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Canceled: The Met Opera Live in HD: Der Fliegende Holländer (Wagner)

This event is unfortunately canceled due to the COVID-19 precaution.

Although we are unable to gather together to watch the remainder of the Met Opera HD Film Season, the Met Opera has made several performances available to watch online.

These free streams will present encores of past performances from its famed Live in HD series. The encore presentations will begin at 7:30 p.m. EST each night on the company’s official website and will then be available for an additional 20 hours thereafter. Each showcase will also be viewable on the Met Opera on demand apps.

Thursday, April 30, 2:00pm

The great bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel returns to the company for the first time since 2012, in the title role of the cursed sea captain doomed to sail the open ocean for eternity. Valery Gergiev conducts a new production by François Girard, whose visionary 2013 take on Parsifal set the recent Met standard for Wagner stagings. With sweeping sets by John Macfarlane, Girard’s new production turns the Met stage into a rich, layered tableau reminiscent of a vast oil painting. The gifted German soprano Anja Kampe, in her Met debut, is the devoted Senta, whose selfless love is what the Dutchman seeks, with bass Franz-Josef Selig as her father, Daland, and tenor Sergey Skorokhodov as her deserted former lover, Erik.  

Der Fliegende Holländer is the earliest of Wagner’s operatic creations to remain in the repertory. The two lead roles represent archetypes to which the composer would return, in one form or another, in most of his later works: the “otherworldly stranger” and the woman who sacrifices herself for his salvation. The work’s unearthly ambience is impressive but only one aspect of it: Both the world of nature and of the supernatural are magnificently evoked in the score.