This is his first music drama.  He called it a romantic opera; but here for the first time the drama grows out of an idea and the music out of the drama.  The thing suggested itself to him during that stormy trip to London:  the roaring waves, the whistling of the salt winds, the loneliness of the bitter North Sea—­these set his imagination aworking on the old legend of the mariner doomed to sail the ocean until the Day of Judgment.  In this there was colour and atmosphere enough, but no drama.  The dramatic idea he took from Heine’s sentimental version.  In this the Dutchman’s lot is softened and mitigated by a possibility of salvation.  He can go ashore once in seven years, and if he can find a maiden who will love him and be faithful unto death he will be released from the necessity to wander.  That is to say, his chances of redemption depend upon constancy of some unknown young lady.  All the Dutchman has to do is to find her, make himself agreeable, and trust to luck.  A more childish notion never occurred to an intellectual man, nor a more selfish one.  The lady might have done nothing wrong; she was to be punished for loving not wisely but too well; and there is nothing in the old legend or in the Wagner-Heine form of it to show the Dutchman to have been a deserving person.  Yet, on the other hand, Wagner, with still vivid memories of the agonies he had endured during his voyage, may have thought the punishment excessive for a momentary loss of temper in trying circumstances and a passing swear-word; and the girl was to find the fullest joy her nature was capable of in sacrificing herself.  But there is no fundamental verity inherent in the idea:  the Dutchman’s salvation might as well depend on a throw of dice; and all this early nineteenth-century romantic sentimentalism, with one of its main notions—­that a woman cannot be better occupied than in “saving” a man—­this, grafted on to the stern, relentless old story, makes a compound that is always unreal and sometimes ludicrous.  But it gave Wagner three opportunities:  of painting the stormy sea, of depicting the hopeless misery of the Dutchman Vanderdecken, and of expressing in music woman’s most passionate and unselfish love.

No one need be afraid of “not understanding” the Dutchman.  The story is simplicity itself.  Wagner knew the theatre and every stagey device by heart, and in none of his dramas is there anything half so hard to follow as the plots, say, of Rigoletto and Aida and most Italian operas.  Nor, again, does the music present any difficulty.  In spite of the use of the leit-motif which I shall discuss presently, the separate numbers are as clean cut as those of any Mozart opera.  He joins his different items, it is true, but it is impossible to avoid knowing where one leaves off and the next begins.  The play opens with the raging tempest on a rocky coast; the ship of one Daland is driven there, and Daland goes ashore to see if there