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  • Melodramatic Possessions: The Flying Dutchman, South Africa, and the Imperial Stage, ca. 1830
  • J. Q. Davies

Setting the Scene

Having arrived in London on 6 April 1827, a young poet cashed two bank drafts in the name of his uncle. The payments received, he accepted an invitation to dine at the home of the cashier, Baron James de Rothschild. On the following evening, at around 11 P.M., Heinrich Heine probably joined his host in a box at the Adelphi Theatre.1 The afterpiece was about to begin. Attendance of after-dinner entertainments at this minor theatre on the Strand was routine for Regency bucks and visiting foreigners. The idea that London's high society avoided the amusements of the minors, in contrast to the Parisian worship of the boulevard theatres, is unfounded.2 In the late 1820s, the Adelphi was a fashionable, if insalubrious, venue of mixed social resort. It is plausible, furthermore, that Heine recommended the late-night theater trip. As it so happened, he had shown a passing interest in the subject of that night's melodrama in the third volume of Reisebilder, a work published in Hamburg on the day he left for England. He could hardly have missed the playbills; his lodgings at 32 Craven Street were only three blocks from the theater. We can imagine the scene: the audience and Rothschild's party taking their seats, the green curtain lifting on the season's final performance of The Flying Dutchman; or, the Phantom Ship, a colonial melodrama by Edward Ball, a.k.a. "The Terrible Fitzball."3

Struggling to round the Cape of Storms, the story went, a Dutch ship's captain blasphemes against God and Nature and is cursed to rage against the open sea until Doomsday. Having set sail against the elements, the defiant wanderer—Fitzball names him "Vanderdecken"—is imprisoned forever on his flailing vessel (his curser is "Rockalda," the aquatic demon-queen). It was said that the deranged emigrant's brig could still be seen floundering off some far-flung coast, condemned neither to return home nor to reach his longed-for colonial destination. Legend had it that on hot, windswept nights, one could glimpse the old mariner—his ship set against the gale in full rigging—bearing down on that wild and most unforgiving of shores: South Africa. [End Page 496]

Of course, Heine may never have been to the Adelphi. But circumstances and a quizzical episode in his "Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski" in Der Salon (1833) make it likely.4 Heine's narrator was suitably impressed by the fifth scene of the melodrama, in which a young heroine contemplates a painted portrait of the Dutchman. This episode probably inspired Senta's now familiar ballad and, if we take Richard Wagner at his word, the music from whence Der fliegende Holländer was spun. (In his A Communication to My Friends [1851], Wagner imagined that Senta's song was the "thematic seed of all the music in the opera."5 ) Heine's recollection of the setting of this and other unidentified scenes, however, was drifting and sketchy. Barely worth recalling, or perhaps obscured by the theatrical lighting, was the Act Two backcloth of Table Bay. "Some cape or other (the name of which escapes me)," he remembered.6

It may have been because Captain Peppercoal, the uncle of Fitzball's heroine, wore a "cassimire [sic] waistcoat and breeches [with] striped silk stockings," but Heine mistook him for a Scot (a "Scottish nobleman"), and the rocky landscapes and castle scenes for Scotland.7 Wagner followed suit. The manuscript drafts of the Holländer show that Wagner originally imbued the opera with an ambiance Ecossaise, before realizing his own personal identification with the story and landing the Dutchman closer to home: Norway.8

South Africans may (or may not) be pleased to hear that, if Heine's memory had served him better, Wagner might have set his Der fliegende Holländer in South Africa.9 Yet my intention is not to prolong the debate over the pure site of the Dutchman myth, a discussion that Wagner himself began for dark autobiographical reasons.10 Nor is it to ask how a...

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