Suffering and Greatness: Metaphor, Will and Self-reference in The Flying Dutchman

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wagner’s early opera The Flying Dutchman has long been recognized as the first of the composer’s works to be written in his own authentic style and idiom, in which the protagonist strongly suggests a metaphorical representation of autobiographical content, complemented by a musical expression of overpowering will that listeners have variously felt to be aggressively domineering or curiously liberating. This paper traces the progressive unfolding of these effects in the course of seeing (and hearing) the work performed, approaching it as a form of drama in which stage action and dialogue are immeasurably enhanced by the Wagnerian musical narrative. As such, it begins with the overture, in which the opera’s central metaphor is already implicit in the figure of the storm, before becoming explicit in the onstage presentation of character contrasts and relationships, a dynamic in which the sympathetic listener is increasingly implicated through a heightened emotional (and even quasi-sexual) involvement in the music. There is, in other words, an implied parallel between the heroine’s redemption of the doomed Dutchman and the aesthetic abandonment to the work itself that is so imperiously demanded of its audience.