The new production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin seemed engineered to be provocative; but while Milo Rau’s ambitious staging – which attempted nothing less than a critical dissection of international relations between Germany and Israel since the end of the Second World War – was certain to ruffle some feathers and raise a few eyebrows, in the end it remained so rigorously committed to its own enlightened neutrality that it stopped well short of actual provocation. What emerged instead was something between a conversation piece and a history lesson, often fascinating in its presentation, and fundamentally humane in its outlook; the fact that is also contained a performance of a Wagner opera seemed, at times, purely incidental.
The production consisted of three layers that unfolded in parallel. The first was a documentary of sorts, in which Shlomi Moto Wagner, a Berliner of German-Israeli heritage, attempts to bring the music of Wagner to Israel. (Since the foundation of Israel in 1948 there has been an unofficial ban on Wagner performances; both Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim tried to include Wagner preludes as encores at concert performances and were met with fierce opposition). In the course of organising Wagner concerts, Mr Wagner meets Sarah von Schwarze, an actress of German descent who grew up in Israel, and the two travel around Israel meeting with people whose lives have been affected by the ongoing conflict with the displaced Palestinian people. Both Mr Wagner and Ms von Schwarze appeared on stage providing a spoken introduction to the production, and the footage from their travels formed a crucial background to the staging.
The second layer was an historical overview, starting from the first migration of German Jews to Palestine during the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, and continuing through the foundation of Israel, the massacre at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, and the unveiling of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in the early 2000s. The third layer was, of course, a staging of Der fliegende Holländer, in which the characters from Wagner’s drama were placed within an elaborate allegory about the thorny relations between Germany, Israel and Palestine. Any one of these layers would have been fascinating on its own – a full-length documentary about Wagner and Israel is such an obviously great idea it is a wonder someone hadn’t done it already – and the fact that all three managed to co-exist on the same stage at all should suggest the levels of ingenuity and commitment that went into the staging.
However, while the staging possessed many admirable qualities, subtlety was not among them. In the spirit of making sure absolutely no one in the audience missed the point, the overture was accompanied by a credit sequence that not only introduced the characters, but used title cards to state exactly what each one was intended to represent: thus, the Holländer was an explicit personification of post-war German guilt, Senta was the soul of the Jewish people, Daland was the founding fathers of Israel, and Erik the displaced Palestinians. While the world of modern opera is full of stagings that attempt to make the story relevant by transplanting it to a different era, this Holländer tried to map a chapter of modern political history onto a story that wasn’t quite able to support it, and every so often the timbers of the staging would shiver under the weight of its own overtaxed metaphor.
At its best, the staging was able to use the character dynamics of the opera to give a fresh perspective on German-Israeli relations: the idea of the conscience-wracked Holländer (Germany) seeking salvation by bringing the gift of lucrative economic trade to Daland (Israel) had an appealing logic, but the triangular drama in which the predestined love between the Holländer and Senta blossoms at the expense of Erik (Palestine) was awkward enough on the surface and collapsed completely on closer scrutiny.
The staging was, in any event, more interested in pursuing its own agenda, and it was rarely short of interesting talking-points and fascinating asides: the question of whether one can justify listening to Wagner in light of his own personal beliefs (to say nothing of his veneration by the National Socialists) is something that every Wagner enthusiast has had to wrangle with; and the possibility that Berlin’s Holocaust memorial isn’t entirely suitable for its purpose has been widely discussed over the past two decades. Despite the range of ideas put forth, and the velocity with which one point followed the next, there was enough of a governing logic to prevent the staging from lapsing into incoherence; however its myriad propositions often served to distract from, rather than intensify the drama on stage.
Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer. Giedrė Šlekytė, conductor. Milo Rau, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, October 2026. © 2026 by Matthias Horn / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
The staging made a virtue of its honesty: not only was it frank in its presentation of historical events, but the spoken prologue and interlude were delivered with first-person candour; the credit sequence during the overture even went so far as to introduce the singers, focussing on their nationalities and the relationship between their nations to political events of the twentieth century, thus blurring the line between performance and reality. It was this veneer of plain-spoken truthfulness that provided the foundation for a neutrality that was, in the end, necessary for a balanced discussion of Germany, Israel and Palestine.
Yet there were a handful of moments that left one with a sense that the staging’s honesty was, itself, a carefully maintained theatrical construction, a device to earn the trust of the audience. Such lapses were rare and invariably subtle, but when they came they had the effect of throwing everything slightly off balance, offering the briefest glimpse of the sleight of hand that makes the magic trick possible. Of course it is the very nature of history that anyone who attempts to sift through established facts and recombine them into any kind of narrative must, of necessity, impose their own biases, beliefs and experiences, no matter how neutral they may claim to be. In the end, it was not the geopolitical events described, but the skill with which the staging was able to construct its own historical stance that proved to the be evening’s most subtly provocative element.
