Der fliegende Holländer

Der fliegende Holländer links up to the tradition of Carl Maria von Weber’s and Heinrich Marschner’s German Romantic operas. Yet even though still adhering to the conventional structure of self-contained numbers with recitatives and arias, in this work Wagner set out on the path towards the style that would characterise his later creations, through-composed music dramas with leitmotivs, associated with specific characters and themes. An important role in the opera is played by a dream: Senta lives in another world, different to that inhabited by the people around her; she yearns for the mysterious Dutchman, a figment of her imagination and a phantom she deems real. Wagner thus afforded theatre-makers tremendous scope for presenting the often very narrow borders between reality and dream, or sanity and insanity.