Singers triumph in Chicago’s phantasmagoric “Der Fliegende Holländer"

Written by Benjamin Torbert

Lyric Opera of Chicago opened their 2023-24 season with a splendidly-cast staging of Richard Wagner’s brooding 1843 spooktacular, “Der Fliegende Holländer” (“The Flying Dutchman;” reviewer saw opening night on 23 September but focused on 1 October’s matinee). A co-production with Canadian Opera Company, director Christopher Alden’s “Dutchman” featured prominently on the pre-show curtain a two-story high reproduction of Erich Heckel’s woodcut, “Mann in der Ebene” (“Man on a Plain,” 1917, pictured above). Tamara Wilson’s Senta, back to the audience before the curtain, stood reaching for it, nearly in worship, then grasping her head in pain. While Alden flooded the stage with interpretive ideas and might have benefitted from selecting approximately half, the choice of Heckel furnished a unifying conceit, raising questions central to the story about the importance of images and the gaze in romantic and erotic love.

Copious stage business, including the climactic finale, involved the characters Senta and Mary interacting with a more manageably sized replica. “Man on a Plain” depicts a stylized self-portrait of Heckel, emaciated, despairing, and surrounded by environmental desolation of a World War I flavor. Both the character of the Dutchman and “Man on a Plain” echo the myth of the Wandering Jew, and Heckel’s art was later classified entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”) by the Nazis, who destroyed much of it. Like the Wandering Jew, and the protagonist of the folk tale “The Soldier and Death,” Wagner’s Dutchman sails the earth in undesired immortality, punishment for an ancient infraction. (A reading is out there, that this production makes the Dutchman a Holocaust survivor, which appears conclusively contradicted by the wedding party’s 1920s clothing). The opera unfolds at the Dutchman’s latest septennial opportunity for redemption; only then may he dock ashore, potentially to be saved by the faithful love of a mortal woman. Senta obliges the story, compelled by a portrait of the Dutchman, and fixed up with him by her father, Daland. People falling in love with pictures—nowadays the stuff of Match or eHarmony’s business model—was an operatic commonplace, but Alden went all in, centering the portrait and its supernatural power, Senta caressing the frame as she died at the final curtain.

Wagner’s interface with both misogyny and a measured proto-feminism do receive a sizable fraction as much ink that his anti-Semitism has garnered, and Alden’s production addressed the worryingly gendered facets of Wagner’s earliest canonical work by featuring the women as much as possible, affording Senta more agency than usual, and elevating the supporting role Mary to an evening-long stage presence. As such, Tamara Wilson’s Senta seemed the main character, even past the Dutchman.

A natural fit for Wagner, Wilson’s instrument is a marvel. Though it cuts, and fills the cavernous Civic Opera House, as few singers can, she also floats pianissimi and tapers her sound in granular increments. In Senta’s ballad, she gave a master class in control. Her timbre, perhaps seven tenths steely and three tenths warm, transmits force without screechiness. Men surround Senta in the score, and Wilson matched or exceeded each’s vocal power in duets. With such a boss Senta, perhaps it’s the paranormal power of her love [towards the portrait] that drew the Dutchman to these shores—a better look for the story than a random storm pushing him ashore into the happenstance of meeting Senta’s conventionally marriage-minded father, Daland. While I’m increasingly discomfited by opera stagings directing men to shoot firearms at women, who decease otherwise in the libretto, Wilson’s Senta made this dénouement appear entirely her choice, holding the portrait in front of her face and daring jilted suitor Erik to execute her. So he did, firing a Chekhovian rifle he and others had waved around for a good hour.

