"Der Fliegende Hollander"
Hopkins Center Presents the Metropolitan Opera "Live in HD"
For the first time at the Met, Sir Bryn Terfel sings the mysterious seafarer doomed to roam the seas for all eternity in Wagner’s eerie early masterwork.
After astounding Met audiences with his intensely visceral production of Wagner’s Parsifal, François Girard’s new vision turns the Met stage into a rich, layered tableau reminiscent of a vast oil painting, with sweeping sets by John Macfarlane. The gifted German soprano Anja Kampe, in her Met debut, is the devoted Senta, whose selfless love can set the Flying Dutchman free, with bass Franz-Josef Selig as her father and tenor Sergey Skorokhodov as her deserted former lover.
Der Fliegende Holländer is the earliest of Wagner’s operatic creations to remain in the repertory. The two lead roles represent archetypes to which the composer would return, in one form or another, in most of his later works: the “otherworldly stranger” and the woman who sacrifices herself for his salvation. The work’s unearthly ambience is impressive, and the world of nature and of the supernatural are magnificently evoked in the score, which Valery Gergiev conducts.
