To return to the Dutchman and the passage that I consider so crucial: the duet in which it occurs is hardly a ‘love-duet’. Actually Wagner didn’t compose nearly as many of those as he is often taken to have done. Certainly the movement is one of powerfully operating mutual magnetism, but the magnetism is not of an erotic kind – not quite. Erik, Senta’s unlucky suitor, and Daland, her father, naturally take it to be. But they show, by doing so, how much they belong to the world of marriages and children, both of which are, in nearly all cases, comically irrelevant to Wagner’s predestined pairs. One of the things that annoys people about Wagner is that his ‘lovers’ seem to be more interested in verbal, albeit sung, communication than in getting on with consummating their relationship. Very often, though not, as I said, in Holländer, there is a strong erotic charge in Wagner’s music that would seem to indicate that a sexual act is imminent, or is even being performed, but in musical code. He is, in fact, the composer who can write the sexiest music of anyone, though he is rarely capable of the come-hither, seductive (in the strictest sense) kind that comes so easily to Mozart, in Susanna’s ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ or Don Giovanni’s duet with Zerlina ‘La ci darem la mano’. His most famous ‘seduction scene’ is in Parsifal, indeed constitutes most of the Second Act, and Kundry still fails. The only one that succeeds is Gutrune’s of Siegfried in Act I of Götterdämmerung, and that is affected by an aphrodisiac with amnesiac properties. Wagner is not interested in the mechanics of seduction as such; he is concerned with the forces which bring people together, and which are out of the control of either of them.
That is clearly the case in the Duet in Holländer. Senta has long been familiar with the portrait of the Dutchman which hangs in the spinning-room. It represents for her an idea which becomes her ideal: self-sacrifice for an endlessly tormented man, something she gives alarming voice to in her breakaway in the middle of the third stanza of her Ballad. Like Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, she had her imagination ignited by a likeness. Wagner is already intimating that what comes first is the need, focused on a representation which reality obliges by copying. The relationship Senta wants has already been worked out before she sets eyes on the person who incarnates it. It is a theme which will recur in Lohengrin, in the Ring, in Tristan and in Die Meistersinger. Love in Wagner so often occurs at first sight because it has already begun in, as it were, second sight.
That leads to a further crux in reactions towards Wagner. His characters often lead listeners to feel ill at ease because they appear to embrace impossibly elevated notions of self-sacrifice, while at the same time the same characters seem to be abnormally, even abhorrently, self-obsessed – a reflection, the conclusion is often drawn, of their composer’s highly ambiguous state of mind. How is it possible to give, Derrida has been asking recently, in the context of a circle of exchange which turns the gift into a debt to be returned? But that is only putting into a specific context a question which is raised whenever the subject of selfishness and selflessness is considered. Wagner’s ‘givers’, redeemers, are, as I have remarked, no less desperate for someone to redeem than the converse. And this appears to have the consequence that his characters don’t relate to one another so much as relating to an idea of one another, which reality more or less obliges with. Thus both Senta and the Dutchman begin their Duet in reverie, Senta just as self-absorbed as he is. Whereas he misidentifies his yearning for redemption as love, for a moment, she wonders what she should call ‘the pains within my breast’, which are, she concludes, a longing to save him. Like Beethoven’s Leonore, with whom Senta shares several salient features, she is less interested in the identity of the man whom she sees before her than in what she can do for him. ‘Wer du auch seist’ (‘Whoever you are’) she sings, using precisely the words that Leonore uses in the dungeon-duet in Fidelio, at which point Beethoven’s music undergoes a marked intensification. Senta pretends that she will marry him because she will always obey her father – the Dutchman has asked her, after their rapt individual musings, whether she approves her father’s choice – and the music comes down with a rude thump, momentarily, to Daland’s level, before the Dutchman makes her an offer, or rather asks her a question, to which she can hardly say no. And then he, like Florestan in his prison cell, having a vision of Leonore as an angel leading him to salvation, tells her that she is an angel.
There are one or two awkwardnesses in this prototypically Wagnerian duet: the cadenza which the soloists indulge in is a non-contributory throwback; and the drop into mundanity, though it makes a point, makes it a bit too baldly. But the overall structure is maintained with moving mastery, and Wagner already shows how he can take us through a huge process of feeling in a comparatively short time without giving any sense of a hectic comic strip, as Verdi so often embarrassingly does. And the Duet does comprehend all the relevant aspects of the work: the Dutchman’s tiny burgeoning hope, Senta’s lonely need, the distance – this is a particularly impressive stroke – between the pair at the beginning, even though they are dwelling on the same theme. Then, to electrifying effect, the entry, for the first time in the Duet, of the Dutchman’s motif of ceaseless wandering, a compressed account for Senta’s benefit of what he has to endure and what she will have to share if she doesn’t have ‘ew’ge Treu’ (eternal fidelity). Once that has been made clear, Senta is free to express with full, explicit conviction that she knows her ‘sacred duty’, and they surge together to the close, when Daland re-enters bumptiously.
No one, in music-drama or elsewhere, had achieved an effect like this before. It is not, perhaps, surprising that it still remains unclear to many listeners what the effect is, apart from the overpowering sense of two figures being drawn together by a force which lies deeper than any kind of attraction that they feel for one another. The cunning proportions of music, and sentiment, which differentiate them and those which they share give us an uneasy feeling that there is a degree of manipulation which Wagner contrives to present as inevitability. And the manipulation is one which – if it exists – is exercised on the listener as well as on Senta and the Dutchman. It is the more disturbing because it brings into question the nature of quasi-erotic feelings. Already, at this almost alarmingly early stage in his career, Wagner shows himself to be a master of a certain kind of effect, which will grow immeasurably in intensity and profundity in his later works, but which is already sufficiently complex for us to sense a dominating presence demanding submission. For people who find it understandably questionable, as Nietzsche came to do to a degree which necessitated the pretence of wholesale rejection, it is (this is only a first, tentative formulation) as if the drama which Wagner created is one in which the dramatist’s will is imposed on the characters, and in turn their ecstasies are transmitted to us, so that the circle is closed and we are, as it might be felt, engulfed in Wagner’s feelings. He seems to deprive us of the possibility of achieving a perspective on the drama, which means that in a sense it is not a drama. For the genuine dramatic experience, as we have come to understand it, is one in which, however intense the actions on the stage, however sympathetic some of the characters may be and however revolted we are by others, we are still witnesses to a whole process which leaves us with the freedom to judge and assess. What Wagner seems to do – not always, but often enough for it to be fairly called characteristic of him – is to present us with a set of data which are, as it might be put, the premisses of the drama, and which often involve, it is soon made clear, portentous issues on which we are to ponder as well as about which we are to have feelings. But as he proceeds, the movement of the drama leads us to make exclusions which egg us on to identification with the figure, or often the pair of figures, whose supreme intensities of feeling over everything else that is happening lead us to respond so intensely ourselves that