The production of Richard Wagner’s opera is a joint Ukrainian-German art project, dedicated to the great composer’s bicentennial, which will be marked by the world community in 2013. It should be mentioned that his Valkyrie, Siegfried, Lohengrin, and Tristan and Isolde are performed in many opera houses across the world, but in our country this classic’s musical heritage is a rare guest on the operatic stage.
The crew of The Flying Dutchman includes over 200 people (the soloists, choir, orchestra, ballet, and stagehands). The production is anything but cheap, but it is financed from private funds. The cost of the project is more than 100,000 euros. The house has purchased expensive equipment for visual and sound effects. In particular, they have a video projector, which will be used for the first time in this production (to render stormy seas). The producers promise that the premiere will be breathtaking (December 8 and 12, and then February 14 and 17). The performance will be in the original German language, with Ukrainian subtitles.
The Swiss-based producer Aleksander Jankov of Pro Musica Classic believes that this production should be interesting not only for Donetsk theatergoers, but for all Ukrainian music amateurs. Meanwhile, the chief conductor of the Donetsk Opera House Vasyl Vasylenko reminds that “Richard Wagner, the classic of the world operatic stage, is largely unknown to our public! And when the idea of celebrating the composer’s bicentennial with an opera suggested itself, we decided that The Flying Dutchman was the most intriguing and dynamic piece, whose dramaturgy will leave no one untouched.”
Germany’s Consulate General in Donetsk has purchased original Wagner’s sheet music published by Breitkopf (the scores, including those for the vocal parties, symphony orchestra, and choir). System Capital Management (SCM) is the project’s general partner, with financial support also rendered by the Ukrainian offices of such German companies as Knauf, Siemens, and Lufthansa.
The Flying Dutchman is being produced with the involvement of Ukrainian and German partners: the German Embassy in Ukraine, the Consulate General of Germany in Donetsk, and the German cultural center Goethe-Institut Ukraine.
Prior to the premier the opera house will remain closed for the public for a month, with rehearsals going on a daily basis. It took three days to assemble the scenery, which weighs nine tons. While stagehands were busy constructing the scenery, the choir, the extras, the orchestra, and the soloist were all rehearsing in classroom. The cast for major parts is already known (in fact, there will be several international casts), including leading vocalists from several countries. The Dutchman (bass baritone): Andreas Macco, Germany; laureate of international competitions Oleksandr Blahodarny; Merited Artist of Ukraine Anatolii Voronin. Daland, a Norwegian sea captain (bass): Walter Fink, Austria; Merited Artist of Ukraine Yurii Alekseichuk; international competition winner Maksym Ivashchuk; Oleksandr Klymov. Senta, Daland’s daughter (soprano): laureate of international competitions Lesia Aleksieieva (the National Opera of Ukraine); Merited Artist of Ukraine Tetiana Plekhanova; Elana Sahaidak. Eric, a young huntsman (tenor): Vitalii Kozin; Oleksandr Levchyshyn. Mary, Senta’s nurse (mezzo-soprano): laureate of international competitions Hanna Maksudova; Natalia Matveieva. Daland’s steersman (tenor): laureate of international competitions Yevhenii Udovin; Volodymyr Khamraiev.
The renowned maestro of the Mariinsky Theater Mikhail Sinkevich (Saint Petersburg, Russia) is the consulting conductor of the production. Set designers in charge of the artists are Momme Hinrichs and Torge Moller (Germany). The costume designer is Julia Harttung (Germany), the choir will be led by Liudmyla Streltsova, head choirmaster of the Donbass Opera, the co-rehearser is Malte Kroidl (Germany), and the producing conductor is Vasyl Vasylko, head conductor of the Donbass Opera. Vasyl Riabenky, director general of the Donbass Opera, is the project manager, while directing is done by Mara Kurotschka (Germany).
During rehearsals, the director Kurotschka is very emotional and expressive while demonstrating gestures to the soloists (Fink, Macco, and Aleksieieva) and explaining the meaning of each scene. “Wagner is a very sophisticated composer, who requires that you sing and crawl simultaneously. He combined the vocals, directing, and performing mastery,” said the director afterwards. “It is not about just coming up to the front and singing your part beautifully. It must sound nice and look nice.”
