Richard Wagner’s initial draft to Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) originally set the drama’s action by the coast of Scotland rather than the now familiar Norwegian maritime village of Sandvika. In 1839, the notoriously profligate composer abandoned his conducting post at the Court Theatre of Riga and hatched a plan to escape his creditors by sailing to London via Königsberg. While Wagner, his first wife Minna, and his dog Robber were en route to England aboard the schooner Thetis, the vessel encountered an unrelenting storm in the Baltic Sea that forced it to seek harbor in a Norwegian port town nestled among an impressive landscape of towering granite fjords and shale gray skies.

Wagner encountered the legend of the Flying Dutchman while reading one of Heinrich Heine’s novels during this brief Norwegian sojourn. In one of its chapters, Heine’s character sees a Scottish play about the legendary ship and witnesses its heroine’s culminating act of romantic sacrifice that lifts the captain’s curse of eternal damnation–a thematic element that clearly inspired Holländer and other libretti Wagner would conceive during his artistic maturity. Four years later, after fleshing out the score and borrowing the musical colors, tempestuous moods and the scenic atmosphere recalled from his own Norwegian experience, Wagner finalized his draft and relocated the stage action from Scotland to Sandvika for the opera’s 1843 premiere in Dresden.

Wagner’s brush with Sandvika irrevocably intertwined Norway with the composer’s enduring legacy and many of Norway’s preeminent artists also cast a long shadow over Wagnerian interpretation and theater. While no discussion of legendary Wagner singers can ignore the magisterial Kirsten Flagstad, other eminent Norwegian singers including Ingrid Bjoner and Terje Stensvold also created memorable interpretations of Wagner’s cornerstone heroic parts, and theatrical visionaries like Stefan Herheim continue to broaden audience’s imaginations regarding the interplay between Wagner’s dramatic motifs and the medium of theater.

More recently, the opera world has turned its gaze towards the blossoming of Lise Davidsen’s career towards Wagner’s apical dramatic soprano heroines. These summer 2024 concert performances of Senta with Den Norske Opera mark the soprano’s first documented forays into Wagner’s demanding heroic parts and forms the basis of her first opera set with Decca Classics.

Erik Berg

Decca Classics’s new Der fliegende Holländer is the label’s newest Wagnerian opera set since Georg Solti’s second Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg released in 1995. It is also Decca’s first major Norwegian opera project since Kirsten Flagstad partnered with Øivin Fjelstad, the Oslo Philharmonic, and the Norwegian State Radio Orchestra in 1956 to immortalize her Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde–a recording that played a critical role in Flagstad’s journey towards establishing Oslo’s national opera company. This recently recorded Holländer, helmed by the Norwegian National Opera’s forces nearly seven decades after its establishment, thus represents an homage to a vision initiated by its illustrious founder and a celebration of contemporary Norwegian artists who carry the torch of this tradition.

Musically, Norway’s new Dutchman represents an exciting addition to the discography. Its cast of established and emergent artists convincingly inhabit Wagner’s complex characters, the choral singers are appropriately full-throated and lusty, and the orchestra’s frenetic execution summons the score’s turbulent maritime soundscape to the fore. Edward Gardner, who previously administered the English National Opera for nearly a decade, made his inaugural performances as the Norwegian Opera’s new music director with these important concerts.

If Gardner capably demonstrates his experience with delineating Wagner’s Leitmotifs and imparting appropriate instrumental colors for constructing the drama, his interpretation often dominated with a fiery drive that at times stinted on lyricism and contemplation. While this approach likely appeals to listeners who like their Wagner fast and “Ohne Ziel, ohne Rast, ohne Ruh” in the Karl Böhm mold, it sometimes missed the sensitivity to dynamics needed to caress the opera’s more introspective moments like the “Wie aus der Ferne” duet between Senta and the Dutchman.

Gardner’s driven execution of Wagner’s orchestration most audibly stressed his Dutchman, portrayed in this recording by the Canadian bass baritone Gerald Finley. Finley’s experience with performing Wagner is best experienced in roles like Amfortas, Wolfram, and Hans Sachs, where his burnished, soft-grained vocalism and his Lied-like nuance imbue these parts’ more lyrical lines with sufficient heft and textual character. The Dutchman, on the other hand, is second only to Wotan in requiring a Heldenbariton’s steely power and fluency over a broad dynamic range to properly address the part’s technical and interpretive demands.

