I see by Monday's Oregonian that Christopher Alden's production of Wagner's Flying Dutchman is playing in Portland. Apparently it depicts Captain Vandervecken and his crew as victims of the Holocaust, on the grounds that 1) the Flying Dutchman is the Wandering Jew and 2) Wagner was "a notorious anti-Semite and a darling of Hitler".
The matter of Wagner and anti-Semitism is something of a pet peeve of mine. The matterof Wagner and Hitler is an even bigger one. Reviewer James McQuillen writes that Alden's construction doesn't "hold up to very close scrutiny". That's putting it generously.
First of all, Wagner's anti-Semitism consisted largely of saying that if German Jews wanted to be accepted as Germans, it would help if they spoke German and wore German clothes. Considering that many of his contemporaries wouldn't have been satisfied even by their converting to Christianity, he was hardly the worst enemy German Jewry had in the 19th Century.
And let's not forget we are talking about the 19th Century, as in well before the rise of the Third Reich. Wagner never met Hitler, and there's no indication that the admiration would have been mutual. In fact, let's look at the Wagner operas that Hitler loved so much: did he ever understand them?
The Ring of the Nibelungs cycle can be summarized as, "A man renounces human feeling for the sake of power, and enjoys success for awhile, but in the end loses everything." Hitler did that.
The Flying Dutchman is the story of a man who damns himself by his own self-importance, disguised as obsessive devotion to duty. Hitler did that, too.
How does this sound for a production of the Flying Dutchman: Vandervecken is an unreconstructed Nazi who refuses to admit that the war is over, much less that he was on the wrong side. His U-boat surfaces at a modern-day coastal town, his threadbare uniform contrasting horrifically with the commercial fishermen and tourists. His crew, assembled from a variety of justly-lost causes, are equally out of place in their ski masks, Confederate flags and bomb-belts.
In order to be saved, Vandervecken must strip off the rags of his perverted "duty" and go to his bride as simply a man.
That's a Flying Dutchman I would like to see, and I wouldn't be surprised if Wagner would like it, too.
//The Magicv Eight-Ball says, "You're as much entitled to speak for Wagner as anyone else."\\
2 comments:
Very well said on Wagner and Hitler. There is so much ahistorical drivel floating around. Richard Wagner died in 1883, six years before Adolf Hitler was even born.
For all Hitler's supposed admiration of Wagner's work, the Nazis banned performances or broadcasts of Parsifal in 1939, on the grounds that it was too pacifist.
Oops! I hit "Publish" when I meant to hit "Preview", but I meant to add that I think your reading of "The Flying Dutchman" is very sound and insightful (and I've attended six different performances of the opera...)
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