“Wirst du des Vaters Wahl nicht schelten? 
    Was er versprach, wie?—­duerft’ es gelten?”

However, he has the honesty to warn her of her probable fate.  She rises to the occasion.  She may be as mad as a hatter, but in the music she is given to “Der du auch sei’st,” her lunacy becomes sublimity.  Up to the moment of writing this white-hot glowing passage Wagner had never reached the sublime:  now for a few minutes he sustains it.  Again the breath of the sea is brought in when the Dutchman a second time warns her, and the sea music roars as a sinister accompaniment.  Senta only becomes the more exalted.  “Wohl kenn’ ich Weibes heil’ge Pflichten,” she sings to music which is absolutely the finest page in the opera.  The pure white flame of a deathless devotion is here.  I doubt whether Wagner ever again in his life had such an ethereal moment:  it is sheer fervour and sweetness, unmixed with the hot human passion of Tristan or the smoky philosophies of the Ring.  To wish Senta had a reasonable cause for her ecstasy of self-immolation is, of course, to wish the Dutchman were not the Dutchman.  In truth, we must take the scenes as they come without inquiring too curiously; the storm music which goes with the wanderer, and the moments of glorious splendour that come to the redeeming woman, are things worth living to have written and worth living to hear.

The music of the last act I shall pass quickly over.  The seamen’s and women’s choruses are not particularly striking; the spectral choruses certainly are.  The sea music is here turned into something unearthly, frightful; these damned souls have no hope of being saved, and in their misery they scoff and mock and laugh hideously.  More new musical matter, some of it of a very fine quality, is introduced when Eric again appeals to Senta; and the figure (a) is developed with stupendous effect.  In the final scene, when the Dutchman goes off, Senta can say nothing more after her declarations in the second—­nothing, that is, of any musical value; and Wagner has wisely confined her to recitative.

The Flying Dutchman, then, has many weaknesses.  The libretto is a manufacture, not, like Tristan, a growth.  Much of the music does not rise above the level of Spontini or Marschner; there are wearisome pages, there are heavy chords repeated again and again with violin figurations on top, there are lines of the verse repeated to fit in with the conventional melodies in four-bar lengths.  It was only a few years before that Wagner, at Riga, had written enthusiastically about Bellini and his melody, a type of melody he felt to be fresh and expressive compared with the dry-as-dust mixture of Viennese melody (i.e. the Haydn and Mozart type) and stodgy German counterpoint which formed the bulk of Marschner’s and Spontini’s music; and here we see him in the very deed of trying his hand at it.  Very often the result, it must