In this recording, Finley still sculpts phrases of exquisite intelligence and subtlety. Holländer’s great opening monologue, “Die Frist ist Um,” genuinely conveys the character’s great desperation, but certain outbursts lacked the requisite volume and metal to ride Gardner’s bursts of surging orchestration. When Finley’s Dutchman must interact with his Senta, he consistently colors his phrases with yearning and conviction, but the pair’s soaring lines are often dominated by Davidsen’s soprano and the resulting power differential recalls the asymmetry between Fritz Uhl and Birgit Nilsson in their studio recording of Tristan. This remains very much a portrayal crafted by an artist of intelligence and distinction, missing only that fervid, elemental quality that underpins history’s most celebrated Dutchmen.

Naturally, this recording’s chief interest lays in what the press has described as Lise Davidsen’s only assumptions of Senta planned during her foreseeable career. If this claim holds true, then both Davidsen and Decca ought to take a victory lap for preserving her exhilarating reading of the character for posterity–the former for preparing a musically and dramatically rich Senta of a divinely inspired deportment, and the latter for vividly capturing and balancing the vibrancy and the colors of her massive, complex instrument.

Davidsen’s Senta is an exemplary creation for which the composer’s unforgiving vocal writing appears to hold few challenges. The soprano not only produces spine tingling demonstrations of heroic singing with her reserves of vocal power, but also exhibits remarkable facility with tapering and shading her immense voice across a range of dynamic gradations. Her Ballade unfolds as a focal scene replete with striking musical and dramatic contrasts–her hypnotic trances imbued with an otherworldly, ethereal delicacy, her climactic moments unfurled with such sheer force and focus as to pin one against their seat during this charismatic feat of storytelling.

Senta’s scenes with Erik and the Dutchman, too, exemplify Davidsen’s ability to instantaneously modulate her instrumental colorings and her vocal prowess to match the character’s mercurial mood shifts. As with the Ballade, Davidsen’s contribution to the great duet launches with a “träumen” shimmering with hushed rapture and builds up towards soaring majestic lines that underscore the character’s divine resolve to become the vessel for Holländer’s salvation.

The final Act culminates in an electrifying confrontation between Senta, Erik, and the Dutchman, wherein Davidsen unleashes scintillating phrases replete with searing high Bs that provide a worthy climax to her unique traversal of this protean character. Rather than highlighting the fanaticism and the psychosexual eroticism often explored by this role’s most famed exponents, Davidsen’s concept of Senta builds on the qualities of redemptive fervor familiar from her definitive portrayal of Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.

Gardner’s supporting cast rounds out an assemblage of fine artists who showcase an affinity for interpreting Wagner’s music. Stanislas de Barbeyrac, who recently found success in tailoring his repertory towards more dramatic roles, is the excellent Erik in this recording. Erik’s character is written to be as thankless and unsympathetic as his music is challenging to sing, but de Barbeyrac injects such beauty and sincerity into his singing that he transcends his character’s manipulative and irritating nature. His cavatina in the third Act provides a momentary island of repose and plangent vocalism within that turbulent and electrifying finale. Brindley Sherratt’s bass initially lacked firmness during Daland’s interactions with Holländer in the first Act but improved in resonance as the opera progressed. His reading of the character is appropriately venal and strangely likable and was strongest during his exchanges with Finley in the first Act.

The Hungarian contralto Anna Kissjudit is a true discovery of a talent, having sung Erda to great acclaim in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production of the Ring at the Berlin Staatsoper. Hers is a vibrant contralto with an earthy, copper hue that commands attention with its generous and distinctive tone. It’s a pity that Mary has little to sing in this opera, so authoritative and playful a presence she was in her brief scenes, but the discography is nevertheless fortunate to capture this remarkable artist for posterity. Eirik Grøtvedt, a young artist who belongs within the ensemble of the Norwegian National Opera, wields a hauntingly beautiful, melancholic and warmly flickering tenor to the short part of the Steuermann. His ardent and sensitive reading elevates his brief appearance and augurs a potential future in parts like David in Meistersinger.

Despite some caveats about Gardner’s unrelentingly driven conducting and moments of vocal imbalance between Finley’s Dutchman and Davidsen’s larger-than-life Senta, Decca’s latest operatic recording stands as a compelling addition to the opera’s storied catalog of great performances. Certainly, this entire enterprise has proven to be a triumph and a showcase for Lise Davidsen’s extraordinary vocal gifts and for the commendable performances delivered by her colleagues and the Norwegian National Opera. If these Norwegian concert performances indeed mark both the debut and farewell of Davidsen’s Senta, listeners can be grateful that this Dutchman sets sail on such a triumphant final voyage.