Chapter Three - The Diabolical Senta

Summary

Bored with her life of repetitive chores, a girl dreams of a dark ship full of death and annihilation, an escape from the mundane into some fantastic passion (figure 3.1):

Bored with her life of repetitive chores, a girl dreams of a dark ship full of death and annihilation, an escape from the mundane into some fantastic passion (figure 3.2):

But I repeat myself; and in a sense Kurt Weill, in the famous refrain of “Pirate Jenny” from The Threepenny Opera (1928) repeated Wagner from eightyfive years before. Weill's refrain has a similar profile to that of Senta's phrase, from her ballad in The Flying Dutchman (1843): each melody falls from D to F♯ while traversing a progression that can be construed as a i–V cadence, though Wagner gets to the dominant via the supertonic, and Weill via the subdominant. Critics have sometimes read “Pirate Jenny,” with its proletarian barmaid daydreaming of mass murder, as a parody of Wagner's romantical ballad about a girl whose imagination is captured by a sailor cursed to roam the seas forever. But in this chapter I’m going to try to argue that Weill's Pirate Jenny isn't a parody but a reprise of Senta, for Senta herself is a dark character caught up in a black comedy.

The greatest mystery about the composition of The Flying Dutchman is its relation to its acknowledged source, Heine's Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski (1833). In chapters 6 and 7, Heine's hero goes to an Amsterdam theater and sees a play about the Flying Dutchman. He's not particularly excited by what he sees and makes snarky comments on the plot: “Poor Dutchman! He's often happy enough to be redeemed from marriage itself, happy to be released from his redeemer, and then he sets out again on his ship.” In fact the Polish nobleman is far less interested in the play than in a seductive blonde spectator who drops an orange peel on his head, whether accidentally or by design.