Director Àlex Ollé returns to the Opera de Lyon with the great challenge of the stage direction of his second adaptation of Wagner. His first time was in 2011, to adapt a Tristan et Isolde of Wagner‘s most mature time, and he now returns to lead the Der Fliegende Holländer, the work from the composer’s most youthful era. “But Wagner is always Wagner: a controversial creator, a radical ideologue and revolutionary aesthetic,” says the furero Àlex Ollé.
Could nowadays a story like that happen? Can life be of such little value that when death stands besides him, that option doesn’t seem like such a bad idea? Is there anyone who still believes in this emanation of hell? These are some of the questions that has arisen to address the principal creating of the staging of the show.
And so, with the intention to preserve the original values, is how the rereading of this legend, created by Wagner, emerged. Der Fliegende Holländer in which the sea, the central metaphor, has dried up. The Flying Dutchman is now a boat stranded in an industrial surrealism desert. A group of men and women, an ancient tribe almost half pirates and slave merchant ships, have already begun to dismantle it. What emerges from the bowels of the ship, its crew, its captain are now the same ghosts of operators that destroy it. It’s their desires, their ambition, desire for power, wealth, freedom, their fears. It is an emanation of polluting waste from the aspirations of a society on the edge of hell.
With La Fura dels Baus’s umpteenth rereading of Der Fliegende Holländer returns the legend and the realism of the opera to the public through a series of emotions that, since Wagner’s time haven been transformed, preserving the romantic sentiment of the absolute right how the composer percepts it in the sea. Der Fliegende Holländer’s boat, haunting, is the space where the memory of a legend lives, a presence that while the opera advances will suffer a process of scrapping. In this version the circularity of time breaks and the main characters live a hell with no end.
The strength of dismemberment precludes any boat navigation and therefore the possibility of legend, also deconstructing the myth of Der Fliegende Holländer to a viewer who will face the rationalism of the modern man and the magical universe of the archaic man, where feeling love for a damned hero is still possible.
The official premiere of the show will be on Saturday 11th of October. However, during the same month 7 more functions will take place. For more information, dates, times and tickets, please visit the official website of the Opera de Lyon.
