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Airplane travel is certainly not what it used to be. My return trip was uneventful but it was not always pleasant. More than ten years ago, returning from an extensive Asian trip, I thought otherwise. Waiting for my last connecting flight in LAX on my homeward journey I reflected on the marvels of traveling in the early 21st century. I had arranged my itinerary on-line, had paid for my tickets by credit card and had breezed through about a dozen different airports (and some of the best in the world: Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lampur) without a hitch. I thought at the time that travel was just swell. How exciting it was to be alive in an age of technological wonders and convenience! Then 9/11 changed everything.
No one would wax ecstatic about the joys of travel now. It is difficult, underscored by precautions and a sense of fear. Airports and planes are overcrowded. We get slapped with extra charges right and left. We are scrutinized by an army of security guards. We hope they are effective. Sadly, we know only too well that sooner or later another catastrophe will occur. Hopefully, we think quietly, it will not be on our flight.
I attended the second and final performance of FH. The 2,000 seat theater was nearly sold out. The crowd was enthusiastic, if a little noisy. (Can you believe that someone would bring an infant to the opera? The overture wasn't even finished before it started wailing, annoying everyone in the vicinity.) There was a technical glitch in the second act, where the visuals were lost for a while. The tech crew must have been frantic backstage trying to get the problem fixed. Fortunately, they did. Despite these minor annoyances, I enjoyed the opera even more this time.
The longest scene, the encounter of the Dutchman and Senta, occurs in the middle of the opera. It could be taken for a static stretch, but one must understand how crucial it is in the development of the dynamic between these two characters. It would take just a few minutes to read the text. Set to music, this encounter lasts about twenty minutes. It begins slowly, tentatively and builds to an enraptured duet. And if that weren't enough, Daland enters and we are launched into an even more ecstatic trio. Music has the capability of probing the emotional depths of a situation, of expressing the unutterable, and of intensifying every nuance. That is why a text in itself might be banal, but the music it is set to may be sublime. In Kay Walker Castaldo's intelligent direction the two protagonists, meeting for the very first time (and we have just heard Senta's Ballad and her inner yearning for this mysterious stranger) circle each other slowly. It was like two fighters in the ring scoping each other out. This is the center of the opera, the wheel around which the rest of the story revolves, the turn of the kaleidoscope that changes everything. It was a brilliant stroke to have the characters also revolve around each other. The reviewer of the opera in the local press is, I am told, really a theater critic and not a musician. He criticized the static nature of the piece, failing to understand the nature of music, the very raison d'être of combining words and music.