It was an awful year. Prussia reentered the war against Napoleon in March. Swiftly rebuilding his forces, which had been decimated during the 1812 Russian campaign, the self-proclaimed French Emperor led major offensives at Lützen (southwest of Leipzig) and then in the Eastern region of Saxony at Bautzen, before a cease-fire was established in early June. Saxony was no stranger to strife. In October 1806, Napoleon had decisively crushed the Prussian and Saxon army at Jena-Auerstädt, before marching on to Berlin. Saxony then joined the Rhineland Confederation (Rheinbund) forged by Napoleon following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Together with Bavaria, Saxony became one of the largest members of the Confederation, and was similarly elevated to the status of a Kingdom (Königreich) while lacking much genuine political authority. King Friedrich August I endeavored to remain uncommitted as the Wars of Liberation (Befreiungskriege) were launched, but Saxony's neighboring position to Prussia made active participation inevitable. At the end of August, the scale of war escalated substantially. Non-Prussian Germans fought under Napoleon to defeat the Prussians, Austrians, and Russians at Dresden. Napoleon's allies and fortunes changed at Leipzig, however, when the so-called Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlacht) ended on October 19 with his army driven westward back to France. More than five hundred thousand soldiers were involved at Leipzig; the losses on both sides were enormous. Following Napoleon's ultimate defeat in 1815, Saxony was substantially reduced in geographical scope before it joined the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund).

Senta has few faithful admirers, save Erik. The mysterious Dutchman would dearly like to believe that she can redeem him from his curse, as promised, but a misunderstanding prompts him to abandon her. Overhearing Erik's side of a conversation with Senta, the Dutchman thinks she will not uphold her promise of utmost fidelity to him. (Erik can only wish this were the case.) Senta, as we all know, fulfi lls her destiny and proves herself true to the letter. Who is this young woman who repeatedly falls into a cataleptic state, blurts out bizarre pronouncements, and yields so fully to the legendary captain of the Flying Dutchman?

As is so often the case in Wagner's operas, Senta's name hints at some kind of reflexive meaning—more so, certainly, than her initial name of Anna. Wagner changed almost all of the main characters' names when he shifted the opera's setting from Scotland to Norway, shortly before the 1843 premiere, but he had settled on Senta already in the early part of 1841 and stuck with it. Isolde Vetter attributes the name's persistence through the geographical move to its being “adequately polyglot.” That Senta sounded neither Scottish nor fully Norwegian was surely an advantage given her outsider status within the opera. Curt von Westernhagen acknowledged Hans von Wolzogen's theory that the composer may have heard and misremembered a girl in a Norwegian captain's house introduced as “tjenta” (servant).

With Tannhäuser and Elsa, Wagner continued to craft dramatic characters that are sometimes psychologically remote—somewhere other than here in the drama. As entryways into their respective operas they both recount dreams presaging solutions to their respective challenges. The power of unconscious mentation as a shaper of these dramas is not to be underestimated. Tannhäuser manages to resist Venus's efforts to keep him in her rose-hued grotto where time, to his frustration, stands still. A lightning-fast scene change then takes us to the sun-drenched verdant Wartburg Valley under a bright blue sky. The sound of distant bells completes the picture of the yearned-for home that he had described to Venus just moments before. Lohengrin's arrival in Brabant is a more protracted and suspenseful process, but also involves the juxtaposition of a supernatural world with an earthly one. We are not privy to a visual glimpse of the Grail realm from which he comes. The opera's prelude nevertheless unforgettably evokes an otherworldly dimension from its first chords, before that music becomes associated with the knight's journey later in the first act. The prelude already suggests a narrative of embodiment. Once its initial nebulous musical idea becomes more tangible, however, it returns to the rarefied atmosphere with which it began, just as Elsa's envisioned knight will also ultimately prove ungraspable.

In 1955, around the twentieth anniversary of Berg's death, Theodor Adorno felt compelled to restore what he regarded as Berg's rightful place in the history of musical aesthetics, as well as his legacy as a composer. One of Adorno's chief complaints was related to the changing perception of Berg's music: “During his lifetime he was a leading member of the avant-garde and would have never felt himself to be anything else. He now finds himself lumped together with others under the label of ‘modern classics,’ a label from which he would have recoiled.”

Referring to audiences of the 1920s as well as to well-informed critics of the 1950s, Adorno argued that they had misapprehended one of the principal aspects of Berg's work: its musical logic, from rhythmic and phrase structures to the large-scale formal organization. While this sort of misapprehension was probably true then as now, Adorno's main goal in his essay was to repudiate what he saw as a widespread perception of Berg as a Wagnerian composer. In his critique, Adorno points out that audiences “need only hear a few bars of Berg to start talking automatically of Tristan-like Romanticism, as if chromaticism and the leading note were the most important aspects of Berg's mature music, and as if determining what his searching, infinitely subtle sensibility succeeded in making of such elements were irrelevant.”