![]() ![]() Will you please just get off the stage and go get a job at The Great Frame Up?Īlden saves his worst conceits for the final act. The tiny role of Mary, who has told Senta of the Dutchman tale, is elevated into a constant irritating and unhinged presence-either hugging or brandishing the Dutchman’s portrait, or taking it off the wall and putting it back on a different wall over and over again. So the Steersman instead of disappearing after his opening aria, remains onstage as Daland’s confidante throughout the first act. The director’s other brainstorm is to elevate minor roles into annoying omnipresent figures silently doing ridiculous things that detract from the principals. Characters become quasi-zombies (like Senta) or caricatures like Erik, her suitor, who is depicted here as a cringing neurotic, menacing himself and others with a long hunting rifle. So characters constantly face walls or away from the audience, emotions are either absent or exaggerated and parodied. ![]() If you prefer Wagner’s version of The Flying Dutchman you’re probably on the side of the forces of darkness and maybe even a Republican.Īlden’s patented shtick is to take all the humanity and naturalness out of every opera he touches. That few audience members would get that without reading the note tells you how successful is this inspiration. Alden says his misbegotten staging reflects “my desire to confront head-on the unholy connection between Wagner’s art and the spectres of Fascism and Antisemitism.” Right. All the male principals wear dark eye makeup like silent-film villains.Īlden’s artistic arrogance is on pretentious display in his “Director’s note” (always an ominous sign) where he has the audacity to wrap himself in the flag of a crusader against anti-Semitism. Senta spends most of her time with her back to the audience staring at a Munch-like portrait of the Dutchman. Instead of happy young girls working at their spinning wheels, the women’s chorus are unsmiling, proletarians in peasant scarves who move their arms in automaton-like, chopping motions (and not very well coordinated). ![]() Things begin to go seriously awry in Act 2. Saturday night’s performance began well with superb singing and a striking unit set that evocatively depicted the deck of Daland’s vessel. ![]() Im addition to Wagner’s use of musical leitmotivs for his characters (in somewhat embryonic form), Dutchman offers Wagner’s finest overture, rousing choruses for the sailors, and glorious set pieces for the principal singers. But The Flying Dutchman shows Wagner finding his own voice in this tale of the sea captain cursed to wander the earth, coming ashore every seven years in a search to find a woman that will be faithful to him and relieve his torment. As with Rienzi, they expected another Meyebeer-esque epic, yet this strange, dark and brooding Germanic opera took its lineage more from Weber. Naturally it took Freud to bring back this spectacularly giftless hack.įollowing the young Richard Wagner’s success with Rienzi, audiences were initially baffled by Der fliegende Holländer at its 1843 Dresden premiere. That production was so widely reviled that Alden was effectively banned from the company roster for 23 years. In his last Lyric outing in 2000, Alden staged a Rigoletto that put the title jester in a large chair center stage where he sat and glowered at the audience throughout the opera with little interaction with Gilda or the other characters. The malefactor in this case is director Christopher Alden. The company’s season-opening performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman was yet another shining exemplar of the leitmotif of the Anthony Freud era-first-class singing thoroughly undermined by a revisionist and execrable production. One entered the Civic Opera House Saturday night hoping that, similar to the haunted captain of the Flying Dutchman, the curse of the company’s past 13 years may have finally been lifted. Tamara Wilson and Tomasz Konieczny in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at Lyric Opera. ![]()
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