The stage itself is designed as a ship’s deck, tilted in a storm. The soloist and choir need to literally find their feet. Some actors prefer reciting barefoot, so they can get used to the “deck.” “I was so touched when the artists embraced my idea,” says the director. “Everyone is ready to experiment, because our production is not a conventional one. I really feel like we were all in one boat.”
The Kyivite Lesia Aleksieieva is a laureate of the International Wagner Competition for Young Vocalists. She has worked in Austria and is familiar with the German opera. She is delighted with the director: “Mara is a very open person, always ready to listen to the opponent. She has ingenious ideas. They are simple yet brilliant. She works by Stanislavsky’s principle: not just telling what and how must be done, but explaining what the protagonists feel and why they behave this or another way. You can’t sing Wagner without this.”
The title, The Flying Dutchman, implies that the Dutchman is the major figure of the play. However, in the Donetsk Opera’s production it is Senta who will be in the spotlight. This interpretation of the well-known plot is quite unexpected. In Wagner’s opera, Senta dies with the last chords of music. In Kurotschka’s interpretation, she dies as early as in the overture. The international team of artists has a lot of surprises for the public in stock. This is why The Day has asked Kurotschka to tell more about the starting point of the Donetsk production, and explain how she succeeded in combining romanticism and fantasy on stage, share about the Dutchman’s restless soul, the imagery of Senta’s dreams, the play’s female agenda, and the meaning of The Flying Dutchman for the contemporary public.
“LIFE IS LIKE A RISKY VOYAGE”
“The shipwreck – a conventional plot for Wagner’s time – is our production’s theme and leitmotif. The central images are a drifting raft, tossed by the waves, and a little man opposing the elements. Life is like a risky voyage, a symbol of isolation in the evil world, which is shaped by economic, social, and political trouble, and in which man is struggling to survive,” muses Mara KUROTSCHKA. “In Wagner’s Flying Dutchman we come across several survivors of a shipwreck: the Dutchman, the captain and his crew, also shipwrecked, and Senta, who is experiencing her own emotional shipwreck. Even the careens and threatens to sink in the orchestra pit. Centuries have washed over it and cleared it of all the debris.
“We are looking back to that time. On the one hand, we sense the protagonists’ homesickness and yearning for shelter; on the other, lust for freedom and adventure, promised by sea. These two poles define the protagonists’ destiny, and serve as a background for an emotionally tense story.”
“SENTA’S VISIONS COME CRAWLING FROM UNDER HER BED”
The plot is a legend, a scary story recited by Wagner with a choir of ghosts, specters, and the legendary Dutchman. How do you handle the fantastic element, so typical of romanticism?
“I render The Dutchman as Senta’s troubled dream. It is very close to Wagner’s music, which vibrates with the girl’s reveries. On the one hand, it reproduces the zeitgeist and conveys Senta’s propensity to alienation and hallucinating. On the other, it creates a great background for developing more fantastical lines.
“Senta’s visions come crawling from under her bed. The sheet spreads across the stage and turns into the sea. The sea comes pouring through the door or unfolds out of a costume. The chopping waves conceal an abyss.
“The sea surface also hides the unsaid desires, fears, hopes, and crimes. They pop up on the surface as reflections, or loom against the backdrop like restless souls, and dominate everything that is happening on the stage. The figures on the stage also retreat to the sea, or appear on it again as if washed by tides and ebbs.
“Senta’s delirious dreams usher the spectator into the world of fantastical reality, where the protagonist’s actual experiences are transferred to metaphorical visions and events. They superimpose, the figures appear three-dimensional, there are numerous overlaps, crossovers, the time spans shift as if the action recurred and repeated itself in variations. The surrealistic sequence of Senta’s dreams resembles a kaleidoscope of individual fates and social processes.”
