The Flying Dutchman and Wagner's "cinematography"

A flying horse beats a sword-fight...

Start reading about Richard Wagner and some key phrases keep cropping up again and again:

• "A genius"
• "The most influential..."
• "Revolutionary"
• "20th century music would not be possible without him..."
• "Forward-looking"

And so on. But what does all that mean? Presuming that many of you are casual opera-lovers, you may well wonder what all the commentators are talking about with such comments.

O, Faithful Reader, if you only knew.............

This post will cite one example to give you a clue. More like half a clue. More like a teensy fraction of a clue. This post won't give you the tip of the iceberg; it'll give you a snowflake on top of the tip.

But it's a good one.

The title of this post mentions cinematography. That's a film term referring to the photography of the movies we see - the visual images that fill a movie screen. How could an opera have anything to do with the sorts of images we see in cinema? Simply this: Wagner was the first opera composer to imagine cinematic scenarios.

Virginia Opera's most recent production was Gounod's Romeo and Juliet. Besides all the love duets, "R & J" features an old-fashioned "action scene": a couple of sword fights. In much of opera history (other than the so-called Venetian school of the 17th century, when libretti often called for erupting volcanoes) sword fights were the go-to device if action was desired.

Then came Wagner.

Let's look at some of the stage directions that create cinematic moments in Wagnerian opera. The first one, granted, is kind of the opposite of an "action" scene:

Die Walküre, Act 1.

Here's the set-up: Siegmund has found refuge in a crude dwelling during a storm. He learns it is the home of Sieglinde and her husband Hunding. Siegmund and Sieglinde, not yet aware they have the same father, feel a mutual and powerful attraction. While Hunding eyes the stranger with suspicion, Wagner gives us the following stage directions:

Sieglinde goes to the storeroom, fills a horn with mead and offers it to Siegmund with friendly eagerness. ...Siegmund takes a long draught while his gaze rests on her with growing warmth. Still gazing, he removes the horn from his lips and lets it sink slowly while the expression of his features expresses strong emotion. He sighs deeply and gloomily lets his eyes sink to the ground. ...He leans against the hearth; his eyes fix themselves with calm and steady sympathy on Sieglinde; she slowly raises her eyes again to his. They regard each other, during a long silence, with an expression of the deepest emotion.

Well, I warned you; a little short on action. Guy drinks a drink and stares at a girl. Not exactly "The Matrix", to cite a movie I recently discussed on this site. My point is that it really reads more like a movie screenplay than an opera.

Think about it: don't all those long, long, emotion-filled gazes just cry out for close-up camera-work? During the moments when those directions are being acted out, the orchestra is playing voiceless music that functions exactly like film underscoring, with heartfelt music mirroring all those subtle, unspoken interactions. How were these subtleties supposed to register with audience members sitting in the balcony of a typical opera house? He is thinking in cinematic terms.

Let's look at another, more familiar moment in the same opera (I'm getting to Dutchman in a moment):

Die Walküre, Act 3

Okay, rather than type out a series of stage directions, let's just describe the scene: the action takes place on the rocky summit of a rugged mountain. Eight goddesses called Valkyries, the children of chief diety Wotan, swoop and soar through the heavens on their flying horses (!), gathering up the corpses of slain Norse heroes to transport them to Valhalla. One by one, they come in for three-point equestrian landings to huddle up with Valyrie Number Nine, Brünnhilde, to help her plan how to deal with Daddy, who is pretty mad at her right now. (Long story. Don't ask.)

Now we're talking! Sword fight, schmord schmight - this is COOL! I have to wonder how Wagner thought he'd bring this off back in the 1850's when he wrote it. I hope that the first performance consisted of something other than nine sopranos standing on stage with spears, singing their brains out. But without electricity, how was all the swoopy-soary stuff suggested? Even now in 2016, stagings tend to fall a bit short of what we all envision in our minds. Harry Potter-level special effects are called for.

And as for my current object of study, The Flying Dutchman, we can see Wagner already thinking big - very big. In Act Three, scene one, the stage is given over to the chorus. Here I can once again let Wagner's own stage directions describe the scene, minus some intervening singing.

