The Flying Dutchman's strange plot is part of its legend.
- The Flying Dutchman
- by Richard Wagner
- Canadian Opera Company
- Evgeny Nikitin, bass
- Julie Makerov, soprano
- Johannes Debus, conductor
- At the Four Seasons Centre on Saturday night
Richard Wagner's myth-based fourth opera The Flying Dutchman is awkward to rationalize for today's audiences. It has all the implausibility of the Dracula story but it lacks the kinky sexual allure of that perennially rejuvenant affair. If Wagner had not invested it with his mature genius, we'd not be hearing much any more about the provisionallydamned and eternally restless, zombie-like Dutchman and his dreadful one-day-each-seven-years search for the redemptive love of a pure woman, which love would allow him at last to stop sailing and die.
But Wagner did say that The Flying Dutchman had opened out his career as a true poet of the lyric art, and his powerful imprimatur, along with the work's merits and challenges, have kept it in the repertoire.
The Canadian Opera Company's revival of Allen Moyer's 1996 production, which opened Saturday night for eight performances, reasserted some of the merits, did not overcome all of the challenges, but did bask in the high quality of most of the singing by the principals and chorus.
The Russian bass Evgeny Nikitin brought a steady, handsome, supple sound to his grim and baleful portrayal of the Dutchman. American soprano Julie Makerov sang Senta, his redeemer, quite beautifully, except for touches of flatness in the top notes of her Ballad in Act Two. Makerov's voice is an ideal Wagnerian lyric, warm, firm and focused. It even helped us not to mind her frumpy costumes. Swedish bass Mats Almgren has an unusual voice which not everyone will like, but it is rich, vibrant and virile, and he used it to great effect in his portrayal of Daland, Senta's venal ship-captain father, willing to trade her for the Dutchman's wealth. German tenor Robert Kunzli was passionate and persuasive as Erik, Senta's erstwhile, ordinary lover.
Canadian tenor Adam Luther and American mezzo-soprano Barbara Dever served well in the smaller roles of Daland's steersman and Senta's mother.
Wagner's score was enhanced by our hearing it as he originally conceived it: uninterrupted by intermissions. On the other hand, conductor Johannes Debus, in cahoots with stage director Christopher Alden, somehow kept the overall pace a bit sluggish.
In the score's major encounter between Senta and the Dutchman, so prophetic of later Wagner, everything becomes static. Of course these yearning lovers do not touch, they theorize. They haltingly discuss. They indulge in simultaneous soliloquies. Finally, after this seemingly endless prevaricating rumination, Senta, the pushier and more obsessed of the two, takes off the Dutchman's enveloping dusty black cloak, revealing him in horizontally striped pyjamas (perhaps he didn't take time to dress before he came ashore?) divesting him at the same time of his dignity.
None of this helped quicken the pace, or the blood. A kind of implacable deliberation won out over the most advanced and original music of Wagner's score. Conductor, director and designer were all implicated here. I do think the conductor should have been the deciding authority.
Moyer's stage design itself remains rather good, despite being a diagonally divided box, essentially unchanged throughout except for a few moveable details and Anne Militello's adroit lighting. But generally, even though it was a one-size-fits-all abstraction, it worked.
And I much admired the singing.
The Flying Dutchman runs until May 20 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.