In 1839, the 26-year-old Richard Wagner almost drowned during a perilous voyage across the Baltic from Riga. It was this experience that he claimed inspired The Flying Dutchman, the legend of a man condemned for eternity to sail the oceans in his ghost ship giving the composer the narrative for his first mature opera. Wagner thought of his libretto as a poem, and it certainly grapples with some of the epic questions: birth, life, love and death.
Welsh National Opera’s new staging, directed by Jack Furness, begins with a woman in childbirth, the wild and stormy surges of the overture coinciding with her contractions. So Senta is born, destined, as a small child, to see her mother die, whisked away on her hospital bed into the great abyss. Senta will be a damaged soul, obsessed to the point of derangement by the story of the Dutchman, whose single hope of redemption, the love of a true woman, becomes possible only on touching land once every seven years. Backstories seem to have become a necessary accompaniment to any opera’s overture, which anyway spells out the whole trajectory in its leitmotifs. The strength of this intervention is visual, in the widely sweeping circles run first by Senta the young girl, then as a young woman, a parallel to the Dutchman’s septennial cycles, their dresses symbolic of the blood-red sails of his ship, all metaphors which later return.
