Composer: Richard Wagner
Librettist: Richard Wagner

Romantic opera in three acts (1843)

In German, with Chinese surtitle

Musical direction: Vladimir Jurowski
Direction: Peter Konwitschny
Stage and costumes: Johannes Leiacker
Lighting: Michael Bauer
Dramaturgy: Werner Hintze

Conductor: Vladimir Jurowski
With Bayerische Staatsoper

 

Senta – Sinéad Campbell-Wallace
Holländer – Christopher Maltman
Erik – Matthias Klink
Steuermann – Brenton Ryan
Daland – Liang Li
Mary – Natalie Lewis

* All information on programme and duration is subject to change.

 

Der fliegende Holländer is Richard Wagner's fourth opera and the earliest of his operas to be performed at the Bayreuth Festival. He composed it in Paris in 1841, inspired both by the mention of the legend of the Flying Dutchman in the novel Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski by Heinrich Heine and by an experience of his own while travelling by ship: In 1839, Wagner lost his job at the theatre in Riga and could no longer pay his creditors. Fleeing from them, he found a captain who agreed to secretly take him and his wife on his sailing boat across the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to Great Britain.

 

The ship ran into bad weather several times, so the journey took a long time, and once they had to wait out a storm in the small Norwegian bay of Sandvika. Wagner later had the Dutchman and Daland meet precisely there. The opera was premiered on 2nd January 1843 at the Semperoper in Dresden. Wagner reworked the overture and ending in 1860; this is the version in which the opera is performed nowadays.

Vladimir Jurowski, born in Moscow, began his musical training at the Moscow Conservatory and continued it at the conservatories in Berlin and Dresden. He made his international debut as an opera conductor in 1995 at the Wexford Festival with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Mainacht. In the same year, he made his debut at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London with Nabucco. Since then, he has made guest appearances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Opéra national de Paris, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the Semperoper in Dresden and the Salzburg Festival, among others. From 1997 to 2001, he was First Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin and subsequently Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival until 2013. From 2007 to 2021, he was Chief Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and has been Conductor Emeritus there ever since; he has also been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) since 2017. He is also Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and was Artistic Director of the International George Enescu Festival in Bucharest and the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra “E. F. Svetlanov” until 2021. He regularly collaborates with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the ensemble unitedberlin.

 

He has appeared as a guest conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Philadelphia. In the 2015/16 season, he made his debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper in an academy concert with Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 3, among others; he subsequently conducted a new production of his opera Der feurige Engel. He also conducted the new production of Der Rosenkavalier in the 2020/21 season. He has been General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera since 2021 and has conducted the premieres of Nos / Die Nase, Die Teufel von Loudun, Così fan tutte, Krieg und Frieden, Hamlet, Die Fledermaus, Die Passagierin and Das Rheingold in addition to a series of concerts. In 2024 he was appointed Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by His Majesty King Charles III.

 

 

 

The Bayerische Staatsoper is one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world. It has been the venue for major European premieres since 1700, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta in 1781; four major operas of Richard Wagner (including Tristan und Isolde and two acts of his Opus Magnum Der Ring des Nibelungen) and Richard Strauss’ Capriccio. Today, the Bayerische Staatsoper – together with the Bayerische Staatsorchester and the Bayerische Staatsballett – offers a dense repertoire of almost 350 opera and ballet performances a year. In 2023, the Bayerische Staastoper was voted “Best opera company of the year” by the international critics’ of the magazine Opera.