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The Flying Dutchman opera - Wagner (1843)
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Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman)

Kind: Serious opera in three acts
Language: German
Location: Norway
Time: Non-defined
Hits: Traft ihr das Schiff

Wagner is the only composer in history whose operas, all eleven of them, are still performed, constantly, from the day they were written. "The Flying Dutchman", his first big drama, was composed after a naval trip in 1839, a journey when Wagner left Riga, the city where he worked, and traveled all the way to France. In the course of the voyage, accompanied by a storm, Wagner decided to write "The Flying Dutchman" according to Heinrich Heine's version of the ancient myth.

The poetic opera tells us of the captain of the haunted ship with the black sails, doomed, as a punishment, a curse, to sail the seas until the end of time. Once every seven years, the captain is allowed to go onshore, to look for a wife. If he finds a woman who is willing to love him, in spite of her knowledge of his terrible secret, his redemption will come. The damned seamen finds the weird Senta, who waited for him because of an early sensation that told her he would come, but after he falls in love with her, he suspects she is unfaithful to him, and sails away. She jumps off the highest cliff into the sea, calling her lover's name. Then, light glows through the skies and the happy lovers, free of the horrible curse, fly up towards the sky.

Wagner wrote this opera with a lot of enthusiasm and astonishing passion. He created a new sonic language describing everything in the opera, from the waves of the ocean shattering at the Dutchman's ship, to the sailor's melancholy monologue and the ballad of loving Senta. He composed this opera in the most difficult time of his life: the young genius was lingering in Paris, poor and humiliated. He had already understood he was a genius, but nobody around him recognized it. He turned all of his strength and energy into writing this opera, and it indeed gained him the success he wished for so long. He presented "The Flying Dutchman" in Dresden, Germany, and its success was so big that Wagner left Paris and settled in Dresden, having received the office of the local orchestra conductor.

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