In 1839, the 26-year-old Richard Wagner almost drowned during a perilous voyage across the Baltic from Riga. It was this experience that he claimed inspired The Flying Dutchman, the legend of a man condemned for eternity to sail the oceans in his ghost ship giving the composer the narrative for his first mature opera. Wagner thought of his libretto as a poem, and it certainly grapples with some of the epic questions: birth, life, love and death. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Welsh National Opera’s new staging, directed by Jack Furness, begins with a woman in childbirth, the wild and stormy surges of the overture coinciding with her contractions. So Senta is born, destined, as a small child, to see her mother die, whisked away on her hospital bed into the great abyss. Senta will be a damaged soul, obsessed to the point of derangement by the story of the Dutchman, whose single hope of redemption, the love of a true …