Anti-Wagner

By Martha Duffy

The Met s Radical Dutchman

The time may come when Brunnhilde will pole-vault to her immolation,when Lohengrin will wear a T shirt with his name on it. Wagner was a composer with a bold theatrical imagination; one might think that his instructions would occupy directors for centuries. Instead his works have revisionists been in attracting Europe; among them Gotz Friedrich, Harry Kupfer, and Patrice Chereau, whose Ring cycle set in the industrial revolution remains the standard for irreverence.

Anti-Wagner finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera with French Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of The Flying Dutchman, the tale of a legendary captain condemned to sail forever unless he is able to find a woman faithful until death. Every seven years he in a can come ashore to search for her, and in Norweigian fishing village he finds Senta, a girl obessed by fantasy who believes that she is his redemptress. It is a straightforward story, but Ponnelle has turned it all into the lurid dream of a young steersman. This allows him to dress Senta in an elaborate richly embroidered bridal gown and to make the opera into a series of nightmares and arresting tableaux. As thoroughgoing iconoclasm requires, Ponnelle also flouts the libretto. Wagner's Senta leaps into the sea to prove her love; Ponnelle's walks rigidly up the decks io the ghostly Dutchman's cabin.

The opening-night audience greeted all this with a mixed but emphatic response. There were cheers for the buoyant conducting of James Levine and the splendid ensemble of Soprano Carol Neblett Tenor William Lewis, Bass-Baritone Jose van Dam and Bass Paul Plishka. The applause for Ponnelle was mixed with full-throated booing sounds, heard often enough on the Continent but rarely at the Met. New York audiences like their Wagner to be conventional.

Was this new version a fresh view or just mischief making? Ponnelle did not choose the framework of a dream gratuitously. Senta's reveries verge on hallucination. Other characters sing of their dreams. By eliminating intermission breaks Ponnelle keeps his own vision flying. He also makes a point: it was time for the Met to present an example of the most exciting, if divisive, opera productions now being staged .

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