Wagner's "Pale" Senta

We shall never know when Wagner first heard of the Flying Dutchman legend or exactly when he decided to turn it into an opera. There is no doubt, however, that his source was Heinrich Heine's Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski.¹ In chapter 7 — note the number — Schnabelewopski enters a theater in Amsterdam where he sees a play about a Dutch captain who "had sworn by all the devils in hell that, despite the storm that was raging, he would round a certain cape . . . even if he had to keep on sailing until the Day of Judgement." The Devil takes the captain at his word: "he would have to sail the seas until the Last Judgement, unless he was redeemed by the fidelity of a woman's love." The Devil is stupid enough not to believe in female constancy and allows the Dutchman to go ashore every seven years to get married and to take the opportunity to pursue his redemption. "Poor Dutchman! He's often only too happy to be saved from marriage and the woman who wants to save him; so back he goes to his ship again." This "Wandering Jew of the Ocean," as the Dutchman jokingly refers to himself, eventually meets Katharina, a merchant's daughter, and receives her promise to be "true unto death." Schnabelewopski catches sight of a pretty woman in the audience, an "exquisitely beautiful Eve," who tempts him not with an apple (Apfel) but with an orange (Apfelsine). He leaves with his temptress, and by the time they return to the theater, "Mrs. Flying Dutchman" is wringing her hands and about to plunge herself into the sea. She leaps, and the bedeviled Flying Dutchman is redeemed. The moral, according to Heine, is that "women must be careful of marrying a Flying Dutchman; and we men can see from the piece how, in the best of circumstances, women are the ruin of us all."

The earliest surviving document connected with Wagner's opera is a scenario in French, which he wrote in 1840.² The essentials of Heine's story are all there: the reckless Dutchman, his somber ship with its ghostly crew, the merchant's daughter, and the fidelity unto death. But there are differences. For a start, there is another character: a young man passionately in love with the merchant's daughter, plagued by a strange inclination to dream about her. The daughter is without a name: she is simply a "young woman." As in Heine, she sits in front of the Dutchman's portrait, which shows him in dark, Spanish-style dress; but whereas Heine does not bother to say much else about how the Dutchman looks, Wagner goes out of his way to emphasize that he is "pale and handsome," with features expressing a "profound and endless suffering" that touches the young woman to "the bottom of her heart." This is important. And so is the complete absence of Heine's irony.

On 6 May 1840 Wagner sent his scenario to Meyerbeer's librettist, Eugène Scribe. He spoke in his covering letter of "a little opera in one act,"³ clearly hoping that Scribe would write the libretto and effect a commission for him from the Paris Opéra to set it to music. Anticipating an audition with Scribe and Meyerbeer, Wagner composed three songs: the two songs of the ships' crews in the third act of the opera as we now know it, and a ballad for the young woman. Wagner later claimed, quite rightly, that the ballad was the beginning of the whole project and lay at the heart of it. The blood-red sails of the phantom ship are there, and so is the "pale man" [cet homme pâle],⁴ who is the ship's commander. Wagner also invented a parody text, probably strictly for private use, that easily fits the music: "The poor devil dances well, his pig's foot doesn't spoil it. Houih! he dances well...