⭐️⭐️⭐️

The cast of The Flying Dutchman at Gothenburg Opera | Credit: Tilo Stengel

Wagner’s Ring looms large over The Gothenburg Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman. Seat-pinning singing, idiomatic playing and fluid conducting all suggest the company’s recent staging of the cycle has left a musical mark. Director Alessandro Talevi’s belief that Wagner’s uneven early work adumbrates the Ring’s central theme of human greed at environmental expense is less convincing, while his underlining of the text’s misogyny plays havoc with the transformative love on which the opera’s climax hinges.  

Talevi serves up some potent home truths concerning toxic masculinity’s contribution to societal rot. If there are moments in this opera’s text that do indeed point to the Ring - proffering ‘a ring of gold’ for leverage, no less - there are many more that prove a way off the tetralogy’s suggestion that a lone woman’s power and wisdom can save the world. Here, Daland’s oil worker heavies have only inflatable sex-dolls for company on their rig, which anticipates the crudeness of their behavior on shore. All the womenfolk can do, confined like Barbies to one big pink household back home, is launder, clean and exercise (‘spinning’, naturally) in readiness for the return of their husbands. Kudos to the two members of The Gothenburg Opera chorus who do it all on roller-skates. 

Kjetil Støa and Åsa Jäger in The Flying Dutchman at Gothenburg Opera | Credit: Tilo Stengel

Fair enough: any production of this opera needs to underline the idea of two kindred spirits going against the grain of a limited society. Senta and the Dutchman certainly stand out. But so, to a problematic degree here, does Erik. A thinking individual apparently navigating his way through a gender transition, he always looks a more enlightened choice for Senta than a Dutchman who increasingly resembles a weathered Meatloaf. Nor does it help that this Erik sounds so magnificent in Kjetil Støa’s gleaming, legato-powered tenor. In any production of this opera, if you end up rooting for Erik you have a problem coming down the line.   

The lead couple’s chemistry is more vocal than physical. Craig Colclough’s Dutchman does enough to secure and intensify his presence at the heart of the drama, his attractive voice more lyrical than craggy and at its considerable and articulate best in the long-breathed passages. Åsa Jäger brings impressive dramatic weight to Senta. Hers is a Wagnerian voice with enormous promise and she is absolutely on top of it, though she could further explore accents and vowels. She has the discipline and depth to leave power in reserve for when the drama ratchets up, and thrills in the final emotional torrents, staged with a literal beauty by Talevi.  

Daniel Ralphsson in Gothenburg Opera's production of The Flying Dutchman | Credit: Tilo Stengel

By that point, though, there’s insufficient narrative investment in place and the story’s metaphysical passions and cosmic battles haven’t been clarified. Senta, alienating in her heartlessness to Erik, offers few clues as to her motives; is she an eco-warrior, a Gothic fantasist, a neurotic obsessive? What does she have that could possibly sooth this Dutchman’s well-drawn existential pain?  

Mats Almgren brings vocal warmth and a touch of gleam to a Daland who errs more towards manipulation than compassion. The role sits well for him, though as usual, I want to hear more vowels. In the pit, Alevtina Ioffe is alive to phrase and balance. This is a virile yet heavy reading - valid, sure - but it can bypass the score’s rhythmic buoyancy and hasn’t yet settled into a broad musical arc that can lift the no-interval 1843 version of the piece to another level (no planned interval, at least: during this performance, a set malfunction brought the curtain down for 10 minutes during the final party scene). Not a Dutchman that sinks, then, but despite some outstanding singing, nor one that can dispel memories of Lotte de Beer’s searing 2019 staging down the Swedish coast in Malmö. 

The Flying Dutchman is at Gothenburg Opera until 4 April | www.opera.se