Yesterday I attended Australia Opera's presentation of Mozart's The Magic Flute. It is aptly named as it was a magical performance. Opera has a reputation in the wider community of being high brow and pretentious - a view that I don't accept. Certainly this show was very accessible, partly because it is in the form of a singspiel, "characterized by spoken dialogue, sometimes performed over music, interspersed with ensembles, popular songs, ballads and arias".
While Mozart wrote the music Emanuel Schikaneder wrote the libretto. He also took the role of Papageno at the premier. Schikaneder also may have given advice to Mozart concerning the musical setting of his libretto. The dramatist Ignaz Franz Castelli tells the following tale:
The late bass singer Sebastian Meyer told me that Mozart had originally written the duet where Papageno and Papagena first see each other quite differently from the way in which we now hear it. Both originally cried out "Papageno!", "Papagena!" a few times in amazement. But when Schikaneder heard this, he called down in to the orchestra, "Hey, Mozart! That's no good, the music must express greater astonishment. They must both stare dumbly at each other, then Papageno must begin to stammer: 'Pa-papapa-pa-pa'; Papagena must repeat that until both of them finally get the whole name out". Mozart followed the advice, and in this form the duet always had to be repeated.
An interesting story, though not necessarily true.
Mozart wrote the music with the initial cast in mind, as only two of them (The Queen of the Night and Sarastro) were professional singers. The other parts were taken by actors who could sing a bit. Most characters thus had string introductions so they could find their pitch. Mozart conducted the first two performances before falling ill
The opera premiered in Vienna on September 30, 1791.
This was just two years after the start of the French Revolution, before the revolution spun out of control, murdering its own during the Terror (led by Robespierre and Committee of Public Safety) .
Wordsworth later said of that time:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!" (The Prelude, x, 690-4.)
Mozart, of cause was not a revolutionary, but he was a Freemason. Freemasonry, at that time - quite different to its current incarnation - was about brotherhood and the rights of man. The producer of the Opera Australia production was aware of the Masonic connection as the photo below, from a scene in the Melbourne production, shows Masonic imagery in the background.
Another innovation was that the Magic Flute was sung in German.
As Nicholas Yardley wrote in his review:
The audience didn’t stream out of the Melbourne Arts Centre in 2009 crying, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” or “How wonderful it was sung in German rather than Italian.” Think of fairy floss. It melts away to sweet, sticky nothingness in your mouth. That’s how The Magic Flute is to a modern audience. It’s fairy floss. It’s not about enlightenment. It’s like a Marx Brothers musical with Zeppo as Tamino singing love songs, upstaged by Harpo as Pappageno, who on this occasion sings, and sings very well. It mustn’t lecture – it’s a fantasy.
And that is why the Melbourne production works. The opera opens in an enchanted forest and stays enchanted. The difference between then and now is that the cast can sing, and not just a little bit. Director, David Freeman and conductor, Jari Hamalainen are at their best and Andrew Goodwin as Tamino, not only sounds good, but looks the part. The same can be said of Daniel Sumegi as Sarastro. He towers above the others and looks truly regal. Lorina Gore as the coloratura Queen of the Night is spectacularly suspended by wires high above the stage, sharing the space with a huge, golden crescent moon. Sarah Crane as a tearful Pamina and Andrew Moran, as a boastful Pappageno also perform well.
I particularly enjoyed Moran's performance - Pappangeno as an ocker.
The show was visually spectacular, as the photo below shows:
A great addition was the use of an physical theatre group - Legs on the Wall - to play the animals, which can be seen in the photograph.
Below is a slide show of photos from the production:
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