You could call it Wagner's "enigma variations" - or the nearest he got to the Third Dimension. Bayreuth's latest Dutchman - new in 2003 and now revived to spellbinding effect - unfolds in a spirit- world in which everything exists side-by-side with its double. The Dutchman is Daland's alter ego, Senta is both little girl and young woman. The entire opera inhabits a house haunted by phantom sea-captains, puppet-like sailors and phantasmagorical projections of waves.

Der fliegende Holländer seems to be Bayreuth's lucky opera. After Harry Kupfer's depiction of Senta's dream in the late 1980s and Dieter Dorn's riveting 1990s vision of upturned domesticity, Claus Guth proposes a series of psychological enigmas that keep us guessing. Does Daland's child, spellbound by Daddy's tales of the sea, see him as a model for the man she will eventually fall in love with? Or could the whole story be Daland's Freudian dream about his daughter's search for a husband?

All we can be sure of is that Daland and the Dutchman are one and the same father-figure. The two sea-captains and two Sentas (one silent) are dressed in matching naval outfits: it's a stroke of genius that enables us to see the crucial Act 2 Dutchman- Senta duet as an extension of the father-daughter relationship. By Act 3 multiple Dutchmen are appearing from the woodwork, and a Dutchman-skeleton whisks the little girl up into the flies. At the end Senta is left trying miserably to open the doors through which her father-fixated fantasy-world has vanished.

It's the stuff of goose-bumps. Two Finnish basses, Jaako Ryhänen (Daland) and Jukka Rasilainen (Dutchman), head an unexceptional cast, but chorus and orchestra whip up a storm under the dynamic Marc Albrecht.

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