Der fliegende Holländer

In the organizer's words:

The eerie world of Romanticism with its revenants and ghostly ships inspired Wagner to write his first mature work. Christian Spuck tells the story of the "Cursed of the Seas" and the lonely captain's daughter as a dark fairy tale from the memory of Senta's spurned admirer, the hunter Erik ... Conductor: Ivan Repusic / Dominic Limburg [Nov 12]; Production: Christian Spuck; With Tobias Kehrer / Patrick Guetti, Elisabeth Teige / Vida Mikneviciute [Nov 12, 24], Robert Watson, Michael Volle / Noel Bouley [Nov 24] and others.
The Dutchman is a cursed man, a driven man, an outsider. Richard Wagner became acquainted with the figure of this homeless man in Heinrich Heine, who, however, narrated the romantic material with his typical irony. Wagner, on the other hand, was not interested in Heine's frame story, which put the Holländer material at a distance. Wagner immersed himself in the story of the mysterious seafarer and created his first opera about a man's search for the woman who will redeem him. Holländer, the restless wanderer between life and death, meets a woman - Senta - who also seems alien and homeless, and longs for a male figure born of her own fantasies: the Holländer. It is a world of dream images and the fantastic, of obsessions and projections - a world that has long since lost touch with reality. This especially affects the hunter Erik, who appears as perhaps the only true and real lover. But he no longer reaches the others, who dissolve in their dreams. Wagner's opera, written in 1841 and premiered in Dresden in 1843, is a turn to the tradition of German Romantic opera by Weber or Marschner after the preceding RIENZI, which stylistically followed the Grand Opéra. Despite this orientation to the zeitgeist, the work points ahead to Wagner's further development as a music dramatist. And for the first time, Wagner's life theme of redemption through love in death is at the center.

Director and choreographer Christian Spuck, who already wowed audiences at Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2014 with his production of Hector Berlioz's FAUSTS VERDAMMNIS, is working for the second time at Deutsche Oper Berlin, again in a team with General Music Director Donald Runnicles. This content has been machine translated.