Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
I had to admit, with some misgivings, that the success of my Rienzi was not entirely due to the cast and staging, although I was fully alive to the defects from which the Fliegender Hollander suffered in this respect.
On the other hand, they tried to appease me by saying that this first production of the Fliegender Hollander was to be associated with a special engagement of Schroder-Devrient, which was to begin in Berlin immediately. They naturally thought I should be delighted to see the great actress in my own work.
As in the case of the Fliegender Hollander he had taken exception more particularly to its 'nebulousness' and 'lack of form, I thought I might with advantage point out to him the brighter and clearer outline of Rienzi.
As I was ever anxious, amid all my other discomforts, to find some relief from this burden, I had made an agreement with the music-dealer Flaxland for the sale of all my French rights in the Fliegender Hollander, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin for whatever they would fetch.
He expressed with polite hesitation his feeling that if my operas left anything to be desired, it was a clearer definition of the various characters in my musical dramas. He thought the interest in the persons was overpowered by the elemental forces figuring beside them in Hienzi the mob, in the Fliegender Hollander the sea.
When I came into contact with Leon Pillet, the manager of the Opera, my literary work took yet another direction. After numerous inquiries I eventually discovered that he had taken a fancy to my draft of the Fliegender Hollander. He informed me of this, and asked me to sell him the plot, as he was under contract to supply various composers with subjects for operettas.
The manager of the Berlin theatre, Kustner, quite took me by surprise when he announced the first performance of the Fliegender Hollander for an early date. As the opera house had been burnt down only about a year before, and could not possibly have been rebuilt, it had not occurred to me to remind them about the production of my opera.
My agent, the purely nominal publisher of my three operas Rienzi, the Fliegender Hollander, and Tannhauser the eccentric court music publisher, C. F. Meser, invited me one day to the cafe known as the 'Verderber' to discuss our money affairs. With great qualms we talked over the possible results of the Annual Easter Fair, and wondered whether they would be tolerably good or altogether bad.
So I was again forced to pay the penalty for composing my own Fliegender Hollander by having to sit down and write out arrangements of Halevy's opera. Yet this task no longer weighed on me so heavily.
I remembered how, through lack of experience, I had neglected properly to superintend the production of the Fliegender Hollander, and as I now fully realised all the disastrous consequences of this neglect, I began to think of means by which I could teach the singers my own interpretation.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking