucidate what is going on. It was such a shame to see the theatre only half-full for this unique night of Wagner in Hull, perhaps the most appropriate opera venue in Britain to perform a tale of wild sea journeys and endless wandering.   

Did the city-state create great art?

 

Raphael's The School of Athens: the triumph of philosophy. But was it partly the result of Athens being a city-state?

City-states continue to fascinate world history commentators. Two of the most famous cultural cities in history, Athens and Florence, were city-states, and it is tempting to try to ascertain if, and to what extent, their status as independent entities was an influence on their cultural production. Like many tourists, I visit these cities with their stunning artefacts and marvel that a city could produce such art, architecture,  literature – and that’s just the start of it.

Of course, to answer this question turns out to be far more complicated that envisaged. One immediate problem is that of timing. The peak period for the political influence of the city state does not appear to correspond to the peak periods of artistic output. A widespread (although perhaps less fashionable today) view, for example by art historian Sydney Freedberg, is that the peak of the Italian Renaissance, at least for visual art, was the period 1490 – 1510, in Florence, when Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, and others were producing art in Florence. Then Leonardo moved to Milan and thence to Paris, Michelangelo and Raphael to Rome, and Florence fell under the control of the Medici (not for the first time) in 1512 – it’s tempting to associate the end of any kind of collective decision-making with a decline in art. But reading about the Italian city-states more widely suggests that their peak for collective decision-making was well before 1500. According to Daniel Waley (The Italian City-Republics, 1969), the city-states achieved political independence as early as the eleventh century, and were largely taken over by individual tyrants from the 14th century onwards.

Similarly, the “golden age” of Athens, the fifth century BCE, the age of Pericles, the Parthenon, and Socrates, was thought to have coincided with the peak of the Polis, the Greek city-state. But, it turns out, from a recent book by John Ma, Polis (2024) that the fifth century was a low-point in terms of government; the most successful period for the Greek city-state was the Hellenistic period, when Athens had lost all its political power and was under the control of the Roman Empire, yet retained its stability, prosperity, and collective government.

So what is the relationship between art and political systems? Is it simply facile to think that great art was created in periods of some kind of representative government, or should we recognize that the relationship is more subtle, that there might be hundreds of years between the two peaks, yet in some undefinable way, the effect of collective government lingered on and bore fruit in the creative output? I’m not the first to ask these questions, but I will certainly be thinking again about them when I next visit Florence. 

Examining slavery at the Fitzwilliam

 

A "trade token", used on a British ship to vouch for the "integrity" of the slave trader (1788)

Hot on the heels of the last slavery exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, here is another show on a similar theme (Rise Up: Resistance Revolution Abolition), co-curated by Victoria Avery, who was also responsible for the Black Atlantic exhibition at the Fitzwilliam in 2023. This exhibition is the result of a study commissioned by the University to identify its links with Atlantic slavery “and other forms of forced labour”. This explains why there are so many references to Cambridge alumni in the exhibits and catalogue.  

The themes of the exhibition appear to be:

• Anti-slavery campaigners with links in and around Cambridge, notably Olaudah Equiano.
• The anti-slavery campaigning movement in Britain.
• Resistance and rebellion in early Black states, primarily, Haiti. The curators state the exhibition focuses on “acts of resistance” rather than “narratives of white abolitionism”.
• Resettlement, comprising a fascinating section about the 3,000 British Black loyalists who fought in the American War of Independence and were offered resettlement in Nova Scotia, and some coverage of an attempt to “repatriate” African slaves in Sierra Leone.
• Some early Black students at the University of Cambridge, specifically, a composer and an actor.  

This is a lot for one exhibition. Is it an art exhibition, a history presentation, or an act of expiation by the University? It sits uneasily somewhere between all three, with some muddled messages as you proceed around the exhibition.

What unites the exhibition, if anything, is a strident tone of injustice, with many heavily pedagogical captions. You will be told the correct interpretation of these exhibits, just in case you missed it; for example, a medal celebrating William Wilberforce is sternly labelled:

Medals like this one  - adopting the individualist conventions of the medium – ensured that abolitionist success was associated for decades to follow with a single white man. This has contributed to the neglect of countless other stories of resistance.

This hectoring style of captioning reminds me of recent exhibitions at the Tate Modern.  

Undoubtedly there are some fine exhibits, but overall the effect is weakened because of the very disparate themes and their wildly differing importance. To remember the first Black actor to play Othello is undoubtedly worth celebrating, as is one of the earliest Black composers as a student at a Cambridge college, but where does that fit in this exhibition of resistance and revolution?

Haiti

Haiti is justified for inclusion as the first successful rebellion by a slave population. Yet the focus here is rather strange. While the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the initial rebellion is well known, Haiti after the revolt is not a very edifying tale – as is shown by images in this exhibition. It looked to me there were more objects in the exhibition relating to reaction in Haiti than to revolution.

Dessalines, leader from 1804, introduced “serfdom” (as opposed to slavery, now banned), with all labourers bound to a plantation. The use of a whip was now forbidden, so estate owners used thick vines instead. Before this exhibition, I had no idea that Haiti had ever had a king. Now I know that Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of the rebellion, created a kingdom for himself, with a vast palace, using forced (not slave) labour, “using the corvée system, where people worked without pay instead of paying taxes”. Is this the rebellion we want to celebrate? Do we want to see details of the heraldic arms of the newly created (and short-lived) Haitian nobility?

Links to Cambridge

This is a mixture of significant and trivial. Certainly it is interesting that “the contradictory intertwinement of abolitionism and slavery existed at multiple levels from individuals to institutions to the country at large” [p134]. But does that justify mentioning all possible references to Cambridge alumni, for example that “Cambridge University educated … the heirs of British planters from Barbados, Jamaica and other British colonies long after slavery had ended”? Several references have an unintended effect: “Around 13,000 enslaved people rose up on sixty plantations, including some with connections to the University of Cambridge.” [catalogue, p144]

Contemporary art

One of the common practices with recent exhibitions that take place in an art gallery, but on a historical theme, is to invite contemporary artists to present their interpretation. This is the principle behind, for example, the recent Hew Locke show at the British Museum. However, some of the art seems to be chosen for its compliance with the exhibition theme, but to be in harmony with the message does not always produce an effective piece of propaganda – or art. A collection of hessian sacks by Karen McLean, for example, depicts enslaved women “via their reproductive organs rather than their faces to highlight enslaved women’s resistance and defiance through the control they took over their wombs.”  Sadly, I think that’s just how the slave owners saw the women: as reproductive agents to create more slaves. It doesn’t appear very defiant to me.

Some of the most effective recent art in the exhibition appears to have  little connection with the themes. There is a great picture by Rosmarie Marke (Which One, No Choice – Fleeing) of the Sierra Leone Civil War of 1997, but what is its connection with the rest of the exhibition?

Conclusion

It seems clear that the British Act of 1807 did not end the UK’s involvement with slavery, and I would have welcomed a more nuanced approach. Instead, there is a mixture of central and peripheral topics. The Atlantic slave trade is a fundamental and justified theme; it’s just a shame this Fitzwilliam show dilutes the message.