The Flying Dutchman (opera) - Composition History

Composition History

By the beginning of 1839 Richard Wagner was employed as a conductor at the Court Theatre in Riga. His extravagant lifestyle and the retirement from the stage of his actress wife, Minna, meant that he ran up huge debts. Wagner was writing Rienzi and hatched a plan to flee his creditors in Riga, escape to Paris via London and make his fortune by putting Rienzi on to the stage of the Paris Opéra. However this plan quickly turned to disaster: his passport having been seized by the authorities on behalf of his creditors, he and Minna had to make a dangerous and illegal crossing over the Prussian border, during which Minna suffered a miscarriage. Boarding the ship Thetis, whose captain had agreed to take them without passports, their sea journey was hindered by storms and high seas. The ship at one point took refuge in the Norwegian fjords at Tvedestrand, and a trip that was expected to take 8 days finally delivered Wagner to London 3 weeks after leaving Riga.

Wagner's experience of Paris was also disastrous. He was unable to get work as a conductor, and the Opéra did not want to produce Rienzi. The Wagners were reduced to penury, relying on handouts from friends and from the little income that Wagner could make writing articles on music and copying scores. Wagner hit on the idea of a one-act opera on the theme of the Flying Dutchman, which he hoped might be performed before a ballet at the Opéra.

"The voyage through the Norwegian reefs made a wonderful impression on my imagination; the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which the sailors verified, took on a distinctive, strange colouring that only my sea adventures could have given it."

Wagner wrote the first prose draft of the story in Paris early in May 1840, basing the story on Heinrich Heine's satire "The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski" (Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski) published in Der Salon in 1834. In Heine's tale, the narrator watches a performance of a fictitious stage play on the theme of the sea captain cursed to sail forever for blasphemy. Heine introduces the character as a Wandering Jew of the ocean, and also added the device taken up so vigorously by Wagner in this, and many subsequent operas: the Dutchman can only be redeemed by the love of a faithful woman. In Heine's version, this is presented as a means for ironic humour; however, Wagner took this theme literally and in his draft, the woman is faithful until death.

By the end of May 1841 Wagner had completed the libretto or poem as he preferred to call it. Composition of the music had begun during May - July of the previous year, 1840, when Wagner wrote Senta's Ballad, the Norwegian Sailors' song in Act 3 ("Steersman, leave the Watch!") and the subsequent Phantom song of the Dutchman's crew in the same scene. These were composed for an audition at the Paris Opéra, along with the sketch of the plot. Wagner actually sold the sketch to the Director of the Opéra, Léon Pillet, for 500 francs, but was unable to convince him that the music was worth anything. The rest of the opera was composed during the summer of 1841, with the Overture being written last, and by November 1841 the orchestration of the score was complete. Relieved of the need to give the Opéra a one-act drama, he had expanded the opera to the more conventional three acts.

Wagner's original draft had the action set in Scotland, and many of the characters had Scottish names. He changed the location and names to the final Norwegian version while the opera was in rehearsals for its first production, which took place in Dresden in January 1843 with Wagner himself conducting.

Writing in "Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde" ("A Communication to my Friends") in 1851, Wagner claimed that Der fliegende Holländer represented a new start for him:

"From here begins my career as poet, and my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera-texts."

Indeed to this day Der fliegende Holländer is the earliest of Wagner's operas to be performed at the Bayreuth Festival, and, at least for that theatre, marks the start of the mature Wagner canon.