The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Great music, shame about the storyline
‘The Magic Flute’ is our most popular opera. So why has it driven directors to despair, asks Rupert Christiansen
Every year, the website Operabase publishes a series of interesting statistics including a list of the world’s most-performed operas. Over the past decade, four titles have jostled at the top of the chart: La traviata, La bohème, Carmen
– and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. If one considers Germany, Austria and central Europe alone – a region that produces more opera than the rest of the world put together – then Die Zauberflöte comes out first by a country mile. So, success with the piece is to some extent a litmus test of any opera house’s competence.
Yet despite its enormous popularity with all ages – it has the same “family” appeal as the fairy-tale pantomimes and musical comedies it partly resembles – it’s not an easy piece to produce. The elements of comedy caper and magical fantasy in the plot can weigh too heavily against the solemn theme of a quest for Masonic Enlightenment, or vice versa. You can’t take it too lightly or too seriously without distorting its mix of tones or underselling one of its aspects. Sir Peter Hall, whose productions of Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte were pitch-perfect, once described it as “a director’s nightmare”.
Since its first festivals in the Thirties, Glyndebourne has been famous for presenting Mozart, but it too has struggled with this particular challenge. A very earnest view of the piece taken in 1990 by Peter Sellars – eliminating all the dialogue and drawing close parallels with weird Californian cults – caused heated controversy; it was succeeded by Adrian Noble’s rather Disneyfied approach in 2004-5. Now, 14 years later, the management is trying again with the designer/director team of André Barbe and Renaud Doucet. Will they finally strike gold?
We don’t know much about the origins of Die Zauberflöte, “The Magic Flute”, and the libretto – pitted with puzzles and inconsistencies, and perhaps extensively revised at the last minute – may well be the work of several hands. The opera (or Singspiel, “sung play”, as it was labelled in reference to its passages of spoken dialogue) was first performed in September 1791, only two months before the composer’s early and unexpected death.
The venue was a variety theatre in a lower-middle-class suburb of Vienna managed and dominated by a comedian called Emanuel Schikaneder, whom Mozart had known since his Salzburg days. He knew that by working for Schikaneder he was going downmarket, but he needed money badly and Schikaneder had access to plenty of it.
Staged on a big budget, the piece was a huge and instant success, and Mozart was delighted, despite his contempt for the way that “idiots” in the audience “laughed Richard Jones directs what will doubtless be an arrestingly original new production of Berlioz’s weird and wonderful adaptation of Goethe’s play, with Allan Clayton in the title role and Christopher Purves as Mephistopheles.
May 18-July 10
One of opera’s most energetic comic romps returns in Annabel Arden’s staging with a largely new cast including the buffo bass Alessandro Corbelli as Doctor Bartolo.
May 19-July 14
Massenet’s sophisticated and sweet-toothed