Field Guide: Ladies who lunch
BERGMAN AND MOZART
‘Do you play?’ an interviewer once asked the great filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, startled to learn that he cared more about music than theatre or film.
It’s always been a daft question, given that, neurologically speaking, the ability to perform music is not at all the same thing as the ability to experience or interpret it. As conductor George Szell once said of the latest batch of young American pianists, ‘They play too much the piano and not enough the music.’
Bergman, whose centenary we are marking this year, had a profound love of music – Bach was his lifelong spiritual salve – yet he was not wired to perform. ‘I am plagued by an inability to remember a sequence of notes or sing a tune,’ he wrote in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern. ‘Learning a work is a laborious process. Day after day, I sit with a tape-recorder and a score, sometimes paralysed by my lack of skill.’ Yet the results were astonishing. I am reminded of this by the BFI’S release of a remastered high-definition DVD and Blu-ray set of the legendary staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute that Bergman filmed for Swedish television in 1975 in the exquisite 18th-century theatre at Drottningholm, which still has its original stage machinery.
It was Wagner’s Tannhäuser that first drew Bergman to opera. He was ten and would quickly tire of the old magician’s wiles. Mozart and Verdi interested him more. He never got to direct other loves, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron or Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, but he did direct Lehár’s The Merry Widow and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Stravinsky thought the staging incomparable, not least because Bergman clarified themes and ideas Stravinsky himself had never entirely fathomed.
It is the same with The Magic Flute, where he alters the flow of the final act to make even clearer his already wonderfully cogent unfolding of the opera’s central theme: the war between the psychotically unhinged Queen of the Night and the priest-ruler Sarastro, who has seized her daughter as part of the new order’s overthrow of an old matrilinear dynasty.
Bergman had been fascinated by The Magic Flute since his teenage years. The son of a Swedish pastor, he would have seen his father as the living embodiment of Sarastro’s world, with high-minded priests inhabiting a space that had not changed since Dürer’s day. Similarly, the opera’s predominant themes resemble those of some of Bergman’s greatest (and gloomiest) films, albeit transformed by the magic of pantomime and irradiated by the grace that young lives, young love and Mozart’s music bring.
The opera needs, said Bergman, ‘young fire, young passion [and] youthful playfulness’. Wheel out the old
cannons to deliver the big arias and ‘it becomes merely silly’.
But, then, Bergman’s Flute, like his late masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, is in part an act of reconciliation with his own troubled childhood. ‘I never felt young – only immature. The world of youth was alien; I stood on the outside looking in.’
The film is famous for the young girl, first seen in the audience during the playing of the overture. In what is a nice theatrical conceit, we find ourselves watching the girl wondering at the selfsame thing we ourselves are wondering at. And then there’s the scene backstage during the interval, where we see the singer playing Sarastro quietly perusing the score of Wagner’s Parsifal and the Queen of the Night dragging on a tension-relieving cigarette right beneath a ‘No Smoking’ sign.
In opera, Bergman preferred ‘natural’ singers, young artists ‘filled with vital happiness by song, for whom music is something joyous, sensual and stimulating’. I think of the Three Boys, Sarastro’s lieutenants, radiantly happy in their strange 18th-century flying machine, or Håkon Hagegård’s Papageno, a truly unaffected child of nature
And since Bergman had a genius for directing actors, he has no problem in getting his young cast to ‘play’ the piece more or less directly to camera, almost conversationally, while the never less than astonishing editing ensures that music and image work hand in hand.
Eric Ericson conducts, though the opera appears to play itself – which is how Bergman must have contrived it. I remember his writing about a Munich performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio that was transformed for him by the conducting of Karl Böhm. ‘Everything looked simple: the notes in place; no remarkable tricks; nothing astonishing; the tempi never heard.’
The film of the Flute shares that quality, for all the sophistication of Bergman’s direction and Sven Nykvist’s peerless cinematography. Sadly, Mozart – unlike Stravinsky – didn’t live to see it. How he would have marvelled, wondered, laughed and cried. And I doubt whether he would have changed a single shot.