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As he left the stage with Senta at the end of the second act, a messenger handed him a card. "The gentleman is waiting," he added. "He said he must see you, and that he was in a hurry." Thayer glanced at the card. "Bring him to my dressing-room," he said. He glanced up in surprise, as the door opened and Bobby Dane entered.
Her sweetheart is not out at Sea. He brings home no gold, he brings home game. Everyone knows in what the fortune of a huntsman consists!" Senta does not stir; it is doubtful if she have heard. Without removing her eyes from the picture of the pallid man, she hums softly to herself certain fragment of old ballad.
In the final scene, when the Dutchman goes off, Senta can say nothing more after her declarations in the second nothing, that is, of any musical value; and Wagner has wisely confined her to recitative. The Flying Dutchman, then, has many weaknesses. The libretto is a manufacture, not, like Tristan, a growth.
The two are interrupted by a wail. "Lost! Oh, lost! To all eternity lost!" They turn and start in horror at sight of the Hollander. "Farewell, Senta," he cries, and with the precipitation of despair is making straight for the boundless deep. Senta throws herself across his path. "Stay, O unfortunate!" But the Hollander pushes past. "To sea! To sea! To sea until the end of time!
Get up, Belviso, let us take counsel together. What is your opinion?" Belviso, thus adjured, rose to his feet and stood humbly before me. He was agitated if by fear, then curiously; but it did not seem to be fear which put the slurred accents into his voice. "Senta, Don Francesco," he began, "what Virginia has done was all for love.
She wants Mary to sing the Flying Dutchman ballad; Mary curtly refuses; "Then," rejoins Senta, for all the world like a leading lady in a melodrama giving the cue for the band to begin the royalty-song, "I'll sing it myself"; and, despite protests, she does. It recounts, of course, the story of the Dutchman prior to his meeting with Daland.
Senta is going, too, but Erik bars the way, pleading, "Stay, Senta, stay for a moment! Release me from this torture or, if you will, destroy me quite!" She affects, as the simplest girl must, not to understand. "Erik, what is it?" "Oh, Senta, speak, say what is to become of me! Your father is coming home.
He who spoke so decisively of the supremacy in the imaginative world of the unveiled human form had not been always, we may think, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have been; but they partook of the strength of his nature, and sometimes, it may be, would by no means become music, so that the comely order of his days was quite put out: par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.
One wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise that, and some of them mean it.
The opera is by no means all on the highest level, but a good third of it is, and there are pages which Richard never afterwards surpassed. A dozen passages are prophetic of the Wagner of Tristan and the Ring. Let me begin by quoting a few of these. The feeling is not the same as in Tristan; both are used when Eric makes his last despairing appeals to Senta.
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