This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
As with so many of the more entertaining crimes against humanity, it was opera that first honed the practice of gaslighting. What else to call the frat-boy hazing that poor wee Lammermuir Lucy suffers, with everloving brother Henry editing the letters he’s intercepted from her banned boyf Edgar, and cooking up other evidence of all the boompsadaisy the skunk is up to over in France?
Interestingly, in Walter Scott’s original, it was Lucy’s mum doing the dirty work, but another of opera’s inspirations was to pioneer the idea that women are essentially incapable of doing bad things — a clever move given the audience profile, and something they really ought to be making more of now that the entire sex has officially attained to sainthood.
Another pleasant side-effect of gaslight was getting wasted on the actual gas — like Emma Bovary, so off her tits on the fumes of the lamps in the opera house that she gets inflamed with lust for the tenor, prompting her to spark up her old affair with Léon on the spot — with, as you remember, hilarious consequences.
Gaslight first appeared in theatres in the 1830s — the tech revolution that made proper Romantic opera possible. Old-time candlelit theatres meant sitting in a badly-lit room peering at a badly-lit stage, making any kind of Gothic phantasmagoria a tricky ask.
Now the lights could be manipulated from the wings, and with a load of scrims and gauze and steam the misty menace of Lucia’s Scottish castles and crags could be brought to creepy life on stage.
This was clearly needed for the experimentalist new form of opera-as-cathouse being pioneered in Paris. Gas lighting was what made it possible to stage such outrages as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable of 1831, concentrating on the important thing: viz, how to display to clearest advantage the sexual attributes of the corps de ballet, clad in attractively diaphanous shrouds, playing dead nympho nuns rising from their tombs to seduce the hero.
All this tedious info goes some way to explain why the apotheosis of Gothic opera, Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman (now touring with Opera North), happened some time after the whole supernatural-chiller lark was in fact over. Washing up penniless in Paris with his first wife Minna in 1839, aged 26, Wagner instantly understood that with the gimmicks on tap he could get to work on two important goals: one, to launch the genuine Richard Wagner as an opera composer; and two, to do it in a correctly German way.
His models for this first instalment of the “Artwork of the Future” that would occupy the rest of his life were things like Weber’s trippy Devil Rides Out fantasy Der Freischütz of 1816 and Marschner’s Der Vampyr of 1828, pretty old hat by now. Brilliantly, he could now put together a kind of Freischütz 2.0, enhanced with newfangled FX, as the new heavily-armoured opera that would bulldoze the flimsy inanities of the French and Italian versions.
Wagner’s Dutchman scenario is a compendium of louring romantic archetypes
And nothing could be more typical of Wagner than choosing to do this via a preposterous fantasy of a fanatically gloomy, undead sea captain in a massive hat and the half-wit Scando teen, Senta, whom he somehow convinces to throw herself off a cliff to save his soul.
Wagner’s Dutchman scenario is a compendium of louring Romantic archetypes: the old Byronic hero of the Manfred ilk, whose main employment consists of shaking his fist at God, and the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth for eternity, and now the owner of a very handy ship (plus ghoulish crew) that transports its own appalling weather system wherever it goes.
This gave Wagner the final key to introduce the composer-hero himself into opera as the fabulously alienated protagonist, as Byron had done in poetry. When Richard and Minna did their midnight flit from Riga in 1839, their voyage to London was hit by horrendous storms, and the eight-day pleasure cruise took a nauseous three weeks. As the Thetis took shelter in a Norwegian fjord, the sailors’ shouts echoing around the cliffs planted a seed in his mind …
Some operatic revolutions begin rather chastely, like the violin twiddles that launch Mozart’s Figaro, or the peaceful string chords of Debussy’s Pelléas. None of that for our lad: he’s going to nuke us from the first bar.
Screaming bare open fifths (“a greeting from the spirit world”, he called it, pinched from Beethoven’s Ninth) are pierced through by wild hunting-calls on horns and brass, whilst the monstrous seas and winds boil underneath in the cellos and basses.
Only one thing remains for the full Wagner jackpot: redemption from that curse. Thanks to Senta’s extra-time dive-for-love, the opera ends with her and the Dutchman ascending to heaven — a peculiar image for the unChristian Wagner, and something he’d need to work on later.
The important point is that the curse can be undone only by a woman eager to commit jigai to prove her devotion and fidelity: possibly an alarming image if you happened to be Minna Wagner. But then — come on, ladies, there’s got to be some sort of price to pay for being so fabulous.
