Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
Schroeder-Devrient was an admirable "Senta," and received enthusiastic applause; but the opera itself puzzled the audience rather than pleased it.
As they disappear below, the Dutchmen break into a fearful yell of derision, and instantly darkness and complete silence reinvade the ship, while perfect calm falls upon the sea. For a long interval the scene so crowded and noisy a moment before, remains empty and still. Senta comes hurriedly from the house, followed by Erik, both in great agitation.
The latter is a dreamy, imaginative girl, who, though she has an accepted lover, Eric, is so fascinated with the legend of the stranger that she becomes convinced she is destined to save him from perdition. When he arrives with her father she recognizes him at once, and vows eternal constancy to him. In the last act, however, Eric appears and reproaches Senta with her faithlessness.
The final scene could not be made very lengthy; so the composer determined to pad out the act with pure irrelevant music, and the librettist had to find him words. In a piano score now before me the essential part of the act, the scene in which Senta redeems the Dutchman, occupies twenty-four pages; and these are preceded by fifty pages of choruses of sailors, maidens and ghosts.
This theory made both vocal and instrumental music secondary to the dramatic plan, and this, at that time, seemed a truly revolutionary idea. "The Flying Dutchman" was produced at the Dresden Opera House January 2. 1843, with Mme. Schroeder-Devrient as Senta. Critics and public had expected a brilliant and imposing spectacle like "Rienzi" and were disappointed.
"What frightens you so?" she asks wearily. It is as if excess of emotion had brought on an immense fatigue; she sinks exhausted in the grand-sire's chair. "Let me tell you of it, Senta. It is a dream, hear and be warned by it." She leans back with closed eyes, and as he narrates it is as if having fallen asleep she saw in dream what he describes. "Upon the high cliff I lay dreaming.
Senta, the heroine, sits at her spinning-wheel amidst a number of maidens. After a conventional spinning chorus, Senta sings the ballad of the Flying Dutchman, whose picture hangs on the wall, and ends up with an ecstatic appeal to Heaven, Fate everyone in general and no one in particular to give her the chance of saving him.
Senta gazes, rapt, on Vanderdecken; Sieglinda and Siegmund look on one another and passion begins to dawn. This is worth noting as showing that Wagner used the leitmotiv spontaneously, so to speak, and not always as the result of deliberate calculation.
With the exception of the mere mention of this motive in the score, the music is new, is not evolved out of previous passages; but when Eric has finished we hear the Senta theme, both sections. Daland's air is entirely fresh matter; as is the opening of the big duet between the Dutchman and Senta. We are now approaching the supreme moment of the drama.
Vejaire m'es qu'eu senta Un ven de Paradis. The greater part of this poetry repeats, in another language, the well-worn mannerisms of the troubadours: we find the usual introductory references to the spring or winter seasons, the wounding glances of ladies' eyes, the tyranny of love, the reluctance to be released from his chains and so forth, decked out with complications of stanza form and rime-distribution.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking