Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden -staring into the void again

How often in our lives do we stare for hours into blackness? I ask because I have been staring at black for hours recently in Venice, Vienna and just two days ago, in London. And no, I haven't been staring at the midnight sky which is not black anyway, but deep, deep blue and offers relief in the form of stars, a moon and the occasional cloud.

The black I've been staring at has been on opera stages: A "Walkure" in Venice, a "Don Carlos" in Vienna and "The Flying Dutchman" at Covent Garden in London.  The Walkure gave us a Winterstorm scene where the coming of spring is played out against a black backdrop. Depressing and pointless. The "Don Carlos" was justified in as much as the Spanish Inquisition setting is one of the blackest periods of history.  But it was during that performance that I fell to thinking about the abnormality of just looking at black. And how it makes us feel.

Now Covent  Garden gives us a new Flying Dutchman. I'm not quite sure why. The stunning  and audacious Ian Judge production (1992-2000)  gave us a great ship's prow jutting out into the auditorium, blood red sails, a boat that transforms into a spinning room, a spinning room into a harbour. It was bold and beautiful and wildly exuberantly romantic. www.ianjudge.com

And so, in true Covent Garden tradition, they've replaced it with something dull and ugly. They did this with Salome. Sir Peter Hall gave us an opulent, burnished, decadently beautiful and unsettling world. So, after a brief outing, the loony Covent Garden management gave us, instead, Bondy's dull grey import from Paris.  They got rid of that and gave us lots of flowing blood in another  forgettable production that seemed to be centered around a naked executioner (?!) . Ditto for Eugene Oneguin which went through far too many expensive incarnations, given its infrequent showings, before it arrived at the rather lovely current version.

And now, oh my, the poor old Dutchman gets frogmarched through another operatic black, boring world.  The whole thing starts out well enough - during the overture we are confronted with a magical misty gauze that appears to have rain streaming down it. In what may be a coincidence, the curtain billows and folds in such a way that from where I was sitting,a  tall dark shadow seemed to form at regular intervals across the gauze. A symbol of the Dutchman? Or just a happy chance of a curtain fold? Behind the curtain a  light beams out at us at regular intervals. I got quite excited and anticipated a scene of a great harbour, a lighthouse and those blood-red sails on a black mast approaching in the distance. Yes, I know traditional but take a look at what Judge did with some of those elements. Broadway has never done better. 

Covent Garden certainly didn't on Friday. We were faced with a black set. All the guts of the Royal Opera House stage were on display on either side - lighting fixtures, scaffolding etc. The great Bryn Terfel appeared - always a thrilling moment. He was pulling a giant length of mooring rope that rose high up into the wings. For an insane moment I believed that he was going to pull his blood red sails onto the stage. He walked and sang magnificently and pulled. And I waited. After a while I started to wonder if he wasn't just walking an enormous dog or a dinosaur. I started to wait for it to appear. Perhaps it would symbolize, I don't know, the great black dog of the Dutchman's depression? The dinosaur that the Dutchman had become?  Whatever it was, it remained in the wings. Damn!

I've obviously been looking at far too many silly productions in my two decades of opera-going. This production wasn't silly - not at all. But it was ugly and depressing and gave not a hint of the great romantic work that this opera is. If you don't want to deal with the romantic nature of the Dutchman, I'd advise staying well away from Wagner's opera. Tim Albery didn't, alas.

He came up with the usual ruse of setting the story in modern times. That's okay but not particularly exciting. Are we so limited in our imaginations that we can't empathize with lives lived before we were born? If the chorus don't look like Amy Winehouse wannabees, is their singing of less power and interest? 

But it's the drabness, the sheer ugliness that got me down. The spinners become workers at sewing machines, labouring  under a battery of  garish and, painful to my eyes, fluorescent lights.  The ghost sailors emerge to molest poor old Senta, who has to come on stage and get roughed up in another garishly, fluorescent-lit set.  And all the while we gaze at the black and I just longed for some blood-red sails. If nothing else, I suppose all these grim black productions served to teach me how much colour matters in our lives and how powerful it is when well used on a stage. 

The singing was magnificent, particularly Bryn  Terfel as the Dutchman and the ROH orchestra their usual stunning Wagnerian selves. But another black day at the Garden alas.

Cosima Wagner's Diaries - Richard Wagner preferred blondes

Cosima Wagner's diaries are an intimidating read. In their original form they comprised 21 notebooks - kept in a Munich bank vault for years then transported to Bayreuth under police escort on 12 March 1974. Over a million words record what her beloved Richard ate and drank, when and where he walked, when he worked, what he said, when he dreamed and what he thought. And this was a man who had an opinion, alas, on everything.

The diaries stop dead when he died of a heart attack in Venice on February 13th 1883. Cosima held the dead Wagner in her arms for 24 hours. Then she accompanied the body back to Bayreuth for burial. She would live on for another 44 years but she never wrote another word.

Unconditional love of another human being does not make for happiness. Cosima adores her man but oh my she suffers. She has serious problems with her sight - not easy for a dedicated writer, and she longs endlessly and often rather casually for death. She suffers but very ambiguously from her man's infidelities - cryptic mentions are made of her own unhappiness during his dalliance with novelist Judith Gautier. At the end she suspected a liaison with Parsifal flower girl, Carrie Pringle.

But there is a surprisingly cosy side to the Wagners' life. They dance around the Christmas tree, gossip over coffee at lunch. She is awoken one night by "Richard in a purple night shirt, wandering around looking for his cheque book." He brings in a hairdresser to dye her hair blonde. Cosima comments that she is happy to go grey but Richard likes her blonde.

Wagner often travels by train and, compulsive communicator that he was, sends telegrams from every railway station. So, in the 19th century, instant communication almost rivalled today's emails. Imagine if this man had been around today. We'd have all been trembling as we opened Outlook Express. "Oh blimey! More spam from Richard!"

Wagner's Death in Venice

Richard Wagner lived the last months of his life in the Palazzo Vendramin on Venice’s Grand Canal. He died there of a heart attack on February 13, 1883.The room in which he died is open to the public, along with two other rooms on the mezzanine of the palazzo which these days serves as the winter quarters of Venice’s casino.

Wagner drew on mythology as the inspiration for operas such as the colossal Ring of the Nibelungen, and his own life and death are wreathed in myth and fantasy. Was he, as was claimed, the best-read man of the nineteenth century? The subject of more books than any other person except Christ. A womanizer? Had an argument with his wife Cosima over Carrie Pringle, a young Scottish soprano, set off the heart attack that would kill him? Did Cosima really hold him in her arms for 24 hours after he died?Romantically inclined visitors to these rooms in Venice even claim that, when the breeze from the canal blows in the right direction, you can still catch the scent of one of Wagner’s favourite French perfumes.

All that is sure on the guided visit to the Wagner rooms is that they contain replicas and some originals of the composer’s manuscripts and letters (including one from father-in-law Franz Liszt) a copy of the couch on which he died and that, while you wander, some of the most sensuous, luminous, transcendent music ever to issue from a human brain will be playing in the background.I think that’s quite enough for one Saturday morning in Venice.

Guided tours only – on Saturday mornings. Reservations should be made by phone on Fridays between 10 and 12am at + 39 349 5936990. The tours are free but with a donation suggested. Address: Palazzo Loredan-Vendramin-Calergi, Cannaregio - Venezia