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).