Der fliegende Holländer is often cited as the work in which Wagner struck out upon his own path, forsaking the rodomontade, endless hurly-burly, and cheap thrills of Rienzi—modeled on Meyerbeer and Italian opera—for a subject with philosophical heft, treated with concision and strutting characteristic themes that would inform his operas to the end. Chief among these is redemption by love—Senta redeems The Flying Dutchman from his Satanic curse through her steadfast suicidal devotion. The Flying Dutchman is a "destiny"—a character whose life is a function of a rash action with metaphysical consequences. And the curse, likewise, reappears in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, throughout Der Ring des Nibelungen, in Tristan und Isolde, and, at last, in Parsifal. Only in the sunny comedy of Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg is this baneful dramaturgical baggage dispensed with. Curiously, both Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer were composed during Wagner's hardscrabble sojourn in Paris between 1839 and 1842, where he sought to leap at a single bound into fame and fortune attempting to peddle his juvenile opera Das Liebesverbot to the Opéra. The final act of Rienzi and the Overture to Der fliegende Holländer appear to have been composed in a Parisian debtors' prison. Wagner's greatest success at the Opéra was the sale of the libretto of Der fliegende Holländer for 500 francs, to be set by one Pierre Dietsch and produced unsuccessfully as Le Vaisseau Fantôme. Wagner left Paris for the prestigious post of kapellmeister to the Court of Dresden in 1842, and introduced Rienzi there on October 20 to enthusiastic audiences willing to sit through a work lasting from 6 p.m. until midnight. The premiere of Der fliegende Holländer followed on January 2, 1843. As kapellmeister to the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Liszt brought Tannhäuser and Lohengrin to the Weimar stage, and produced Der fliegende Holländer there in 1853, though he did not transcribe its Spinnerlied until 1860, while Senta's ballade waited until 1872 for his attentions. By that date Liszt may well have felt himself to be a man of destiny laboring under a curse—the opposition of the Weimar public to his pioneering efforts led him to resign his post there in 1858, while his marriage to Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein was canceled at the last minute by the Pope's refusal to grant the Princess a divorce. Senta's Ballade is an epitome of the Holländer, with her narration of his legend punctuated by bursts of sea music and by the gently falling motif of redemption.

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