The Flying Dutchman

Opera

 

“Art must be a dangerous, a disorienting act. It must shake us to the core as a collective.” (Milo Rau)

 

Right after the 150th anniversary of Bayreuth, Milo Rau is staging Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and in Israel as a road movie through German-Israeli history: from the Holocaust to the resumption of diplomatic relations in the 1950s, from the traumatic 1972 Olympic massacre to the opening of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

 

Can Germany come to terms with its guilt over the Holocaust simply by standing firmly enough alongside Israel? Can a distinction be made between history and Tagespolitik? And can the music of Richard Wagner – a self-confessed anti-Semite, a favourite of Hitler and a composer who is still boycotted in Israel today – ever be separated from the crime against humanity that was the Shoah?

 

Milo Rau’s „scandal in waiting“ (The Guardian) will have its world premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 24 October. The public performance in Tel Aviv this August will be part of the research for the opera production.

 

Milo Rau, artistic director of Europe’s biggest crossover-festival, the Vienna Festival, is one of the most prominent and politically engaged artists of our time, with over 100 productions, films and books to his name. His work – ranging from activist tribunal formats to a film adaptation of the Bible, from radical adaptations of classical works to the founding of a ‘Free Republic’ – has revolutionised theatre like no other.

 

For some time now, the writer and director – a recipient of the European Theatre Prize, amongst other honours – has also turned his attention to opera. Following his ‘revolutionary’ (Bachtrack) production of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito (2020) and the opera Justice (2024) – “an opera like no other before” (ARD) – Rau is now staging Richard Wagner’s music for the first time.

 

Rau’s production of The Flying Dutchman is conceived as a kind of historical road movie through German-Israeli relations, from the genocide of European Jews to the present day, which is marked by contested politics of memory. His interpretation combines Wagner’s classical musical theatre with Rau’s characteristic documentary-style, cinematic methods: the ensemble, centred on the two star singers Tomasz Konieczny (the Dutchman) and Aušrinė Stundytė (Senta), is joined by two narrators: Sara von Schwarze – whose grandparents were Nazis and whose parents converted to Judaism – and the Berlin based Shlomi Wagner – who is obsessed with the idea of performing Wagner’s music in Israel, thereby liberating it from its Nazi past for the present day.

 

The director views Wagner’s ‘redemptive opera’ as a mirror of a radical analysis of the present: As a prologue to the Berlin production, Milo Rau and his team stage a public performance in Israel of selected Wagner arias. What does the cultural ‘Wagner complex’ – anti-Semitism, German guilt and the hope of redemption – mean in today’s Israel? As part of this one-off performance, Rau and his Jewish and Arab guests discuss the sense and nonsense of artistic boycotts, and the impact of the Holocaust on German, Israeli and Palestinian history until today.

 

 

“We will travel through Israel this summer, meet people, and ultimately perform Wagner’s music.” (Q&A)

 

How did the decision to stage Wagner come about? And above all: how did your reinterpretation of „The Flying Dutchman“ come about?

 

Milo Rau: Aviel Cahn, the new artistic director of the Deutsche Oper, asked me if I would like to stage The Flying Dutchman to mark the start of his tenure in Berlin. It was immediately clear to me that the production would revolve around the theme of the Shoah. Because, unfortunately, Wagner stands for anti-Semitism, for all those romantic, „German“ fantasies of doom and redemption: The idea that even the worst can be transcended – through music.

In terms of staging, we made a simple yet radical reversal. In Wagner’s work, the Dutchman is Ahasver, the wandering Jew, who can only be redeemed through the love of Senta, a Nordic woman – in line with Wagner’s idea that Judaism must be ‘destroyed’ within Germanness. I thought to myself: what if the Flying Dutchman and his ghost ship represented the German consciousness in the wake of the Holocaust? And what if Senta were Israel? We then went through the opera in detail, and well: it fits perfectly.

