Navigating Wagner’s Tempest: Van Zweden’s Riveting Conquest of Der Fliegende Holländer

Once more, Jaap van Zweden has raised his baton to deliver us a Wagner opera to remember, casting a spell over the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with a haunted interpretation of Der Fliegende Holländer. After masterfully handling Lohengrin, Meistersinger, Die Walküre, and Parsifal on earlier occassions in this venue Van Zweden plunged into the supernatural depths of the Flying Dutchman, and it was nothing short of electrifying. 

Wagner is a master of turning sound into narrative, and that’s precisely why his operas thrive in concert form. Here, the orchestra isn’t just accompanying the drama—it is the drama. With the orchestra laid bare before us, the music rises like a tempest, a vast, churning sea that threatens to engulf all in its path. The storm is the manifestation of eternal unrest, of passions so intense they border on madness. The wind howls, the waves crash—an allegory for a soul adrift, seeking redemption in a world where only the most harrowing sacrifice can bring meaning. And in the hands of Jaap van Zweden this tumultuous force is masterfully controlled. He grasps Wagner’s complex score with grim determination, guiding us in moderate tempi through a musical landscape that allows every haunting moment to breathe, every sinister whisper to be heard.

In this world, so vividly brought to life, the fate of both men and women is far from enviable. Yet, it is particularly the fate of women that offers little to no hope. Wagner's vision of womanhood is one fraught with peril, for in his universe, the woman holds the key to the man’s salvation. This burden is a cruel one. Wagner’s reverence for the feminine form is a double-edged sword, exalting women only to bind them to a role of servitude. Independence, in this desolate realm, is but an illusion. The woman is supposed to do what the man requires, bring redemption for need or desire. It’s a dynamic that’s still alive and kicking in many of today’s love songs and power ballads—a painful reminder of how far we haven’t come.

A power ballad of sorts in Wagner’s opera is Senta's ballad. An aria that's supposed to be a gut-wrenching confession of longing, a dream spun from the darkest corners of her soul. Yet Ricarda Merbeth, stepping in at the eleventh hour, lacked the spectral quality required to summon Senta’s vision of the pale, cursed man of her dreams. Instead, she belted it out like Brünnhilde torching Valhalla, or Venus unleashing her wrath on Tannhäuser. The vulnerability, the quiet desperation that should have drawn you into Senta’s world was absent. Merbeth did better later on when Senta’s passion tipped into bordeline insanity, but by then, the spell had already broken. Merbeth, also when taken into account that she was a last-minute substitute, was the weak link of the cast. 

With Brian Mulligan as the Dutchman there was a man with a tortured soul whose every note was steeped in doom. His bariton was dark, resonant, and filled with the weight of centuries spent drifting on a ghost ship, cursed and haunted. You could feel his torment. Andreas Bauer Kanabas as Daland—the man willing to sell off his own daughter's future for fortune—had a bass voice that rumbled like thunder, matching his character’s moral decay. And Benjamin Bruns as Erik, the hapless lover who watches Senta slip away into the abyss, gave a solid performance that was laced with desperation and sorrow,  a portrayal that lingered like the final echo of a dying storm. The roles of the men were well covered with the Helmsman of Matthew Swensen as possible exception. His nasal tenor didn’t exactly steer us into safer waters. 

But the real stars of the afternoon were the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Van Zweden leading them like a man possessed, and the voices of the Groot Omroepkoor and Cappella Amsterdam. Together, they created this tidal wave of sound, this massive, overwhelming force that swept over everything in its path. It was pure, unfiltered Wagner—no pretense. ​

Der Fliegende Holländer was for a long time my least favourite Wagner opera. It was the opera I returned to much less than the other ones in the Wagner catalogue. But it has won my heart over time - thanks to some fine productions (I'm thinking of a wonderful Holländer at the Nederlandse Reisopera in 2018). Holländer is a tale woven in the very fabric of the macabre, a phantasmagoria that demands to be told in hues of shadow and dread. And unless someone like Tobias Kratzer will prove otherwise, I consider Holländer, a story born in a haunted realm, a piece in which the ghost and the gothic must not be abandoned in favour of the cold and abstract.  And yet, in the realm of concert performance, where the eye is denied its due, the mind conjures the images all the same. The music itself—so evocative, so eerily vivid—paints with sound the very specters of the tale.

​Where previous performances of Der Holländer at the Concertgebouw could feel like going through the motions (looking at you, Andris Nelsons in 2013), this one was alive, pulsing with passion and burning with energy.

It was an adrenaline-inducing listening experience, something that blows you away and gets under your skin. On this afternoon, the ghost ship sailed again in all its gothic grandeur, a vessel of dark passion that made hearts race and souls tremble. May we not have to wait another seven years to once again be drawn into its cursed embrace.

DER BLEICHE MANN (the pale man)
In 1901, Der Fliegende Holländer was performed for the first time at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth (the opera had premiered in Dresden in 1843, the Bayreuther premier was posthumous, Wagner did not find Der Holländer worthy for his own Festspielhaus). In the audience of 1901 was an Irish writer who had made a name for himself a few years earlier, in 1897, with a novel: Dracula, the name that has since become almost synonymous with the word 'vampire'.

Bram Stoker was friends with Bayreuther house conductor Hans Richter, discussed with Richter theatrical matters such as stage lighting. Because next to being a writer, Stoker was also a man of the theatre. As a friend, admirer and manager of the famous English actor Henry Irving, he had made acquaintance with the Holländer-myth through Irvings' interpretation of Vanderdecken, a play about the Flying Dutchman. It was one Joseph Harker (a set designer from the environment of Irving, who designed the stage sets for productions of Lohengrin & Parsifal for Convent Garden in London) that gave Jonathan Harker, main character in Dracula, his name. The fate of the Dutchman (the pale man) shows striking similarities with that of a vampire. Infamous for wandering the earth for eternity. 

Wagner based his Holländer-opera on a story by Heinrich Heine, Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski. But he was also aware of vampires when composing Der Fliegende Holländer. In 1833, Wagner wrote additional music for a performance in Wurzburg of Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr (based on Polidori's The Vampyre). Moreover, the enigmatic figure who seeks to win over fathers with gifts to gain access to their daughters is a character Wagner directly adapted from Der Vampyr. And both title characters pursue their wives not merely out of love or desire but as a matter of survival. Marschner's vampire is compelled to kill three women within 24 hours to prolong his life by a year, while Wagner's Holländer seeks 'only' the unconditional love of a woman to break his curse of eternal damnation.

​Der Fliegende Holländer - Concertgebouw Amsterdam, 7 September 2024

​Radio Filharmonisch Orkest
Groot Omroepkamerkoor
Cappella Amsterdam
Jaap van Zweden conductor
Benjamin Goodson chorus master
Brian Mulligan bariton (Holländer)
Ricarda Merbeth soprano (Senta)
Benjamin Bruns tenor (Erik)
Andreas Bauer Kanabas bass (Daland)
Matthew Swensen tenor (Der Steurmann Dalands)
Iris van Wijnen mezzo soprano (Mary)

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- Wouter de Moor