A bay with a rocky shore: Daland's house to one side in the foreground. The background is occupied by the two ships, the Norwegian's and the Dutchman's, lying fairly close together. The night is clear: the Norwegian ship is lit up; its sailors ore on deck, making merry. The appearance of the Dutch ship presents an uncanny contrast; it is enveloped in unnatural gloom and deathly quiet. (The sailors)dance on the deck. The girls arrive with baskets full of food and drink. (The sailors and women call out to the Dutchman's unseen crew, meaning to invite them to the celebration, but the only response is eerie silence.) The sailors drink up and set down the cups noisily. From here on there are stirrings of life on the Dutch ship. The sea, which everywhere else remains calm, has begun to rise in the neighborhood of the Dutch ship; a dull blue flame flares up like a watchfire. A storm wind whistles through the rigging. The crew, hitherto invisible, bestir themselves. As Daland's crew sing a sea chanty, their ship is tossed up and down by the waves; a terrible storm wind howls end whistles through the bare rigging. The air and sea elsewhere, except in the immediate neighborhood of the Dutch ship, remains calm, as before. The Norwegians try to drown the song of the Dutchman's crew with their own song. After vain efforts the raging of the sea, the roaring, howling and whistling of the unnatural storm, together with the ever wilder song of the Dutchman's crew silence them. They fall back, make the sign of the cross and quit the deck: the Dutch crew, seeing them, burst into shrill, mocking laughter. After this the former deathlike silence suddenly falls on their ship again; in a moment, air and sea become calm, as before.

This is Stephen King territory; this is Walking Dead territory; this is Pirates of the Caribbean territory. It not only presented new challenges to set designers and stage directors, it raised the bar for all future composers re-imagining operatic action scenes.

If you want to see how far Wagner's successors took his trail-blazing ideas of action, get a hold of the libretto to Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron and read the stage directions for the scene of the Golden Calf orgy. Whoa, Nellie! Even Wagner might have found it over the top. Or he might have loved it. But either way, he surely would have said "You have learned well from me, my son".

Dum-Dum-de-Dum: Young Wagner's weird rhythmic obsession

On the count of three, clap your hands to the rhythm of the first four notes of "Hail to the Chief".
Ready? One, two, THREE:

Good job! Try another one, a famous bit of Wagner: the "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin:

You're really good at this. (I'm a shameless suck-up...) You probably picked up on the fact that both ditties are built on the same rhythmic motive. Lohengrin was the third of the three early Wagnerian operas that have entered the standard repertoire. The second, Tannhäuser, features a lyrical aria for Wolfram, "Du mein holder Abendstern". which opens like this:

The meter is different, but it still sounds like "dum-dum-de-dum", so it's essentially the same motive.

But my subject these days is The Flying Dutchman, and here the "dum-dum-de-dum" rhythm puts us hip-deep into an odd phenomenon:

A motif that has no meaning.

Richard Wagner

That's not how we're used to thinking of Wagner! As his craft matured and he committed more to his "music of the future" style, his operas became a spider's web of interwoven motifs (often called leitmotifs though that wasn't his term) both rhythmic and melodic, representing people, gods, objects or concepts.

On the other hand, Dutchman is almost completely dominated by examples of the "Bridal Chorus" rhythm. It is frequently sung by the Dutchman, Senta, Daland and Eric. But to what end? Get a load of these examples. And trust me, by no means am I citing each instance in Dutchman; to do so would become tediously lengthy. But you need to see how obsessively it appears!

In the Dutchman's great monologue "Die Frist ist um", after the recitative and an opening tempestuous section venting his rage and frustration, comes an especially intense expression of brooding bitterness marked "Maestoso". These thirty-four bars are like the slow movement of this multi-movement solo. Over tremolo strings, the Dutchman begins a plea for mercy:

Each four-bar phrase begins with the rhythmic motive, if occasionally double-dotted.

During the ensuing episode in which the Dutchman encounters Daland and expresses his interest in the Captain's daughter, his vocal line is peppered with the motive; here are a few instances;

For his part, Daland, whose initial rhythmic utterances were free of "dum-dum-de-dum" finally gets in the spirit of the motive:

And by the end of Act 1, Daland's instructions to his crew to weigh anchor are accompanied by an orchestral tune that shows he's given in to the rhythm:

Senta is on board with "dum-dum-de-dum" even before her tete-a-tete with the Dutchman; the "Piu lento" section of her ballade, which symbolizes her sacrifice, serves it up on a platter:

When Erik (the suitor in whom Senta has lost interest) shows up to pitch a little woo, he does so in a plaintive solo. Note how the rhythm appears twice in this passage:

When Papa Daland arrives with the Dutchman in tow, every phrase of the first section begins with this rhythmic pattern:

When the two love birds are finally alone to gaze in wonder at one another, their duet is a slow-motion ping-pong game of "dum-dum-de-dum", trading the motif back and forth:

Well, look - IF you are still reading this (and, in your shoes, I'm not sure I still would be), you long since got the idea, and I'm skipping Act 3 because ENOUGH! Again, I've shown you about 10% of all the examples of "dum-dum-de-dum" which are planted throughout the score.