As always, however, I am very precise and specific in my decisions. Alongside the on-stage action, we will therefore have two narrators on stage: one is Sara von Schwarze. She is the grandchild of German Nazis whose parents converted to Judaism and moved to Israel, as a form of atonement, so to speak. Von Schwarze recounts the history of the relationship between Israel and Germany in three acts: the Holocaust in the overture, then reconciliation, Black September, and current politics of remembrance. The Israeli singer and performer Shlomi Wagner, on the other hand, who is genuinely obsessed with the idea of staging Wagner in Israel, is, so to speak, my alter ego. He seeks to confront the trauma in the present. Together with them, I will travel through Israel this summer, meet people, and ultimately perform Wagner’s music.

 

Now, since the traumatic attacks on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing massacre of the Gaza war, the relationship between Germany and Israel, and above all the concept of ‘anti-Semitism’, has once again become highly politicised: it has become a battleground for interpretative authority in the Middle East conflict. Can the debate about German guilt really still be framed as a ‘road movie through history’, as the announcement puts it? Or does that not mean venturing into a minefield of day-to-day politics, where the issues at stake are entirely different?

 

Rau: That’s true, and we have quite deliberately chosen to expose ourselves to it. Simply because to me, the ritualised horror – which has persisted more than 80 years now – at Bayreuth’s unresolved Nazi past and Wagner’s anti-Semitism seems incomplete – as if, by fixating on the past, the present were being deliberately overlooked.

The first act depicts Germany’s rapprochement with Israel – a historical chapter which, incidentally, was extremely controversial at the time. The second act, featuring the attack by Palestinian assailants on the Israeli Olympic delegation in Munich in 1972, marks, as it were, the birth of today’s areas of conflict – right in the heart of Germany. The third act, set on the evening of the inauguration of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, then ventures right into the core of the political battle over memory.

What’s more, the character of Erik allegorically embodies the fate of Palestine: this character who cannot understand why he is not loved, even though he comes from the same country as Senta. But Senta loves the Dutchman, that creepy bloke with his ghostly crew.

 

Your production at the Deutsche Oper is preceded by a trip to Israel, which of course makes perfect thematic sense. During this trip, you are also publicly performing Wagner’s music. That is actually not done in Israel. At the same time, you are inevitably collaborating with Israeli artists and thereby circumventing another boycott, namely the one against Israel. Why are you doing this? Do you have no fears, no doubts?

 

Rau: Israel and the Israeli government are two completely different things. I stand with Israeli civil society, as I stand with the Palestinian civil society, which goes without saying; I refuse to confuse the population with its government. It wasn’t easy to find a logistical and organisational arrangement in which we do not collaborate in any way with official state actors – but we have succeeded. Complete independence is very important to us. Furthermore: Our Wagner event in Tel Aviv is a very direct criticism of the current Israeli government, which I, like the UN, regard as criminal, notwithstanding any entirely legitimate self-defence. We are therefore working very closely on the production not only with Wagner experts and musicians, but also with Palestinian and Israeli critics of the current Israeli government.

Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the relations between Germany and Israel form the dramatic thread running through the production, but they are not the sole focus. When Barenboim performed Wagner in Israel in 2001, his friend, the postcolonial Palestinian philosopher Edward Said, wrote a very interesting piece. He argued: Our consciousness must not be determined by traumas and taboos, by prohibitions and boycotts, for in that way – whether we are Israelis or Palestinians – we cannot understand the past, which in turn determines the crimes of the present.

But of course: all this is a colossal undertaking that surpasses even projects such as ‘Antigone in the Amazon’ or ‘Orestes in Mosul’. To be honest, the whole endeavour fills me with an almost metaphysical fear. I wake up in the morning and think: isn’t it a bit mad to be performing Wagner in Israel today? Is it right, is it wrong? At the time, Barenboim was accused of opportunism, of breaking the boycott of Israel, of seeking attention. His friend Edward Said replied: That is precisely what art is – a mad, contradictory realm in which nothing is entirely right and nothing is entirely wrong. I agree with him. Art must be a dangerous, a bewildering act. It must shake us to the core, collectively. How could we not feel fear, not harbour doubts?