François Girard’s ultimately frustrating production presents the story as taking place within its heroine’s fevered imagination.
A stranger comes to town.
That story line, so full of possibilities, has threaded through fictional works of all kinds for centuries. In Wagner’s opera “Der Fliegende Holländer” (“The Flying Dutchman”), the stranger is a haunted ship captain, condemned to sail the seas forever, with just one opportunity every seven years to land somewhere and be redeemed through a woman’s love.
François Girard, whose new production of “Dutchman” for the Metropolitan Opera opened on Monday night, said in an interview on the Met’s website that resolving the work’s “ghost factor” was his biggest challenge.
His solution involves extensive video projections, but also tried-and-true stage magic like shadows, swirling mist and lots of fog. When the Dutchman (the bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin) first appears, his every movement is mimicked by a huge shadow projected on a screen at the rear of the stage. His ship and its miserable crew are only suggested with murky hints of bodies.
In Mr. Girard’s ultimately frustrating production, the “ghost factor” does come through, but he’s not content to stop there. He goes further, removing the opera from the “ground zero of reality,” as he explained in a recent interview with The New York Times. The story ostensibly takes place in a Norwegian fishing village, but would seem here to be a realm of the supernatural.
The characters — including the town’s hearty sailors and the women, who work at spinning wheels and tend to homes while the men are away — look slightly surreal, often making stylized hand gestures and movements, and staring straight ahead at the audience. For Mr. Girard, this approach prevents what he called the opera’s “simplicity” and “naïveté” from being exposed.
These townspeople are prone to believing in the paranormal, but terrified by it. They know all about the legend of the Dutchman. But Senta, the daughter of the Norwegian ship captain Daland, is obsessed with the story, and with a portrait of him. Mr. Girard presents the opera as taking place within her fevered imagination.
With sets by John Macfarlane, this production literally frames the Met’s stage by adding a lower border to its proscenium: We view the opera as if through a picture frame. The Dutchman’s portrait here becomes simply a glowing, grand eye projected on the screen at the rear of the stage. During the overture, a dancer — Alison Clancy, a stand-in for Senta — stares at it while writhing, gyrating and twisting herself into contortions with longing and obsession. But the overture is long, and the episode turns stagy and exaggerated.
In the first scene, Daland’s hulking ship is tugged onstage with ropes pulled by a male chorus of sailers. It’s a powerful image. Every time the townspeople were presented straightforwardly, with hints of the simplicity that Mr. Girard aims to mask, I was drawn in. The stentorian bass Franz-Josef Selig made a robust, good-natured Daland. The young Steersman, charged by Daland with keeping watch, was the youthful tenor David Portillo, wonderful in the role as he sweetly sings a love song to the girlfriend he soon will see. The mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura, in her Met debut, brought a down-to-earth touch to Mary, Senta’s nurse.
Mr. Nikitin, who stepped into the role of the Dutchman after Bryn Terfel injured his ankle in late January, deserves credit for managing to turn in a solid, if inconsistent, performance as he consistently conveyed the burdened despair of someone who longs for death. The slightly nasal twang of his voice is better suited to Wagner roles like the sorcerer Klingsor in “Parsifal.” At the middle of his range, he shaped phrases with clarity and crisp diction, and brought a booming, if leathery, tone to sustained notes. But high-lying phrases were sometimes wobbly.
The soprano Anja Kampe, a leading Wagner soprano in Europe, made her belated Met debut as Senta; it’s good to finally have her here. Her singing was plush and warm, with lyrical sheen in tender phrases and steely intensity when Senta’s obsession takes hold. Despite some strained top notes, she was a standout.
Her job was made difficult by the set design for Act II, when the women, hard at work, sing the “Spinning Chorus.” The scene is represented here by a bare, slightly raised, rocky platform at the middle of the stage, with dangling ropes suggesting the threads they weave. So the chorus and Ms. Kampe must sing far back, with no side or rear set pieces that would help project sound.
Still, Ms. Kampe’s voice had sufficient carrying power to be heard. But it was a relief during the next scene — Senta’s argument with Erik (the muscular-voiced tenor Sergey Skorokhodov) — when the singers moved closer to the front of the stage and their voices rang out more easily.
A crucial later scene also took place mostly mid-stage, which was frustrating. The Dutchman has won over Daland by offering him untold riches in exchange for a night of hospitality. To the delight of the ambitious Daland, he also raises the prospect of marrying Senta, a union that could end the Dutchman’s curse.
Redemption of a suffering male through the love of a virtuous woman is a motif in many Wagner’s operas. Working within this mystical production concept, Ms. Kampe digs below the surface to covey what drives Senta. She seems apart from the other women in the town; she wants her life to matter. Salvaging the Dutchman’s soul becomes her mission, carried out by Ms. Kampe with both desperate longing and fearlessness.
If the production had some interesting ideas, however unevenly executed, so, too, did the conducting of Valery Gergiev. He has given some of the most electrifying performances I’ve heard, including many at the Met. But his work can be curiously slack, as it mostly was on Monday.
Rather than whipping the score into moments of frenzy, Mr. Gergiev seemed to be striving for breadth and sweep — sometimes with success. He drew dark colors from the orchestra, and buffeted Ms. Kampe’s reflective moments with warm strings. And he brought out the dancing lilt of passages that reveal a young Wagner still influenced by Italian styles. But the performance lacked definition, clean attacks, crisp rhythmic execution and, at times, energy.
Mr. Girard has become the Met’s go-to director for Wagner operas, with a new “Lohengrin” production on the way. It’s easy to see why: His poignantly bleak staging of “Parsifal,” from 2013, is one of the house’s finest today. If only this “Dutchman” were as inspired.
Der Fliegende Holländer
Through March 27 at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; metopera.org.
