Vocally, Elisabeth Teige is undoubtedly the great discovery at this year's Bayreuth Festival.

Already as Freia in "Rheingold" and then again as Gutrune in "Götterdämmerung" the Norwegian soprano set exclamation points in the desperate, desolate productions of Valentin Schwarz with her penetrating sensuality, the siren-like sweet, ominously alluring magic of her big, strong voice.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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But now the artistic director of the festival, Katharina Wagner, has happily cast Elisabeth Teige as Senta in Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, giving her the big stage that she deserves.

A unique, youthfully dramatic soprano can be admired: Teige miraculously understands how to take the warmth of the chest register into the head voice and, without roaring, to enormously amplify the diverse nuances of the head voice.

The effect is confusing: One believes that the precious, always half-shadowed mother-of-pearl shimmer of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf gets a booster of incredible power, with a lot of body in the sound.

Unlike Lise Davidsen, who is not yet thirty but already sings Sieglinde in Die Walküre and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser in Bayreuth, Teige is in her early forties.

Her voice gives the impression of healthy maturation.

Senta doesn't come too early for her, while Grigorian's forced break earlier this year raises the suspicion of vocal strain.

After Grigorian's truly sensational Bayreuth debut as Senta last year, one could rightly ask oneself whether the production of Dmitri Tcherniakov's "Dutchman" would not collapse without this outstanding singer and actress.

A completely different story

Tcherniakov tells a completely different story than Richard Wagner, namely that the Dutchman returns after many years to the city where his mother - Daland's mistress - hanged herself after she had been ostracized by the townspeople.

In revenge for his mother's death, he wants to burn down the whole town.

Senta, Daland's daughter, is in league with the Dutchman from the start because she hates her lying father, who also abused Dutchman's mother.

Teige may not have the boyish physique of Grigorian, but she grippingly stages her social dissonance with the city youth – at a choir rehearsal in which the spinning room song is being rehearsed – as aggressive boredom.

Then she slouches between the girls, legs apart, intoning her "Johohohe!" very quietly, but so compellingly that everyone has to listen to her and not to the choir director Mary, who is also her mother or stepmother here, at least Daland's wife.

The emphasized upbeats in the stanzas of her ballad with the following leap of fourths downwards have nothing nagging about in Teige, but roundness of sound at full power.

The staging also works better than ever in other areas.

The directing of the action for the choir, which Eberhard Friedrich has made singing in top form for these sporting tasks, is virtuosic.

The changing formations of fronts in urban society become clear in a flash.

The precision of Tcherniakov's detailed personal work makes even the greatest deviation from Wagner's original libretto plausible.

As a Dutchman, Thomas J. Mayer may not have the icy aura of John Lundgren, who gave his character an eerie presence from the start last year, but the engaging, slightly melancholy in Mayer's demeanor only makes it more likely that Daland (who, as always, Venerable Georg Zeppenfeld) and many others are so easily taken in by him.

Nadine Weissmann as Mary only has to swear at dinner to get Senta and Hollander engaged – and you already know how she feels about the whole thing.

With a final shot, she will bring the whole spook to a surprising end.

Eric Cutler, who, like everyone else, has an extremely well-groomed sound and sings in a very understandable way, plays out his abused patience with Senta, his anger against her, but also his fear of her as Erik in a concise and very targeted manner.

As Senta, Teige responds with mute coldness and contempt.

She thinks he's a wimp and an idiot.

Oksana Lyniv has gained a lot of composure and moderation in the second year of her Bayreuth conducting.

The tension and sharpness of their debut have given way to a more supple organic dynamic and a greater trust in the orchestra's common sense.

Wagner's disparate intonations in "The Dutchman" - romantic fairy tale à la Weber and Marschner, bourgeois opera à la Lortzing and amorous bel canto à la Bellini - are seamlessly combined by Lyniv without leveling out every stylistic idiom in detail.

At the end, the concentrated, stormy affection of the audience flies towards her during the final applause.

"The Flying Dutchman" will join the successful productions of recent years with Tobias Kratz's "Tannhäuser" and Barrie Kosky's "Meistersingern von Nürnberg".

Even if "The Ring of the Nibelung" is currently in urgent need of follow-up work (Bayreuth also has to defend the freedom of failure), this "Dutchman" shows that the further work on Wagner can succeed.