My question: WHY, WHY, WHY?! Does it MEAN anything?

I can't see how. This motive cannot have a symbolic meaning; it can't stand for anything. Too many characters sing it in too many unrelated dramatic contexts.

I think Wagner just thought it was a fine way to begin a melody, that's what I think. As his technique matured and he gained confidence in his art, old-fashioned melodic phrases built on "dum-dum-de-dum" took a back seat to the aforementioned spider's web of leitmotifs. That said, it's worth noting that the Overture to Die Meistersinger revives "dum-dum-de-dum" in grand fashion.

Did Wagner realize how much he was relying on this rhythm? Was its overuse (in my opinion) a deliberate device somehow? Did he imagine himself the New Beethoven, imagining that perhaps "dum-dum-de-dum" would become his calling card in the way that so much of Beethoven is built on the grundgestalt of four notes as in the Fifth Symphony?

If so, he found a much, much better calling card.

The Flying Dutchman, as explained by Bill Murray and Keanu Reeves

This post, the first devoted to Virginia Opera's upcoming production of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, draws parallels between the opera and two Hollywood films you may have seen.

Though it may strike you as unlikely at first, the outline of the plot is contained in Bill Murray's 1996 comedy Groundhog Day.

Even more interesting to me: a reasonable interpretation of the characters and (most importantly) the contrasting styles of music in Wagner's score, can be made through the prism of the 1999 action flick The Matrix.

Red pill and blue pill.
{Author: Wim b. Used with permission)

First, about that plot. Even if you know nothing about Wagner, you already know the basic story of the Dutchman. In Groundhog Day, Murray played an arrogant man whose arrogance was punished by some cosmic force that doomed him to repeat the same day over and over. Each day, with mounting misery, he found himself in the same hotel room with the same Sonny and Cher song playing on the clock-radio. After hundreds of repetitions of the same day, he tried in vain to kill himself just to end the torment. But every form of suicide was short-lived, resulting in yet another morning of Sonny and Cher. In the end, this curse was lifted by finding true love in the character played by Andie MacDowell.

In the operatic version, the (unnamed) Dutchman's curse of unwanted eternal life was due to his shouting blasphemies while battling a storm at sea. Satan decrees he shall sail until Doomsday for his arrogance. Longing only for the peace of the grave, he is finally released from the curse through the devotion of a woman who proves faithful unto death.

I don't know if the producers of Groundhog Day were aware of the close ties between the movie and the legend of the Dutchman, but closely tied they are.

Now for The Matrix.

The premise of the movie is that the reality that you and I and most people experience is an illusion. Hostile alien robotic machines long ago enslaved the human race, imprisoning us in individual capsule-like pods where we spend our lives hooked up to a giant alien computer that pipes dream-like images into our brains as we remain in perpetual sleep. Billions of pods exist in vast towers overseen by the aliens, but a few individuals (such as Morpheus, Neo and Trinity) have managed to break free from this Matrix. They alone experience true reality, which consists of surviving in dark subterranean tunnels in a nightmarish world while evading those darn robots.

How does this relate to The Flying Dutchman? It's pretty simple. All of the characters, save the two lead roles of the Dutchman and Senta, lead complacent, repetitive lives. Daland and his crew spend their adult lives going to sea and catching fish, then returning home and eating fish.

Catching fish, eating fish. Catching fish, eating fish. Catching fish, eating fish. Catching fish, eating fish, all the while singing lusty sea-chanties. They believe that their lives have purpose and meaning; they believe their activities are fulfilling. It never occurs to them that they are trapped in an empty routine.

The village maidens, Wagner lets us know, are no better off. At the top of Act 2 they provide an obvious visual metaphor of the pointless futility of their own existence: endlessly spinning at a loom. We are to imagine a mouse on an exercise wheel.

