A Role Model for Senta? Fred Bridgham examines a study of parallels between Wagner and Kleist

Review of Grit Schwarzkopf, Käthchen und Senta: Partnerfindung als Traumspiel in Heinrich von Kleists ‘Das Käthchen von Heilbronn’ und in Richard Wagners ‘Der fliegende Holländer’ (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015).

July 2017, Volume 11, Number 2, 94–6.

Not all Wagnerians today will know Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810), though Kleist’s evergreen ‘grand historical romance from the Age of Chivalry’ reached London in 1881, staged (in German, faithful to the original) by the Court Theatre of Meiningen, a decade after Der fliegende Holländer (in Italian) but a year before the Ring, Meistersinger and Tristan. Grit Schwarzkopf rightly notes how seldom Kleist and Wagner are bracketed together, but, it has to be said, her book is a lost opportunity. Crucially, neither author is placed in the context of his work as a whole, and an unnecessarily abstruse theory of the heroines’ ‘delegated fantasy’ (13–76) is at best unexceptional in these days of Regietheater. The focus is on sources, location, social world, character profiles, even etymologies in Käthchen (77–269); the Dutchman section (270–308) is more cursorily sketched, expressly excluding things musical. There is a brief but useful appendix of interpretative milestones (though no index), while the subtitle ‘On finding one’s partner as a dream play’ pinpoints the book’s main concerns.