Of all of Wagner’s works, the details behind The Flying Dutchman are the trickiest to
sort out. He wrote it very quickly when
he was staying in Paris, and did not explain its genesis until he dictated his
autobiography many years later, by which time he jumbled fact and fiction
together in what one musicologist has called “retrospective myth-making.” The plot is set in a more recent time than
most of his operas, and the story of the Flying Dutchman itself was relatively
recent, having travelled from Holland to the rest of Europe only at the end of
the 18th century. We know
Wagner got the idea for his opera from a very short story by Heinrich Heine,
which describes a play version of the story taking place in a theatre in
Amsterdam. Now, here’s where this gets
interesting, because there was a play version that Heine could have seen when he
was in London in 1827. Heine made a trip
to London that year, and he could have caught one of the last performances of
the run of The Flying Dutchman; or, the
Phantom Ship by Edward Fitzball, one of the most successful authors of
melodramas of the time. The problem with
this theory is that Fitzball’s melodrama is a terrible play. It is amazingly complex, filled with demons
and opportunities for stage magic, and part of the plot revolves around a man
wearing a bear costume. In the second scene of act 2, the heroine,
here named Lestelle, sings a song while staring at a painting of the Flying
Dutchman, who is here and in other contemporary sources named
Vanderdecken.This obviously has a
similarity with Wagner’s opera.The
stage directions tell us she accompanies herself on the lute.Now, it is possible that it wasn’t really
played on the lute, much as performances today do not use the lute to accompany
Beckmesser’s song in Die Meistersinger.But, today, we are going to perform it with a
lute.The music to this song is by
George Herbert Rodwell, who was an author and impresario in addition to being a
composer.This song long outlasted the
composer, who lived from 1800 to 1852.It was published in many editions on both sides of the Atlantic starting
at the time of the show’s premiere, and was last published in 1890, when it was
included in a British publication of the 100 Standard Songs of the
century.
Copyright 2014 by Collectio Musicorum.
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