Wagner, The Flying Dutchman - Overture

In early 1839, 26-year-old Richard Wagner was hired as director of the national opera in Riga, the capital of Latvia. An extravagant lifestyle coupled with the retirement from the stage of his wife, the singer Minna Planer, caused him to incur large debts. Unable to pay them, he devised a plan to evade his creditors. He would finish the work he was working on, the opera Rienzi, with the idea of performing it in Paris and making some money with it. He set off for Paris, via London.

The ghost ship legend
After illegally crossing the Prussian border, the couple embarked on a ship that would be the worst sailing experience of their lives. Faced with a series of storms, the ship was finally able to find shelter in a Norwegian fjord after days of endless struggle with rough seas. They arrived in London three weeks after leaving Riga. The experience reminded Wagner of the old legend of the ghost ship, the ship unable to call, forced to sail the seas for life in search of redemption.

And already in Paris, things did not improve either. Wagner could not get a job as a conductor and the Paris Opera refused to stage his Rienzi. The couple faced great financial hardship, having to live on the help of friends and the little money Wagner could get by publishing music articles and copying scores. In these circumstances, he drew on his recent experience and devised the composition of a short one-act play on the legend of the ghost ship, which in some versions has a Dutchman as captain, a "wandering Dutchman".

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883)

A resounding failure
The work was intended to serve as a "curtain-raiser" for a ballet at the Opera. Wagner based it on a satire by Heine that took up the legend of the Flying Dutchman, modifying the story to present the wandering captain as a cursed character who can only be redeemed by the loyal love of a woman. The libretto, with the title "The Phantom Ship", and together with three important passages of the opera, were released in July 1841 to the Paris Opera, which agreed to buy the rights from Wagner for 500 francs, and to entrust the music and the libretto in French to other artists.
"The Phantom Ship" was a resounding failure. After its premiere, in November 1842, it fell into complete oblivion.

Der fliegende Holländer
Meanwhile, during the summer of 1841, Wagner wrote the rest of the opera, expanding the work to the more traditional three-act form, and now titled Der fliegende Holländer. The initial libretto set the work in Scotland. Wagner changed the names of the characters and the setting to Norway, in an attempt to distance himself from the failed Ghost Ship.

It was premiered in Dresden in January 1843, under the baton of the author, but was not the success Wagner had hoped for. Soon after, however, it gained in popularity and became a favorite of the public to this day, because despite the initial disappointment, it is one of the most accessible operas of the German author.

The Flying Dutchman - Overture
The overture is the last section that Wagner wrote. It contains all the leitmotifs of the work, those famous musical passages that illustrate and accompany either the characters or the situations through which they pass according to the plot, and of which Wagner made his trademark for the rest of his work.
It opens with a motif that could be called "oceanic" or "stormy".

The performance is by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Georg Solti.