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Updated: June 11, 2025
He has heard of the intended marriage, and begs passionately that she shall not sacrifice herself, ending with a cavatina a cavatina by Richard Wagner! in vain. But Vanderdecken has heard all from the wings another bit of old-fashioned stage trickery, like the "asides" and resolves that Senta shall not sacrifice herself. "For ever lost," he cries, realizing that he is renouncing his last chance.
She speaks so passionately, appears so strangely, that her companions feel a sort of puzzled alarm. The old nurse, frightened, rushes to her side with the cry: "Heaven help us!" and all together they try to bring her to her normal self, calling in tones of protest, "Senta! Senta!" Unnoticed of the rest, Erik, the huntsman, has during the last moments been standing in the doorway.
H. sent you yesterday a long account of the first performance of the "Flying Dutchman". The rendering was satisfactory, and the reception such as I had reason to expect decidedly warm and sympathetic. The two Mildes did their very best to give to the parts of the Dutchman and of Senta their full significance, and they were completely successful.
It begins as if Wagner had felt that he had not made sufficient use of the uncanny effects to be got out of the phantom ship, and we get a long string of choruses not necessary to the drama. At the last Vanderdecken, he, too, rises to the full height of his character, and, determining that he will not sacrifice Senta, renounces her and goes on board his boat to sail off.
Even the belated attempt to show him heroic in his determination to sail off alone to his doom has no dramatic point; it has no bearing on his salvation, for nothing happens until Senta jumps into the sea, and we feel sure nothing would have happened if she had not jumped. That lesson, at any rate a childish, inept, inane, insane one at best is not set forth in the Dutchman.
Vanderdecken enters with Daland, and Senta, almost stunned, sets eyes on him for the first time. Of no significance here, of what tremendous import it is in the first act of Tristan.
The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must needs live in hell a world that others make, a world where he has no place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle.
The act closes with the sailors' chorus as the two vessels sail away. After a brief instrumental prelude, the second act opens in Daland's home, where the melancholy Senta sits surrounded by her companions, who are spinning. The song is full of intense feelings and is characterized by a motive which frequently recurs in the opera, and is the key to the whole work.
Finally she salutes him and asks about Vanderdecken; and Daland, in haste, discloses his plan. Neither Vanderdecken nor Senta speaks; so, with a stroke of the old-fashioned opera trickery, Wagner makes Daland feel himself de trop and go away.
Now try and recall Rienzi, the Flying Dutchman and Senta, Tannhauser and Elizabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan and Marke, Hans Sachs, Woden and Brunhilda, all these characters are correlated by a secret current of ennobling and broadening morality which flows through them and becomes ever purer and clearer as it progresses.
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