Undoing the Discourse of Fate: The Case of Der fliegende Hollander

This essay treats the quarrel between opera and music drama. It situates the question of genre in a monumentalizing philosophy of history and therewith in a tragic discourse of fate. In these terms, Senta assumes the role of a world-historical actor—the woman of the future—the moment she rejects the operatic demands of love in favor of the music-dramatic demands of pity. The essay also pursues an analogy between persons and works of art regarding the conditions of their life and death. It looks at the "sense of an ending": how and why persons and works die in and even of the "fifth act"; how persons and works are both well and badly undone by their own doings; and how, if at all, persons and works resist the movement that leads them so fatefully "to go to ground"—to die. As Senta sings, and thus this essay begins, "Mit ihm muss ich zu Grunde geh'n!"

Senta's Ballad

An old quarrel asks whether Der fliegende Holländer is an opera or a music drama. Wagner increasingly thought of it as the latter, even if he originally named it the former. Many commentators tell us that he retrospectively selected Senta's ballad as the "thematic kernel" out of which all else in the work would dramatically grow.¹ Few commentators take the claim at face value: this early work is more of an opera than Wagner would like to think. Some reject what they take to be Wagner's attempt to canonize his own life's work by making it seem as if he had always thought about his individual works in the same terms. Wagner wanted to see his life's work by analogy to his individual works, in terms of essential unity and continuity. What music drama demonstrates is an internal connectedness of parts, a musicality or symphonism that formally prevents it from falling into a mere conglomeration of parts. Whereas music dramas can't be broken up into bits and pieces, operas can be. It isn't even rare to hear the terms "ragbag" or "patchwork"² applied to opera when precisely what's wanted for music drama is to capture the truth or health of its wholesomeness. Clearly there is, or always has been, something at stake in distinguishing music drama from opera, especially if to raise the status of one implies lowering the status of the other.

Some commentators dispute Wagner's claim that the Holländer is a music drama, if the claim suggests something only about musical unity. They deny that the work has the sort of fully fledged symphonism or unbroken leitmotivic form that later comes to characterize his works so strikingly. The seeds are seen of such, but they are not yet fully grown. Initially subtitled a "Romantic opera," the work still shows much of the traditional operatic commitment to offering numbered arias, duets, choruses, and finales. Not finding the kind of musical unity that separates music drama from opera, some commentators turn their attention to the possibility that the work has a poetic unity or mood (Stimmung). But this doesn't convince those who think that reference to a poetic mood is simply too vague to do the work that a fully fledged music drama needs or aims to do. Others, more convinced, try to render the idea of a poetic mood more substantial, seeking evidence of dramatic devices that do the unifying work of the work. This is where Senta's ballad comes in, since the ballad, to quote one commentator who in turn is quoting Hegel, is precisely such as to "comprise . . . the entirety of a complete event." A ballad, so Hegel writes, does not merely "sketch" the prominent features of an event; it also tracks its entire inner emotion or mood—its lament or melancholy, its mourning or its joy. From which it's meant to follow that the narrative of the Dutchman's long-term suffering might well be what spreads itself out over the entirety of the work, but it does so only because...