Alden’s directorial conceit shaped Melody Wilson’s Mary even more showily. Wagner did the mezzo-soprano no favors, surrounding her often pattering lines with a women’s chorus two dozen strong and locating her in a low tessitura, but in her Lyric Opera debut, Wilson leveraged Mary’s few legato opportunities with a lovely, blooming middle and top, audible chest, and warm coloring throughout. After warning Senta away from and confiscating the Dutchman’s portrait, Mary swiftly developed an erotic fixation on the picture during Senta’s ballad, and spent much of the rest of the opera mooning over it, detaching it from and rehanging it on the wall, and cradling and stroking it as though she were Strauss’ Salome holding John the Baptist’s head—Wilson’s acting chops proved crucial, or all this would have landed cheesily. The psychosexual exclamation point for the performance occurred precisely at the moment Erik shot Senta through the Heckel canvas: Mary clearly experienced her own petit mort thereupon. This directorial choice reified the interplay between people falling in love with each other, and people falling in love with images, ideas. When together onstage, Mary scarcely seemed to notice the real Dutchman; that further problematized Senta’s orientation to him. He’s as much ghostly apparition as man, and Senta falls, knowing a single fact about him—he suffers. Do people fall in love with people, or with our ideas about and images of each other?

The production treated the men more conventionally. Veteran Wagnerian bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny, singing Wotan worldwide, made a fine Dutchman. Wagner’s strengths have kept his work central to operatic repertory despite his glaring weaknesses, and again, undercurrents of anti-Semitism in “Meistersinger” and “Das Rheingold” aren’t the only pitfalls. Many concern gender. Wagner’s most-accustomed topos, in fact, is a male character wallowing in his pain, from the Dutchman and Erik to Tannhäuser, Tristan, Wotan, Siegmund, Alberich, Amfortas—on it goes. This presents a challenge for the star, how to generate pathos without a contemporary audience deeming the character insufferable. Konieczny walked this tightrope admirably. His middle register was a bit covered, but overall his vocalism impressed, and reinforced the Dutchman’s character. His forte showed off his timbre best, a sandalwood color, and he managed formidable pacing, carrying past the orchestra with ease all evening. Alden directed him to attempt to hang himself at the end of his opening monologue (“Die Frist is um / the term is up”), the more pathetic because the Dutchman knows well that he won’t die. Konieczny vividly communicated the Dutchman’s burnout, even in the hopeful duet with Senta. A man who’s dead inside makes an apt Rorschach test for the other characters, who are all too willing to project their own psychology onto him, or his portrait.

Bass Mika Kares’ Daland affably soldiered on, wearing lightly Alden’s direction that positioned him as comic relief. Kares too met the orchestra with power and his voice carried into the oversized auditorium, a prosaic, fatherly sound. Daland’s avarice upon the Dutchman’s offer of oodles of gold, as dowry for Senta, played humorously. You could almost see cartoon dollar signs on Kares’ eyelids, and Daland came off as a mark. The Dutchman’s inventory of “gold” resembled plastic Mardi Gras beads secured from Party City for a reasonable price, cheaply exposing Daland’s transactional view of marriage. The production, so full of ideas, seemed to run dry in Act III when Daland found himself with little to do, sitting sleepily as Mary gloried over the portrait and the Steersman drunkenly skulked about.

Like Mary, tenor Ryan Capozzo’s Steersman enjoyed enhanced stage action, buffeted and somersaulted by storms and compromised by the contents of a frequently-deployed hip flask—indeed, much of Act III unfolded as a drunken haze, both the men’s and women’s choruses pregaming the wedding in an overbeveraged melee. Recently emerging from Lyric’s young artists program, Capozzo obviously has a future as bright as his timbre. He gave a Lieder-esque, light rendering of the Steersman’s song with an effortless sounding top. I subsequently heard Capozzo in recital with Konieczny and Tamara Wilson; he’s likely to graduate not to heavier roles in Wagner, but lyric ones like Des Grieux (Massenet) and Nadir (Bizet), perhaps with a spinto turn a decade on. This is a talented singer one hopes isn’t pushed into excessive up-gauging of fach. The industrywide malaise of overworking singers reared its head with the Erik of Lyric debutant Robert Watson, a Europe-based tenor who’s appeared widely in Wagner. His timbre was pleasant enough, but he had to push and sounded fatigued both in his monologue and his duet with Senta—I’d bet his Wagner thrives better in sensibly-scaled European houses than it does in Chicago’s 3600-seat maw. Dramatically, he excelled, furthering the sense that not only Erik but all of these traumatized characters operate in a disordered milieu.

