Gothenburg Opera Wagner – The Flying Dutchman
Wagner’s Ring looms large over the Gothenburg Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman. Seat-pinning singing, idiomatic playing and fluid conducting all suggest the company’s recent staging of the cycle has left a musical mark. Director Alessandro Talevi’s belief that Wagner’s uneven early work adumbrates the Ring’s central theme of human greed at environmental expense is less convincing, while his underlining of the text’s misogyny plays havoc with the transformative love on which the opera’s climax hinges.
Talevi serves up some potent home truths concerning toxic masculinity’s contribution to societal rot. Here, Daland’s oil worker heavies have only inflatable sex-dolls for company on their rig, which anticipates the crudeness of their behaviour on shore. All the womenfolk can do, confined like Barbies to…
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Opera Now (Digital) - 1 Issue, Summer 2024