In July 1839, Richard Wagner fled Riga aboard the Thetis with his wife Minna, escaping creditors and heading toward an uncertain future. The voyage nearly killed him. Storms in the Baltic and North Sea battered the ship for weeks; the crew's cries in the darkness, and the shelter of a Norwegian fjord, lodged themselves permanently in Wagner's imagination. Der fliegende Holländer — the opera that became January in the Aufbruchmatt year — grew directly from this crossing.

This is an AI-imagined reconstruction of that voyage.

Part of Aufbruchmatt: a year-long scored walking practice threading Wagner's twelve operas through New York City.