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Last night I tried to get my blood pressure down (doctor’s orders) with a recording of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, produced at Bayreuth in 1978 and taped in 1985. As it happened, it was one of those productions that, like Patrice Chereau’s Bayreuth Ring cycle conducted by Pierre Boulez at around the same time, attracted both praise and condemnation from the Festspielhaus’s devotees. John Gilks laid out the reason for this in 2011:

The concept is that the Dutchman exists only in Senta’s imagination. She is fixated on the Dutchman as her route out of the repressed bourgeois environment [in which] she is trapped. It’s a tormented, even hysterical, version of Senta. …

Onstage throughout the opera, Lisbeth Balslev is excellent and haunting as Senta; Simon Estes as the Dutchman is revelatory. Last night I caught the first half; tonight I conclude.

I’ve been more attracted than usual to vocal music and opera over the past few years, especially that of Austria and Germany; it follows a lifelong interest in what I suppose we can call the German Enlightenment, a 150-year period that stretches from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Freud and Wittgenstein in the years before the First World War — over just slightly more than a century and slightly less than a single lifetime, German-speaking lands produced Goethe and Beethoven, Schopenhauer and Wagner, Thomas Mann and Mozart. In these dark times (as Karl Kraus called them), I could use a little more light, so I’m again reaching up to those higher shelves where I’ve been keeping The World as Will and Representation and Buddenbrooks.

And of course my vinyl collection awaits me — the Solti Ring and the Furtwängler Ninth. But first, down to my German homework — I’ve got a lesson on Monday.

If you’re playing along at home, I recommend Bryan Magee’s Aspects of Wagner, the best short introduction to the composer, and Barry Millington’s lengthier but more comprehensive look at the Sorcerer of Bayreuth. (Magee also is quite good on the relationship between Schopenhauer and Wagner in another book.) Kupfer’s Fliegende Holländer production and several other Bayreuth productions are streamable through Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ — a streamer I highly recommend as well.