Storm Warning

Canadian director François Girard, who proved himself a Wagner interpreter of the highest order with his profound 2013 staging of Parsifal, turns his attention this season to the composer’s first masterpiece, Der Fliegende Holländer, opening March 2. Evgeny Nikitin is the cursed sea captain doomed to sail for eternity, and Anja Kampe makes her Met debut as the devoted young woman whose love will set him free. Valery Gergiev conducts his first Wagner at the Met in nearly 15 years, leading Girard’s evocative new production, which explores the mystical nature of the opera and the power of images to consume us. By Jay Goodwin

In Der Fliegende Holländer, the young Norwegian beauty Senta stares, transfixed, at the portrait of a damned sea captain, captivated by the dark, mysterious image and drawn into its haunted world. With a new production of the opera that turns the Met stage into a massive oil painting, director François Girard hopes to give audiences the same experience.

Girard sees Der Fliegende Holländer from Senta’s point of view. “It’s the story of a young woman who is so obsessed with a picture that she will eventually be swallowed by it,” he explains. The director, also a celebrated filmmaker, says that making movies “induces picture-obsessions constantly,” so he can identify with the young woman’s infatuation.

Working with John Macfarlane, the most painterly of set designers, Girard has created a rich, sweeping aesthetic of dark yet subtly shaded tableaux—moonlit cloudscapes, crimson sunsets, and a hand-painted, stage-filling image of a ghostly eye, which acts as the Dutchman’s portrait and is visible as the audience fills the seats. To drive the point home, the director says, “we are completing the Met’s golden proscenium arch along the bottom side, so that the audience sees a large painting, framed as a painting. When the curtain goes up, we enter into it the same way Senta does.”

Russian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin headlines the cast for the new staging, stepping in for Sir Bryn Terfel, who withdrew due to an ankle injury that required surgery. Nikitin has made a strong impression singing Wagner roles at the Met before—including Fasolt and Gunther in last season’s Ring cycles and a memorable portrayal of Klingsor in Girard’s Parsifal production in both 2013 and 2018—but this will mark his first turn with the company as the Dutchman, one of the composer’s most mystical characters. Based on a folktale that became a popular inspiration for many 18th- and 19th-century writers, poets, and artists, the Dutchman is the perfect vessel for the moody yet idealistic imaginings of German Romanticism—a brash sea captain who, as punishment for invoking the devil while struggling to sail through a violent storm, is doomed to endlessly roam the seas until Judgment Day, or until a love “true unto death” releases him from the curse. He is permitted to set foot on dry land just once every seven years, so that he may search for a woman, suitably faithful and pure, to save him.

In the Met’s new production, the title character’s otherworldly nature will be given a unique visual representation. “We are creating a virtual shadow of the Dutchman,” says Girard, who stresses that his object was to portray the character as supernatural without resorting to any of the numerous ghost or zombie clichés. “As he moves, he carries with him a live-generated shadow, triggered by a dancer offstage who will mimic the singer’s every gesture.”

The production also features an important Met debut, as the powerful German soprano Anja Kampe makes her first appearance with the company as Senta. She has sung the Dutchman’s redeemer with great success throughout Europe, winning acclaim for both her thrilling singing and fierce commitment as an actor. Girard gives her plenty to sink her teeth into in his new production, including some striking stage action during the crucial scene in Act II when Senta, intoxicated by the Dutchman’s portrait, sings her famous Ballad, recounting his harrowing legend while the other young women look on in alarm. In this staging, not only has the portrait been transformed into Macfarlane’s gigantic painted eye, which stares hauntingly back at her, but the movements of the women, who in the libretto are spinning yarn, have been magnified as well. Each singer or dancer holds a thick rope that disappears into the flyspace above the stage, and as Senta sings, they slowly intertwine them to form a vast symbolic pattern. “Together,” Girard says, “they weave the net of destiny.”

When the staging has its premiere on March 2, maestro Valery Gergiev will be on the podium for his first Wagner at the Met since 2005, leading the brilliant Met Orchestra and Chorus in one of opera’s most thrilling and elemental scores. The composer’s earliest opera that is still frequently performed, it exhibits both the impetuosity of youth and the beginnings of the ideas that would come to define his style—and transform opera—in his later work.

Composed in 1840 and 1841 when Wagner was not yet 30, Der Fliegende Holländer was partially inspired by a journey the composer took by ship through the Baltic and North seas. The trip was part of a dramatic escape in summer 1839 from creditors in Riga (in present-day Latvia), where Wagner was music director of the opera and was buried in debt. After slipping over the border to Prussia under cover of darkness, the composer, his wife, and their enormous Newfoundland dog—appropriately named Robber—found passage to London on a small merchant vessel called the Thetis.

Wagner’s first encounter with travel on the high seas was a harrowing one, as the ship was repeatedly driven off course by violent storms. The voyage ended up taking twice as long as scheduled and included an unplanned stop in a tiny fishing village called Sandwike, on the southern coast of Norway, where the Thetis took refuge during a particularly relentless gale.

The composer drew on this firsthand experience to create the entirely convincing musical depiction of a storm at sea that begins the opera, and the entire score is infused with this dramatic, stirring energy—from the slashing strings that stand in for howling winds and driving rain to the echoing horn calls that conjure the shouts of sailors bouncing back from the rocky fjords. He even went so far as to set the opera in the very same village where the Thetis had found shelter, and claimed that some of the music sung by the opera’s chorus of mariners was directly based on the rhythmic cries of the Thetis’s crew as they struggled to moor their ship in the stormy harbor.

These images and inspirations are carried through to the Met’s new staging: As part of their work to arrive at the look of their production, Girard and his creative team studied the rocky landscape of the Norwegian coast around Sandwike and researched the clothing of its inhabitants at the time of Wagner’s visit.

Der Fliegende Holländer also marked Wagner’s first exploration of the leitmotif system—which uses recurring musical themes to represent characters, events, or ideas—that the composer would continue to develop and refine for decades, and which would become a defining characteristic of his style. “We are witnessing the seeds that will eventually grow into larger trees,” says Girard, who began his exploration of Wagner at the end, with Parsifal, “so we’re working backward, but still working with the same ideas.”

In fact, the director has found that it’s impossible not to bring his experience with the composer’s philosophical final masterpiece to this earlier work. He sees connections everywhere. “Because we’ve explored Wagner’s grand attempt to reconcile all spiritualities in Parsifal, we infuse some of that in Der Fliegende Holländer, giving the journey of the Dutchman a spiritual resonance,” he explains by way of an example. “It’s a mirroring system; we’re bouncing the final conclusions of his ideas and systems back to their origin.”

Jay Goodwin is the Met’s Editorial Director.