Dutchman in the Doldrums: The frisson of the supernatural is missing from this Florentine production for Richard Laing

Review of Der fliegende Holländer, directed Curran, conducted Luisi, Florence, 2019 (C major, 1 Blu-ray disc).

November 2020, Volume 14, Number 3, 65–8.

Though the narrator of Heinrich Heine’s Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski (1833) misses most of the drama of the Flying Dutchman for a rather more entertaining assignation with a Flirting Dutchwoman, he sees enough to recall how on stage the ‘Wandering Jew of the Ocean’ laments that ‘his body itself is its living coffin, wherein his soul is terribly imprisoned’. Wagner made no secret of the inspiration he drew from Heine’s work. He may also have known of the Struldbruggs of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, who age but never die: as Gulliver describes them, these rare people are ‘the most mortifying sight I ever beheld’. An avid student of Greek myth, Wagner would certainly have been aware of the unfortunate Tithonus, whose lover begged Zeus to grant him immortality, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. The composer would perhaps have enjoyed Tennyson’s Tithonus, dating from the same year as Heine’s Schnabelewopski (though unpublished until 1859), wherein the agonised lover bewails his fate: ‘Me only cruel immortality / Consumes’. Drawn to some of the same myths as Wagner, J.R.R. Tolkien would later have his own take on supernaturally extended life: ‘I feel all thin,’ Bilbo Baggins complains, ‘sort of stretched … like butter scraped over too much bread.’