The magic in The Magic Flute

VANCOUVER—“It isn’t true,” the playwright Noel Coward once quipped, “that opera isn’t what it used to be. It is what it used to be and that’s what’s wrong with it.”

Ah, if only the witty Mr. Coward had lived longer he might have revised his remark. Surtitles have enhanced opera’s intelligibility, HD telecasts have broadened its public. And in places such as Toronto and Vancouver, producers are giving the traditional repertory a striking new look.

On the evening of April 6, the curtain will rise in Toronto’s Elgin Theatre on one of the most successful productions of The Magic Flute mounted in recent decades, an Opera Atelier staging which returns this symbolic tale to an approximation of the way it was performed back in 1791.

In Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the curtain fell recently on a Vancouver Opera production that took Mozart’s masterpiece completely out of its 18th century Masonic context and set it in the world of the Salish First Nation people of Canada’s West Coast.

Both approaches serve to demonstrate the work’s universality, rooted in the enduring appeal of Mozart’s music. What further distinguished the Vancouver production was the controversial issue of cultural appropriation.

As our First Peoples struggle to assert their cultural rights, the very notion of an opera company’s trying “to put a feather in Mozart’s The Magic Flute,” as one participant said, could easily have given offence.

Obviously aware of the issue, the Vancouver Opera Company approached the First Peoples Heritage, Language, Culture Council to partner in the project and the result is a Magic Flute like no other, simultaneously faithful to Mozart’s music and sensitive to the sensibilities of the Salish.

As general director James A. Wright recalls, the Vancouver Opera Company has been striving in recent years to give its productions a connectedness to the local scene. What the company did not want, he insists, was to present a “tourist’s” vision of native culture. Through three years of preparatory work before the production’s initial staging in 2007, native artists developed designs for the sets and costumes, crafted an Englishlanguage adaptation of the libretto, incorporating native words, and consulted widely with chiefs and other authorities on issues of authenticity. The process continued in preparation for this month’s revival of that 2007 production, with an enhanced role given atmospheric videos. Every performance was also preceded by a song-blessing from a local chief in full costume, accompanying himself on a drum. All well and good, but what of Mozart’s intentions and those of his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder? They have been modified. In deference to native concerns about the treatment of women, some of the libretto’s anti-feminist remarks have been deleted and the Queen of the Night is reconciled with the high priest Sarastro in the final scene. On a personal note, I also missed seeing Opera Atelier’s wonderful dragon threaten Prince Tamino in the opening scene. In Vancouver, the danger comes from a doubleheaded serpent who sadly does his threatening offstage. The Vancouver Opera commissioned a third-party evaluation following the production’s original staging from Dr. Lorna B. Williams, assessing it as a cross-cultural collaboration. The largely positive report cites a native participant comment that “this will open doors of trust that have not been bridged — if we nudged the door a little bit — that is huge.” To operagoers, of course, what ultimately mattered was the quality of the production, the set designs of Kevin McAllister, the costume designs of Christine Reimer and John Powell, the videos of Sean Niewenhuis and the performance of the cast and orchestra, directed by Robert McQueen and conducted by Leslie Dala. Overall, it was a production that did credit to Vancouver Opera, with a solid if less than stellar cast, headed by John Tessier as Tamino, Simone Osborne as Pamina, Joshua Hopkins as Papageno, Phillip Ens as Sarastro and the flamboyantly gowned Teiya Kasahara as Queen of the Night.

Whether the production, handsome as it is, has a future on other stages is nevertheless a problem. James Wright suspects that, in its present form, it is too culturally specific to Canada’s West Coast, but could be adapted to other locales with the collaboration of their aboriginal populations.

Not that all operas lend themselves to cross-cultural pollination. In his director’s notes, Robert McQueen states that for him “the thematic core of The Magic Flute has everything to do with universal myth.” It is about what the late scholar Joseph Campbell used to call a “hero’s journey.”

It is clearly operas with this kind of mythic resonance that lend themselves to revitalizing transportation through time and space. Wagner’s Ring Cycle comes immediately to mind. For those production candidates, at least, opera is surely not what it used to be.