German unification was still a twinkle in Prussia’s eye when the spirits and spectres began spooking opera stages, giving rise to a new sub-genre: “German Romantic opera”. In the years prior to the great 19^th-century upheavals European art and culture were on the lookout for a uniquely German response to the much-lauded French and Italian opera. On the opera stage “romance à l’allemande” was primarily about the supernatural impinging on reality, about the clash between the realm of ghosts and the world of flesh and blood. In 1825, for instance, Louis Spohr has a mountain troll fall passionately in love with a woman until it is ordered back to the underworld after a catalogue of escapades. In comfortable, bourgeois circles at the time the moral of the story was that humans and spirits alike should be content with their station in life and the circumscriptions that it brings with it. Heinrich Marschner’s vampire likewise fails to conquer the earthly woman of his dreams, skulking back to his netherworld as the final chorus rings out in joy: “He whose breast is charged with fear of God… is steeled against that dark, Satanic power.” Here, too, with the Devil thwarted, we celebrate the happy preservation of our idyll.

Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman appears to have a certain kinship with these eerie suitors – and yet with him there are unanswered questions, because Wagner’s works do not end in cheery Biedermeier style. In his romantic operas the human characters have no ghostly liberation to look forward to - quite the opposite: their encounter with extra-terrestrials has a devastating effect on the terrestrial protagonists: their world collapses, they fall hard, their very existences are plunged into sombre chaos. With Wagner, nothing comes neatly full circle. There is no longer a place for them in society – not for the spirits or for the people who they have been involved with.

It is precisely this collapse of the conventional order and of certainties both internal and external that holds audiences’ interest in Wagner’s Romantic operas to this day. We are presented not with menacing evildoers but with peripatetic characters moving between different worlds. The Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin… they are all seeking a home, an anchorage in their odyssey between heaven and hell, between the Venusberg and the Wartburg (Tannhäuser), between the Court of Brabant and an errant knight’s existence searching for the Grail (Lohengrin), between a never-ending voyage and a domestic spinning parlour (Dutchman). As the operas progress these far-flung locations lose their significance, since redemption – Wagner’s recurring theme – is only granted to the wayfarer through the unconditional devotion of a woman.

Happily, the image of women in Wagner’s works is not as one-sided as it might seem. With Wagner female redeemers are also rebels striving for more. In THE FLYING DUTCHMAN Senta yearns to escape her petty, materialistic existence and chooses a path that can only end in suicide. The Dutchman makes his entrance at exactly the right time and demands exactly what she’s prepared to give: fidelity unto death. Elisabeth in TANNHÄUSER and Elsa in LOHENGRIN are little different – both are desperate for a life beyond the confines of a straitlaced, bourgeois society. They are holding out for a hero from another world, a revolutionary, an anarchist, a man of dynamism who will plant his fist squarely in the soft, smooth flesh of society and individuals.

As this is Wagner, all these heroes are doomed to fail and – no less than the women they wait for - to miss out on the redemption they seek. The fears, though broken up, remain. No virtue or morals can banish Wagner’s ghosts back to the hell whence they came.