Thanks to the availability of
student tickets for Lincoln Center's summer festival events, I was able to treat myself to Peter Brook's luminous production of "A Magic Flute," Mozart's opera pared down and opened up into a fable so engaging, the strength of its ideas may not fully hit you until the end. Here there is no chorus, and no orchestra, but the central drama of Mozart's opera is intact. Additional dialogue in French replaced some of the
Sprechstimme and changed and expanded other parts of it (the piece was originally put on in Paris.) Two actors with speaking roles, William Nadylam and Abdou Ouologuem, guide the characters through their trials and provide explanation where necessary. These disparate elements came together to make elegant and moving theater, with a simple space well used (production video
here.)
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| Raphael Bremard (Monostatos) and Malia Bendi-Merad (Queen of the Night) |
Brook took the drama of the piece seriously, without letting it become heavy-handed, and the audience responded well. Either the audience was liberated by the unfamiliar context from a mistaken notion that complete silence is always necessary in the opera house, or quite a number of them were experiencing Mozart's jokes for the first time. It made a refreshing change to not be the only one laughing (except once, when according to my companion the surtitles weren't funny at all. But Papageno was!) Brook's solution to the most notorious dramatic problems of
Magic Flute was to omit or transform them: it is Monostatos' soul that is black, and the Queen of the Night's crime is not to be a woman in power, but to be proud and hypocritical in her use of that power. And when these are corrected, she participates, reconciled, in the society
wo Mensch den Menschen liebt.
; here its sheer exuberance recalls Buster Keaton routines.) It's also, however, tender and thoughtful; it doesn't confront very seriously or for very long the historical horrors on which it's loosely based, but this is because of its irresistible sincerity of belief in the fact that love does, in fact, conquer all. In Sarastro's vision, there might just be a way to break the cycle of "war to end all wars," and make peace. That this is Sarastro's vision is not at first clear--one of the things I liked most about the production is that it kept me actually guessing as to the characters' motives, and as to what would actually happen to them. Stephen Fry's transladaptation (to borrow a term from Definitely the Opera) of the libretto is sly and sure-handed, eliminating much of the racism and misogyny while cleaving closely to the German vowel sounds, and the musical values are solid. James Conlon leads the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a lively and nuanced account of the score, sensitive to the emotional journeys of the characters. (There are some cuts, but the only substantial ones to the spoken dialogue.) Joseph Kaiser's Tamino (more likable than most within the first 60 seconds) and René Pape's Sarastro were vocal and dramatic standouts, but the singing was fine all around. I don't mean this as damning with faint praise; on my home speakers, the recording had a tendency to flatten singers' sound, so it was difficult to evaluate the sound they were actually producing. Still, the singing was on the whole musically intelligent, as was (notably and commendably!) the direction. The way the film was shot was itself interesting, with creative camera angles and color palettes, and also related well to the music, I thought (if occasionally succumbing to literalism.) Opera and film being vastly different art forms to begin with, I thought Branagh's gleeful creativity with the latter medium provided a good argument for adapting the former to it. Affection for both Mozart's opera and the possibilities of film animates the endeavor, which I found unexpectedly winsome and touching. The network of theaters screening opera opened the way for its belated U.S. premiere; for showings go here.
