Sounding the Seas

In his second lecture about opera’s relationship with international law, David Armitage recalls Wagner’s quasi-origin story for Der fliegende Holländer (1843): the composer’s own stormy sea voyage from East Prussia to Paris via London and Norway in the summer of 1939. Although Wagner had already planned to transform the legend of the eternally doomed ghost ship into an opera, he insisted that his journey gave his ideas a characteristic musical-poetic coloring. For Armitage, this coloring had less to do with the Schauer (dark)-romanticism of the craggy Norwegian fjords than with Wagner’s experience of the sea as a space of legal exceptionalism and the ship as a vector of law in an ocean of lawlessness. On the run from his Baltic creditors, Wagner had crossed the East Prussian border illegally. According to Armitage, the journey lent both documentary and autobiographical significance to the action, redirecting emphasis from romantic and gothic visions of the sea towards its legal significance

Depth sounding · Legend · Opera · Romance · Romanticism · Vision · German Literature and Culture Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Theater, Performance, and Music History