FLYING DUTCHMAN Tickets Now On Sale at Opera Orlando

Individual tickets are now on sale for Opera Orlando's Flying Dutchman, the Company's first-ever Wagner production, with an added Saturday performance, January 22–24, 2027 at Steinmetz Hall at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. And Wagner does not arrive quietly. The Dutchman is a ship's captain cursed to sail the seas for eternity, permitted ashore once every seven years to find a woman willing to be faithful unto death. The music has such raw power that it feels less like something composed than something elemental, dredged up from the ocean floor. A ghost story, a love story, and a force of nature all at once.

Ooooh… some souls wait forever to be found.

'This is the opera where Wagner truly became Wagner,' says Opera Orlando artistic director Grant Preisser, who conceived and directs the production. 'He wrote it after a storm-wrecked crossing of the North Sea, and you can hear it. The score doesn't describe the ocean. It is the ocean. So we built a world where the stars and the sea govern everything, and then we let the Dutchman break it. Senta's choice is what puts it back together. Wagner's music is going to overwhelm this audience. We built a mythology big enough to hold it.'

This new production sets Wagner's sea legend in a fantastical northern world beneath the shifting light of the aurora and the glow of a phosphorescent sea — a matriarchal society where women read the stars, chart the seas, and keep the cosmic order. At its center stands a great astrolabe, the instrument by which this world reads its fate. When the cursed Dutchman's nightmare ship arrives, that order shatters. To restore it, Senta fulfills her destiny and her sacrifice is woven into the stars. Wagner wrote Flying Dutchman in 1843, but a love that redeems? That story is forever.

Baritone Darren Drone — praised by Opera News for his 'gorgeously warm tone and deep resonance' — returns to Orlando in the title role, joined by German soprano Johanna Will making her Company debut as Senta. The youngest-ever recipient of the Rolex Scholarship at Italy's Solti Accademia di Bel Canto, Ms. Will recently made her role debut as Senta in Austria, and gave Orlando audiences a first taste of her incredible voice this summer in the Opera's Summer Concert Series. Bass Nathan Stark as Daland and tenor Brendan J. Boyle as Erik both return to Orlando, last heard here in the Company's 2025-26 production of Silent Night. Former Opera Orlando Studio Artist, mezzo-soprano Laura Zahn, is back on stage as Mary, and current Studio Artist, tenor Benjamin Ruiz, rounds out the cast as the Steersman. Conductor Geoffrey Loff, now assistant to the music director at Komische Oper Berlin, returns to the Opera Orlando podium to lead the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra in the pit and, on stage, the Opera Orlando Chorus and members of the Opera Orlando Youth Company as Wagner's storm-tossed sailors and council of women, singing some of the most thrilling choral music in all of opera.

'When we started this company, Wagner was an aspiration,' says Opera Orlando general director Gabriel Preisser. 'In just ten years, that aspiration is becoming a reality. Steinmetz Hall, the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, and a cast born to sing these roles will make this an event Orlando shouldn't miss. With the first chords of the overture, the horns sound the Dutchman's call, the storm breaks, and the whole hall is swept out to sea. And when the ghost ship arrives — hold on to your seats!'

PERFORMANCE DETAILS

• Flying Dutchman
• Steinmetz Hall / Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts

TOUR DATES

• Friday / January 22, 2027 at 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday / January 23, 2027 at 7:30 p.m.
• Sunday / January 24, 2027 at 2 p.m.
• Sung in German with English and Spanish supertitles.
• Approximate run-time of two hours and forty minutes inclusive of one intermission.

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