“THE DUTCHMAN IS NOT JUST A RESTLESS, WANDERING SOUL THAT CANNOT FIND PEACE FOR CENTURIES. HE IS AN IMAGE FROM SENTA’S DREAMS”
In Senta’s dream we experience the events that are going on through her emotional perspective. We face a narrow-minded, mercenary, hostile and hard-hearted world, dominated by her father and Mary. Senta dreams of the Dutchman, she senses a fantastical soul-mate in him.
The Dutchman is also in search for a different life. He comes from nowhere, drifting across the seas after a shipwreck, yearning for a different life, and separated from his own self due to the circumstances of his existence.
In the Dutchman, Senta sees an extraordinary, critically-thinking human man, capable of rescuing her from the burden of her father’s home. Her yearning for this sea farer, to the Absolute, is most explicit in her ballad – the leitmotif of the piece which discloses Senta’s desire for liberation and escape from the narrow-minded, philistine treatment of romantic freedom.
Her true man-to-be, the cold, unsympathetic Eric can give her nothing of it. On the contrary, with Eric at her side she faces an abyss, since marrying him would inevitably mean the continuation of her previous wretched existence as Daland’s daughter.
CHERCHEZ LA FEMME!
It is a story of a personal fiasco in an attempt of attaining cherished dreams and live a life of one’s own. The prevailing themes are those of fear, the experience of living on the edge, and feeling out of place in the circumstances of a person’s life. For women from the 19th-century bourgeois milieu this was a particularly obvious, painful problem. But through the perspective of Senta as a female protagonist we still can see universal themes.
“DEATH AS THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THE STORY”
In Wagner’s Flying Dutchman Senta’s death was determined musically from the very beginning. You can hear the motif of death during the overture, and at the beginning of Senta’s meeting with the Dutchman, after the fatal pause, we hear the well-known death motif: laudatory signing, typical for Italian and French Opera, in the traditional rhymed peon rhythm (timpani solo).
This death is portrayed as the beginning and the end of the story. The added prologue complements libretto and comes out of the original work. Senta has to play a passive role in her strictly regulated world, which is typical for the majority of women of the 19th century. She is forced to marry a man she does not love, her playmate Eric. He is a simple-minded, crude man, who cares for his own wishes and desires, and for whom Senta’s personality and feelings are of no importance.
Senta solves this dead-end situation with a suicide. And then action spins from this prerequisite. In her pre-death dream Senta manages to rise above her death with the Dutchman’s help, her savior and avenger. Her death is not pointless, like any real pathetic suicide, but it is the “life goal.” Her bed becomes a raft of death which carries her towards her end and her lifetime dream.
ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FLYING DUTCHMAN FOR MODERN AUDIENCE
“First of all, in this performance I plan to express the lifestyle of the 19th century (unlike Wagner’s 17th century) through Senta’s story. I want to come as close to it as possible from the modern perspective, because I see considerable parallels with the present-day social sentiment. Globalization, hyper capitalism, market instability, change of values lead to a situation when a lonely person feels helpless in a game with no clear rules.
“In the 19th century, just like it is now, promises are endless, the world and its resources seem to be completely available, consciousness systems that were carefully passed from one generation to another are now ruined, each person going through a stage of ‘transcendental homelessness,’ as Lukach described it.
“An individual loses balance in this tension between a promise and absurdity. States of postponement and unstable drifting are described in works by the great novel writers, like Melville and Flaubert. The fear is rising, nationalism is spreading. History has proven that this social climate conceals horrible dangers. People should be aware of them beforehand and be able to fight them. Perhaps, we should not forget that a glance in the past might help see the future.”
The Day’s FACT FILE
Mara Kurotschka is a German director and choreographer from Berlin. She graduated from the Juilliard School, New York. Her choreography works can be viewed at the Lincoln Center in New York, at the Ruhrtriennal in Germany, at the Chamber Theater in Munich, at festivals in Salzburg. She has been working as a co-director with Philipp Stoelzl for many years. This crew staged Faust and The Flying Dutchman for a theater in Basel, Rienzi and Parsifal at the German Opera and Ballet Theater in Berlin, Die Fledermaus at the Stuttgart State Opera, and L’Orfeo at the German State Opera in Berlin. Kurotschka’s works on the everyday life in big cities received international recognition. Kurotschka is a multiple awards winner.
