Der fliegende Holländer, Jan. 1989

This production marked Stephen Wadsworth’s Wagner debut at Seattle Opera, along with a team that included Thomas Lynch as set designer and Peter Kaczorowski as lighting designer. Marilyn Zschau was a superb Senta, and Gerard Schwarz’s conducting was youthful and energetic. Roger Roloff and Julian Patrick shared the Dutchman’s role persuasively. I made two bad mistakes that I have never repeated. The first was in schedule. Because the Holländer is a short opera by Wagner standards, I scheduled it for a short rehearsal period, and that short rehearsal period was made worse by the Christmas holidays. No Wagner opera is easy, and how we put this Holländer onstage at all is a mystery to me now. The credit goes to Wadsworth and to everyone else for doing the impossible.

The second mistake came about because of a problem I have in visualizing in three dimensions. When the technical director showed me Lynch’s designs, I never grasped that, as beautiful as they were, the deck on the Dutchman’s ship where Roloff would have to sing “Die Frist ist um,” his mega-monologue in Act I, was far back and up. Lynch didn’t know that in our theater that meant that only a baritone with the voice of a fog horn could have been heard against a Wagner orchestra. When we got to stage rehearsals, we tried everything we knew to make Roger’s sound get out into the house. We were partly successful, but I never forgot the lesson.

One moment in the production that comes to mind took place in Act II. Wagner, only thirty when he composed Holländer, had to get the chorus offstage quickly in Act II , and he wrote a quick, somewhat meaningless exit chorus. Wadsworth had an inspired idea: they all should pack sandwiches in an assembly line to give to the returning sailors. It made the speed of the chorus, always an awkward moment, very funny.

Since the opera was set in a period that could have been modern, Senta’s suicide was spectacular. She somehow connected herself to an electric box, controlling a lot of power, and hit the water connected to it, thus creating a huge explosion. Afterwards, she and the Dutchman walked toward each other at the curtain line during the transfiguration music just before the curtain fell.

The dress rehearsal proved the value of having students in attendance. The idea of the production was to have all of the characters except the Dutchman dressed in fishing garb that could have been found in Norway in the 1830s or in any fishing village near Seattle today. Dunya Ramicova had designed timeless nautical costumes. The Dutchman would wear a long coat, appropriate to a sea captain. In the second act duet, when the Dutchman believes that Senta is the one for him, he was supposed to open the coat and show that he is wearing an eighteenth-century dress costume. He would be of another time, in keeping with the story.

At the dress rehearsal, as is our custom today, there were close to a thousand high school students in the second balcony. When the Dutchman, standing sideways to the audience, opened his coat to Senta, directly across from him, the students roared in laughter. None of us got it. I ran upstairs and asked the students what was funny. They said, “He’s flashing her.” Needless to say, Roloff quickly was directed to turn halfway toward the audience before he opened his coat. Maybe the adult audience wouldn’t have laughed, but one never knows. Time after time, the students’ honest reaction has saved us later embarrassment.