Daland, his crew, and the rest of the villagers (save for Senta) are plugged into the Matrix, clueless about the existential crisis they should be obsessing over.

Senta, present but detached from the group in the spinning-wheel scene, rejects the stupid loom and the stupid song they sing to pass the time. She is kind of a combination of Trinity and Neo; while she's the Matrix-free female in the cast, she's also really the "chosen one" like Neo, the Keanu Reeves character. He was "chosen" to free humanity from the Matrix; Senta is destined to free the Dutchman from his curse.

The Dutchman, of course, is also burdened with Existential Anguish. His monologue careens through an emotional roller coaster encompassing rage, bitterness and defiance. The eternal stormy sea is tormenting him and kicking his butt just as the clones of Agent Smith torment Morpheus in the movie.

Wagner's opera even has a character much like Cypher. Cypher knows about the gritty reality of Man vs. Robot, but prefers the dream-world of the Matrix. With a juicy piece of steak on his fork, Cypher contemplates the fact that the steak isn't real, but he doesn't care. He just enjoys it.

This is a bit like Senta's frustrated suitor, Erik. Erik seems to intuit that there is more to life than the complacent faux lives of the fishing villagers. He relates a dream he had to Senta; one that seems to predict Senta's ultimate sacrifice. So in that sense, he's unplugged from the village Matrix. Yet he wants nothing more than a conventional life with Senta. She should marry him, bear his children, make his home, all the regular wifey stuff. Some part of his mind suspects an alternate possibility, but even so, he chooses to "plug in", so to speak. Thus the arias with which he woos his erstwhile girlfriend are ardent but far removed from Wagner's "futuristic" style, as you'll note in his Act 2 solo beginning at 1:21 in this recording.

I believe this two-planed existence in The Flying Dutchman helps to explain the startling contrast of musical styles in the opera. Extensive sections of the score reflects a conventional German Romantic operatic style, a style similar to the popular operas Wagner conducted in his early career. The Steersman, Erik and Daland sing tuneful arias with regular periods, conventional structure and highly conventional harmony. Daland's Act 2 aria, in fact, is downright dull and stodgy - a perfect bit of musical characterization of Senta's father, who is not the sharpest tool in the tool kit. (In this recording, it begins at 2:07.) The orchestration in their solos is discreet, even affecting an "oom-pah-pah-pah" for old Daland, for pity's sake! The Steersman's aria (sung here by Fritz Wunderlich) features a good bit of unaccompanied singing; the orchestra's contributions are practically Mozartian in texture.

Senta and the Dutchman, on the other hand, sing in a style much closer to mature Wagner. The orchestra often features huge sonorities, thick textures, blaring brass, strings in turmoil and brooding chromaticism. Even the simplicity of the "Redemption" portion of Senta's ballade are austere and stark. (More about their music in a future post.)

Daland's crew and the spinning maidens sing in a manner appropriate to their complacent lot. My goodness, there are portions of the Spinning Chorus that, if slowed down a bit, would sound like a soft-shoe number. Listen to this version and think "Tea for two". In WAGNER!!

But everything changes when, in Act 3, those same choristers make the mistake of poking a sleeping monster, arousing the zombie-crew of the Dutchman's ship. The passage in which the ghostly crew terrorizes the villagers gives them a Close Encounter (Another movie reference! Sweet!) with Wagner's versions of the Alien Robots.

Many Wagnerian commentators attribute this musical dichotomy to Wagner's immaturity. One reads comments like "finding his way"; "still searching for his voice". "still formulating his musical ideas". I don't agree. To me, the two contrasting styles were a deliberate dramatic choice by the young composer; a way of delineating the two planes of reality experienced by the two groups of characters.

Ironically, the conventional Romantic style of Erik, the Spinning chorus, and the other members of the Matrix, though used for irony, had the advantage of tossing some ear-candy to the audience. Who wouldn't enjoy the toe-tapping tunefulness of that Spinning Chorus? It's a bit of subtlety on the composer's part that at the same time he imbued his score with audience-pleasing tunes, there was nonetheless a subversive message in those same tunes.

In a way, your reaction to that tune is a litmus test for YOUR place in the Matrix. If you see the irony, you took the red pill: you're unplugged. If you just sit back and enjoy the melody............  you swallowed the blue pill...............................................