A Dream Come True: Mike Ashman greets the belated release of Joachim Herz’s pioneering ‘Holländer’ film

Review of Der fliegende Holländer, directed Herz, conducted Reuter, Leipzig, 1964 (Progress Film-Verleih and DEFA-Stiftung, 1 DVD).

November 2014, Volume 8, Number 3, 75–8.

The belated release on home DVD of stage director Joachim Herz’s 1964 film Der fliegende Holländer ‘nach der Oper von Richard Wagner’ highlights a number of important achievements. The film was the climax of a period of work on the opera by the director which began with stage productions in Leipzig, Berlin and Moscow. Others in the early part of the 20th century had pontificated in print about the likeness to film, or the suitability for filming, of Wagner’s stage work. Herz was the first actually to do something about it, making a feature film – as opposed to training cameras on a theatre performance – of a complete Wagner opera.