Thunder of euphoria: the audience votes with their feet.
Hardly has the last D major chord after the end of salvation with the bittersweet minor subdominant inserted - that erogenous touch of the heart that once again slips death with a promise of orgasm - faded away, breaks, with the curtain still closed, a hurricane in the Bayreuth Festival Hall on the green Hill go.
Through clapping, trampling and screeching, the experience of being part of something big just a fraction of a second ago is discharged.
When the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, who sang Senta in “Fliegende Holländer”, steps on stage alone, the audience is no longer in their seats.
She was and she is a stunner!
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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In terms of voice and acting, Grigorian simply sets standards. The director Dmitri Tcherniakov doesn't give a damn about justifying Richard Wagner's ideal of the woman who is devoted to fate - one could also say: blindly loyal to the leader - who waits for the man of her life to give him this life, without weighing up any reasons, like a Magda Goebbels or to sacrifice Eva Braun. Senta is an unruly brat in a hooded hoodie in this coastal fog-plagued small town with the roll-colored clinkered houses, which Tcherniakov also came up with (costumes: Elena Zaytseva). She stirs up the urban women's choir at rehearsal for spinning room singing through demonstrative resistance, angry at everything that tries to keep the appearance of a healthy family, a bit like Julia Hummer,the problem child of the then young German film, in "Northern Star" by Felix Randau. Perhaps the older ones among us still remember the sentence she slammed on the head of their teacher: "Your husband is fucking my mother."
The audience doesn't thank him
Similarly, Senta wants to provoke the choir director Mary, who is also her mother, because she knows that Daland, her father, cheated on his mother with another woman years ago.
During the foreplay, Tcherniakov tells this story like a silent film.
This woman's young son then witnessed Daland taking his mother.
The following ostracism by the bourgeois mob drove the woman to her death.
The son found the hanged man.
He is H., the Flying Dutchman, who is now returning to the city after years to avenge his mother's death.
Tcherniakov puts this - a completely different - story under Wagner's “romantic opera” in order to escape the seductive idolatry of the original.
The audience doesn't thank him.
But Asmik Grigorian carries this idea as a rebellious girl who can no longer stand the lies and secrets of the honest men, but in the end also renounces the murderous Dutchman and shows understanding for Mary. When she swings in to sing the ballad with the famous “Johohoe”, one hears the complexity of her role in her singing: call, hurt, indignation, at the same time an awareness of the charisma of her own voice. Grigorian has a height that outshines everything without glaring. With the lyrical basic color of her soprano, one would hardly trust her to have this immense power, which, by the way, she still knows how to muster, especially in the final scene. In every situation it does not deliver a rehearsed part, but rather shows what action-related singing is.