If the production seemed dominated by the weight of its discourse, the music didn’t always do its utmost to reclaim the spotlight. The evening’s finest performance may have belonged to the Deutsche Oper choir who, in defiance of the staging, managed to infuse their scenes with a welcome jolt of seafaring bravado. In an evening that called the very idea of Wagner into question, it was the vigorous ‘Steuermann, lass die Wacht’ in the third act that offered the most pithy rejoinder: if we still listen to Wagner in the twenty-first century, it is because at his best he is untouchable.
Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer. Giedrė Šlekytė, conductor. Milo Rau, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, October 2026. © 2026 by Matthias Horn / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
From Tomasz Konieczny’s first appearance as the Holländer it was apparent that something wasn’t quite right. Although his opening monologue was gripping in its outsized expressions of emotional force – he captured both the guilt of the staging and the harrowing fate described in the libretto with the same epic sweep – there was some strain in his normally fulsome tone, and the monologue itself was punctuated by coughs so well integrated into the performance that they could have been intended to convey a sense of the Holländer’s damp and rheumy life at sea. It turned out, however, that Mr Konieczny was actually ill, and during the Holländer’s scene with Senta in the second act, Derek Welton appeared at the side of the stage to take over. Fortunately Mr Welton was equally well-attuned to the severity of the role, and he sang for the rest of the evening while Mr Konieczny performed the physical part, an heroic joint-effort that added up to an excellent performance.
Aušrinė Stundytė’s Senta was inevitably more divisive; but while her performance frequently bypassed conventional beauty in favour of unnerving intensity, her insistence on venturing far beyond the character’s usual pure-hearted timidity was often thrilling, and in her finest scenes she was able to offer fascinating glimpses into Senta’s interior life. Her retelling of the Holländer ballad was like an iceberg: slightly cool, but with suggestions of an enormous depth beneath the visible surface. The ‘Yohohos’ were unusually restrained and the narration often hauntingly remote, but when the repressed passion finally exploded to the surface in the exultant ‘Ich sei’s’ it was all the more ecstatic for having been preceded by such hypnotic calm. Her scenes with Erik were very good, and her first encounter with the Holländer was majestic, albeit in ways that could be startlingly unconventional.
Attilio Glaser – whose 70s costume gave him the look of a minor character in a Fassbinder film – provided the evening with a strong Erik who grew in stature as the evening went on. His first scene with Senta often crossed the line between lovesick and bullying which, when combined with Senta’s reluctance, suggested the full toxicity of their relationship. Yet Mr Glaser’s finest moment came in the third act, a declaration of feeling so unaffectedly ardent that it brought an unexpected infusion of humanity to a staging that had largely favoured intellectual abstraction. And Tareq Nazmi’s Daland was consistently excellent: without drawing excess attention to himself he managed to provide the drama of the early scenes with a solid foundation, and his professions of friendship to the Holländer were a highlight of the first act.
The orchestra under Giedrė Šlekytė sounded notably different than it used to under Sir Donald Runnicles, who held a virtual monopoly on new Wagner productions during the past fifteen years; the brass, especially, was both mellower and more integrated into the orchestral texture. Yet Ms Šlekytė’s reading could, at various points, be as unconventional as the rest of the production. It was unquestionably attuned to the opera’s sense of grandly scaled drama, offering both violent orchestral outbursts and pleasingly portentous pauses. What was absent was any sense of playfulness: Holländer might well be Wagner’s most effortlessly jovial score – and, after Rienzi, his most conventionally ‘operatic’ – but on this evening the lusty vigour of the opening scenes, the excitable momentum that leads from the first act into the spinning chorus, and the exultant lilt that seems to follow Daland wherever he goes were replaced by a presiding gravitas that worked extremely well for the more dramatic scenes, but also robbed some of the more good-natured passages of their vitality.
The reading, however, was well-suited to a staging in which the treatment of serious themes left little room for levity; and this may be the reason that the evening, despite its worthy intentions and balanced handling of sensitive issues, remained vaguely unsatisfying. If Wagner is problematic, it is precisely because even his most questionable ideas were accompanied by music so rousing it can overpower reason. In dealing so rationally with the question of Wagner, the production managed to sidestep the very quality that makes him so dangerously seductive.
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