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The Opera Quarterly 21.3 (2005) 465-485



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The Diabolical Senta


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Ex. 1
Refrain for Pirate Jenny, Weill, The Threepenny Opera (1928). © 1928 by Universal Edition A.G. Wien/www.universaledition.com

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Ex. 2
Senta's Ballad, Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer

A girl, bored with her life of repetitive chores, dreams of a dark ship full of death and annihilation, an escape from the mundane into some fantastic passion (see Ex. 1). A girl, bored with her life of repetitive chores, dreams of a dark ship full of death and annihilation, an escape from the mundane into some fantastic passion (see Ex. 2). But I repeat myself; and in a sense Kurt Weill, in the famous refrain of "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera (1928), repeated Wagner from eighty-five years before. Weill's refrain has a similar profile to Senta's phrase; each melody falls from D to F-sharp while traversing a progression that can be construed as a i-V cadence, though Wagner gets to the dominant via the supertonic, and Weill [End Page 465] via the subdominant. Critics have sometimes read "Pirate Jenny," with its proletarian barmaid daydreaming of mass murder, as a parody of Wagner's romantic ballad about a girl whose imagination is captured by a sailor cursed to roam the seas forever. But in this article I will try to argue that Weill's Pirate Jenny isn't a parody of Senta but a reprise of Senta; for Senta herself is a dark character caught up in a black comedy.

The greatest mystery about the composition of Der fliegende Holländer is its relation to its acknowledged source, Heine's Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski (1833). In chapters six and seven, Heine's hero goes to an Amsterdam theater and sees a play about the Flying Dutchman; he is not particularly excited by what he sees, and makes snarky comments about the plot: "Poor Dutchman! He's often happy enough to be redeemed from marriage itself, happy to be released from his redeemer, and then he sets out again on his ship." In fact the Polish nobleman is far less interested in the play than in a seductive blonde spectator who drops an orange peel on his head, whether accidentally or by design. At last he stops pursuing his elective affinities with the blonde long enough to notice what's happening onstage:

When I returned to the theatre, I came upon the play's last scene, where on a high sea cliff the wife of the Flying Dutchman, Mrs. Flying Dutchman, wrings her hands in despair, while on the sea, on the deck of his uncanny ship, her unlucky husband can be seen. He loves her and wants to abandon her, to save her from perishing, and he confesses to her his grisly fate and the terrible curse fallen on him. But she calls with a loud voice, "I have been true to you until this very hour, and I know a sure way of keeping myself true until death!"

At these words the loyal wife plunges into the sea, and now the curse on the Flying Dutchman ends, he is redeemed, and we see the ghostly ship sink into the depths of the sea.

The moral of the play is that women should take care not to marry any Flying Dutchmen; and we men observe from this play how we ruin ourselves through women, even in the most favorable case.

(My translation)

The puzzle is this: why did Wagner write an opera that seems designed specifically for the sake of being parodied by Heine? Every overblown gesture, farfetched motive, ridiculous piece of behavior that Heine derides, Wagner commits. Furthermore, Wagner's comments on his opera, in Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde (1851), are full of the longwinded, tortuous, superserious rhetoric that invites mockery; Wagner speaks of the story of the Flying Dutchman as "a mythic-poetic creation of the folk: a primeval trait of human nature," and claims that its theme is "the longing for...

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