Fortunately for Watson, and the whole cast, maestro Enrique Mazzola marshalled the orchestra appropriately as an accompanist to the singers rather than as the show itself. In his own Wagner debut, Mazzola sustained over two hours of unbroken drive and verve—“Dutchman” features an Italianate, bel canto-adjacent bounciness absent from Wagner’s later works. In the overture, he coaxed from the orchestra effects of an undulating sea, swells rising from the timpani house right and crashing leftward into the strings, with clear horns and lower brass, and pleasantly blended winds. Mazzola incorporated Michael Black’s three choruses (men’s, women’s, offstage men) and unified all participants. He’s not Hans Knappertsbusch, but his Wagner is clearly headed in the right direction. A fully appreciative audience hooted and hollered for all the musicians.

Set and costume design by Allen Moyer variably augmented and undermined Alden’s staging. Weakest were costumes. The men sported predictable trenchcoats and assorted maritime garb, the Dutchman exiting his briefly, to reveal wide-striped prison pajamas. The women fared less well, Mary decked with a 1990 schoolteachers’ jumper, and Senta in a lengthy sweater mismatched to her dress. Senta labored beneath a choppy, orange Raggedy Ann wig, when Tamara Wilson’s own attractive long hair would have sufficed. All manner of couture chaos erupted in Act III, when the women’s chorus departed their Act II weaver’s costumes for fluorescent green-festooned flapper getups. The set made more sense, employing relatively modest effects efficiently. The huge steersman’s wheel in Act I joined a smaller disc and belt aloft to form a vaguely industrial flywheel, as the women’s chorus pantomimed looms and bobbins. Daland’s dinette set—where he struck the marital deal with the Dutchman and danced with the Steersman—moved on and off the ship’s deck as needed. Though singers mostly entered and exited by the wings and a spiral staircase, the Dutchman’s big reveal to Senta occurred in a backlit, centered doorframe where he stood regarding a wallet-sized photo of her given him by Daland. Nobody has the funds to build the two ships specified by Wagner, so Anne Militello’s lighting made clear that regular lighting indicated Daland’s ship, and a sickly red the Dutchman’s, as his ghost crew appeared trapped beneath in the hold. The set often resembled an expressionist painting.

Which returns us to vision. Mary’s frenetic calisthenics with the portrait culminated in her twice breaking the fourth wall, demanding that the audience gaze upon Heckel’s woodcut, the most unsexy rendering of a live man possible. Wagner’s later works frequently traffic in communication breakdown, people talking past each other, in “Götterdämmerung,” in “Tristan und Isolde,” and especially in “Lohengrin.” But Alden’s “Dutchman” compelled us to watch people looking past each other: Daland past the Dutchman at a gob of Mardi Gras beads; the Steersman past everyone in a drunken stupor; and Mary past the real Dutchman, lost in an erotic reverie upon an enervated grayscale rendering of a nearly skeletal male figure that visually rhymes with Munch’s “The Scream.” Erik didn’t even look directly at Senta as he shot her, only at the portrait. Romantic love, this production seems to contend, lives in our heads, and depends on deceptive images of scary power. What then, for a man whose septennial chance at an exit from a living hell depends upon Romantic love? Is his salvation her delusion?

“Der Fliegende Holländer” concludes on 7 October 2023; Lyric Opera of Chicago’s fall slate continues in November with Donizetti’s comedy “The Daughter of the Regiment,” and Janacek’s tragedy “Jenůfa.”