Mr. Hueffer adds:
"Here, however, his indebtedness ends. Fitzball knows nothing of the beautiful idea of woman's redeeming love. According to him the Flying Dutchman is the ally of a monster of the deep, seeking for victims. Wagner, further developing Heine's idea, has made the hero himself to symbolise that feeling of unrest and ceaseless struggle which finds its solution in death and forgetfulness alone. The gap in Heine's story he has filled up by an interview of Senta with Erik, her discarded lover, which the Dutchman mistakes for a breach of faith on the part of his wife, till Senta's voluntary death dispels his suspicion."
It should be noted that Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, whose translation of Wagner's prose works has been so often quoted, wrote a paper to disprove the theory of Mr. Hueffer as to the play having been Fitzball's. The matter, after all, is not one of great importance. Wagner got his materials from Heine's book, which contained a version of a very old legend, and in making the text of his lyric drama, he altered and improved that material as Mr. Hueffer has indicated.
The late Mr. John P. Jackson, formerly musical editor of The New York World, in the admirable introduction to his translation of the text of this opera, at one time used at the Metropolitan Opera House, says that the Fitzball play was founded on a version of the legend printed in Blackwood's Magazine in May, 1821. That version runs thus:
"She was an Amsterdam vessel and sailed from port seventy years ago. Her master's name was Van der Decken. He was a staunch seaman, and would have his own way in spite of the devil. For all that, never a sailor under him had reason to complain; though how it is on board with them nobody knows. The story is this: that in doubling the Cape they were a long day trying to weather the Table Bay. However, the wind headed them, and went against them more and more, and Van der Decken walked the deck, swearing at the wind. Just after sunset a vessel spoke him, asking him if he did not mean to go into the bay that night. Van der Decken replied, 'May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the day of judgment.' And to be sure, he never did go into that bay, for it is believed that he continues to beat about in these seas still, and will do so long enough. This vessel is never seen but with foul weather along with her."
This is practically the original story of the "Flying Dutchman." It is no new tale, but, like nearly all myths, a development. In the literature of Greece we find the wanderer in the person of Ulysses, yearning for hearth and home and the joys of domestic love. In the early period of Christianity the myth entered and gave us the gloomy figure of the Wandering Jew, accursed and hopeless of all save the end in oblivion. With the Dutch the legend in the Middle Ages was easily transferred to their own favourite element, the sea, whereon at that time they were among the most daring and skilful. The struggle of the Dutchman against contending winds and waves typified their own battles with the powers of Old Ocean, and their determination to conquer at all hazards.
Later writers than those of the dark ages endeavoured to give this legend an end. In its original form it stands suspended with the Dutchman a creature without hope. Captain Marryatt, in his "Phantom Ship," releases the wanderer from his ceaseless journeyings by means of an amulet, or religious charm. Sir Walter Scott's version of the tale—wherever he found it—is a curiously poor one. According to him, the vessel was laden with precious metal. A murder was committed on board, and as a punishment for it a plague fell upon the crew. No port would permit the ship to enter, and it was doomed to float about aimlessly forever. There is no poetry and a total absence of the personal tragedy in that version. The idea of the salvation of the wanderer through the self-sacrificing love of woman, an idea to be found in literatures much older than this, was introduced into the story before Heine saw the play of which he wrote. It is quite possible that Heine never saw such a play, yet the fact remains that in the Fitzball drama the Dutchman did take a wife, only, however, to make an offering of her to a sea monster—a grotesque and utterly unpoetical idea.
Wagner got his beautiful ending from Heine. Mr. Hueffer has taken the trouble to retail the story as told in "The Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski." The sentence of Van der Decken is that he shall wander till doomsday unless he shall be released by a woman faithful until death. The Devil does not believe in the existence of women of that sort, and therefore allows the wanderer to go ashore once every seven years to see if he can find such a one. (How was it that the Devil was so often mistaken about women?) He meets with failure after failure, till finally he falls in with a Scotch merchant, whose daughter has already learned his story and formed a romantic attachment for him. She has his picture in her room, and when her father, having accepted the Dutchman's offer for her hand, brings him home, she at once recognises him and determines to sacrifice herself to save him. Just at this point Herr von Schnabelewopski is called away for a short time, and when he returns he sees the Dutchman about to sail away without his wife. He loves her and would save her from his fate. But she, true to her vow, ascends a high rock, whence she throws herself into the sea. The spell is broken and the united lovers enter eternal rest. The reader will now see that it was the void occasioned by the temporary absence of von Schnabelewopski which Wagner filled with the interview between Senta and Erik. Except for the introduction of this character, a tenor, necessary to afford both dramatic and musical contrast to the story, Wagner has followed Heine closely, as lovers of the dramatist's works will at once perceive.
Out of this material Wagner constructed a drama which at the time of its production was as novel as "Tristan und Isolde" was in later years. In it we first meet with this master's remarkable power of concentrating in each scene the emotional moods and pouring them out to us in the music, while in those portions of the score devoted to musical description, such as the sea music and the sailors' choruses, we may note his ability to make dramatic atmosphere. How these powers reveal themselves to us in the grand duo of the last scene of Siegfried and the Waldweben! It is worth while hearing "Der Fliegende Holländer" occasionally, if only to study the embryonic Wagner. Now let us see how Wagner himself regarded the subject-matter of his story.
"The figure of the Flying Dutchman," he says, "is a mythical creation of the folk. A primal trait of human nature speaks out from it with a heart-enthralling force. This trait, in its most universal meaning, is the longing after rest from amid the storms of life." He traces the older forms of the legend as seen in the stories of Ulysses and the Wandering Jew, and then says: