Harry Fehr brings ‘unpleasant’ Wagner to Scottish Opera

AS OPERA directors go, Harry Fehr has done the rounds with Scottish Opera. He’s the man behind such previously successful staged presentations as Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage, Handel’s Orlando, and Craig Armstrong’s The Lady from the Sea, part of Scottish Opera’s new mini-opera series at last year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Elsewhere in the UK, he has tackled Mozart, Massenet, Tchaikovsky, Donizetti, Rossini and brand new works with the likes of Opera Holland Park and the Royal Opera House.

But strangely, for someone who pledged himself to opera after graduating from Nottingham University, studying philosophy of all things, he has steered clear of Wagner.

“I assisted on The Flying Dutchman at the Royal Opera House, but that is the only professional experience I have,” he admits. “Nor have I seen enormous amounts of Wagner myself, so it’s a new discovery for me.”

What he has discovered will become abundantly clear tonight when the curtain rises on Fehr’s intriguing new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. It’s set on an oil rig, the characters have Scottish names (Donald instead of Daland, George instead of Erik), and we are asked to accept the Dutchman as the modern day captain of an oil tanker off the north-east coast of Scotland in the 1970s, rather than the mystical storybook wanderer, cursed to sail the seas until fate draws him to the Norwegian fjords and a strange girl called Senta.

Why so long getting to Wagner? “I feel that with Wagner one can’t just like him in a way one likes Handel or Mozart. With him, you have to sign up for a whole lifestyle choice, and there’s such difficulties associated with the philosophies and politics surrounding his work that I’ve just kind of resisted it for quite a long time,” Fehr says.

The Flying Dutchman seemed a good place to start, given that, of all Wagner’s early operas, it’s the one that most embodies the traumatic passage between the hot German Romanticism of Weber and Marschner, and the one-man revolution that would reach its apotheosis in the monumental scale and psychology of Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Yet it was that very psychology that Fehr felt impelled to suppress in his fresh view of the opera. “My first reactions to it were that it’s a piece Wagner clearly felt was to be read allegorically. As a guide perhaps to how women should subjugate themselves to their men. And basically that reading is quite misogynistic.

“It was quite important to me early on to find a way which limited the misogyny, and therefore try to focus on the individual rather than the allegorical, and on a story, not about an archetypal man and an archetypal woman, but just one particular individual woman and one particular individual man who need each other at the point in their lives for sex. I felt it was important to put personality on it.”

Did that, in any way, influence Fehr’s decision to relocate this weird tale to a coastal fishing village in Scotland, complete with cast of home-baked Highlanders and enigmatic outsider that makes it sound, to all intents and purposes, like an operatic derivative of Bill Forsyth’s film Local Hero?

The reasons, argues Fehr, are completely vindicated. “First, there’s the obvious one – that Wagner’s original draft actually placed the action in Scotland, giving many of the characters Scottish names.” The composer eventually changed the location and names to the final Norwegian version for the opera’s first production in Dresden in 1843.

More importantly, the use of that original libretto was just what Fehr needed to fire his realistic approach. “I wanted to highlight the individual over the archetypal, so had to find a context that would allow the audience to read them as individual people, one that would be legible to a Scottish Opera audience, and an era closer to the present day.”

But an oil rig? “My designer Tom Scutt and I were really taken by the aesthetic associated by the emerging oil industry of the north-east coast of Scotland in the 1970s. It felt that it was the very strong industrial, blunt quotidian aesthetic would act as quite a nice contrast to the imaginative interior world of Senta.

“And also it just made strong sense. There were in the 1970s – and still are – fishing communities on the north east coast of Scotland; but we found the oil rig, the oil tanker, the kind of work the men are doing, so legible visually that we thought it would be interesting to go with that.” It has certainly opened up huge possibilities in developing the characters. “All of them have a very strong back history. The thing about the Dutchman is that I want him to be as real as possible, a 1970s’ sailor seen against the outline of his oil tanker. It’s very easy for the audience to feel distanced from the Dutchman, because he just feels like a ghost. So I’ve done everything I can to resist, to make him feel as flesh and blood as is possible.”

“There’s also the risk with this piece that it can feel very like Senta’s story, but it’s not. She doesn’t even turn up till Act 2, and it has to be that there are two people who both have needs, and who both have stories which need to be explored.

Fehr found the idea of an isolated community perfect for his exploration. “It’s a small and very insular community. This outsider comes to it, but also there’s an outsider within it, who is Senta. She doesn’t fit in. Setting it in a community which has this isolated introspective feeling to it was important.”

There’s a sense, in fact, that Fehr is deliberately cleansing the opera of Wagner. “Yes. That has helped me enormously, so that I can just focus on the narrative, and focus on the emotion of the piece, which I think is the important thing, without having to feel bogged down at every turn by questions of Wagner’s rather unpleasant philosophy.”

Come to think of it, I’m not even convinced Fehr likes Wagner. “I like the music and I think that there are thematic things that are certainly very relevant and very true. But I don’t think I’d like to sit next to him at a dinner party.”

• Scottish Opera’s new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman opens at the Theatre Royal Glasgow tonight, with further performances on 6 and 9 April. It is then at Edinburgh Festival Theatre on 13, 16 & 19 April. www.scottishopera.org.uk