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In 1839 the 26-year-old Richard Wagner almost drowned during a perilous voyage across the Baltic from Riga. It was this experience that he claimed inspired The Flying Dutchman, the legend of the man condemned for eternity to sail the oceans in his ghost ship gave him the narrative for his first mature opera. Wagner thought of his libretto as a poem, and it certainly grapples with some of the epic questions: birth, life, love and death.

Welsh National Opera’s new staging, directed by Jack Furness, begins with a woman in childbirth, the wild and stormy surges of the overture coinciding with her contractions. So Senta is born, destined, as a small child, to see her mother die, whisked away on her hospital bed into the great abyss. Senta will be a damaged soul, obsessed to the point of derangement by the story of the Dutchman, whose single hope of redemption, the love of a true woman, becomes possible only on touching land once every seven years. Backstories seem to have become a necessary accompaniment to any opera’s overture, which anyway spells out the whole trajectory in its leitmotifs. The strength of this intervention is visual, in the widely sweeping circles run first by Senta the young girl, then as a young woman, a parallel to the Dutchman’s septennial cycles, their dresses symbolic of the blood-red sails of his ship, all metaphors which later return.

But of ships there are none, neither the Dutchman’s nor that of Senta’s father, Daland, who will exchange his daughter for the ghostly vessel’s treasures. Turbulent sea and skies are conjured in the muted colours of Elin Steele’s design and Lizzie Powell’s lighting, the menace of enveloping mists much invoked. Nor do the spinning girls spin, instead they do garment-control on the frocks they then put on for the party, but the absence of extraneous detail, the occasional shower of oddly sentimental gold-dust aside, helps put sharp focus on words and emotions.

The clarity of German diction was a prime virtue of a musically very rewarding cast, James Creswell’s fine Daland in particular. Simon Bailey’s Dutchman, his doublet with slashed sleeves denoting his centuries of voyaging, portrayed a tormented yet sympathetic individual, at his most impassioned in the final act. Rachel Nicholls’s Senta was most impressive, her deluded love for the Dutchman plausible, absolutely true in pitch and with lovely bel canto lines. Tenors Trystan Llŷr Griffiths as the hapless Steersman and Leonardo Caimi as Erik made their mark; it’s only unfortunate that Wagner has both characters go on far too much as – it must be said – do the many choruses, no matter how full-bloodedly sung.

The WNO orchestra plays up a proper storm under the authoritative baton of Tomáš Hanus, WNO’s outgoing music director. This company is desperate to prove it’s not a sinking ship, despite this thin 26/27 season, so catching these few performances is an imperative. Just don’t expect a conventional ending.

• At Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, on 19 April, Theatre Royal Plymouth on 24 April, Birmingham Hippodrome on 7 May and Milton Keynes theatre on 15 May