Die Zauberflöte,
directed by Yuval Sharon,
Staatsoper Berlin, May 9, 2024.
The Magic Flute,
directed by Barrie Kosky and
Suzanne Andrade,
San Francisco Opera, June 8, 2024.
According to the specialists, Mozart’s The Magic Flute is the most frequently performed German-language opera, ranking among the top ten operas produced worldwide. With its fairy-tale quality, it appeals to all ages and all types of people, easily crossing national borders and repeatedly transcending its centuries-old origins. Why, then, is it so hard to come up with a really good production?
I can certainly attest to its popularity. Over the course of a half-century or so, I’ve seen more performances of The Magic Flute than of any other opera, though I never actively seek it out. It’s always just there, plopped right in front of me with an inviting director or a talented lead singer, sometimes at a cute little neighborhood opera house or a beloved old venue, and so I end up going once again. Yet the only production I ever found fully satisfying was the miniature version William Kentridge created in a dollhouse-sized theater and exhibited in a traveling retrospective about fifteen years ago. Even Kentridge’s own full-size embodiment of the opera, which I subsequently saw at BAM, was less appealing than his reduced and shortened version. No doubt a director will come along someday who can crack this hard nut: if good theater directors have conquered Shakespeare’s problem plays, like The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, surely Mozart should not pose an irresolvable puzzle. But I have not seen a solution yet.
Still, I never cease to hope. Last spring I had a chance to attend two different productions within a thirty-day period, both by stellar opera directors: Barrie Kosky, whom I’ve been avidly following for years, and Yuval Sharon, whose enticing-sounding work I had only heard about up to now. I regret to say that I didn’t really enjoy either evening much. But I think these clever though ultimately flawed interpretations offer useful clues to what can go wrong—what almost always does go wrong—with The Magic Flute.
It’s tempting just to say that the opera’s plot is nonsensical, but that can’t be the problem, because at least a third of all extant operas have nonsensical plots. We do not have to believe in any given series of coincidences and reversals and disguises and false recognitions to find an opera persuasive and moving. It’s not so much that we suspend disbelief as that the music makes all such questions about credibility irrelevant—first because of the bare fact that there is music, unlike in real life, so naturalism is completely off the table; and second because the best opera music, with its cunning intertwining of instruments and human voices, reaches us emotionally in a way that sidesteps reason. The music in The Magic Flute is undeniably glorious, as it is in all of Mozart’s operas, even a hateful one like Così fan tutte. So that is certainly not the difficulty here.
But I still think the problem lies with the opera itself. If you’ll bear with me now, I’ll try to break down the flaws of The Magic Flute into discrete units, and at the same time explore how Sharon and Kosky (both demonstrably smart fellows) visibly attempted to deal with them.
First, there is the question of who counts as the good guys and the bad guys. Near the beginning of the opera, when we learn that Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, has been kidnapped by Sarastro, a powerful black-arts magician, we assume that we ought to be siding with the Queen. So, at least, the naïve Tamino assumes, when the Queen gives him the quest to free her daughter and tells him he can marry her if he succeeds. But as the plot thickens, and the Queen eventually threatens to destroy both Pamina and Tamino if they do not kill Sarastro, we are forced to change sides. Maybe the Authoritarian Father is less to be feared than his female alternative. After all, who in the endless family drama is to say which kind of magic is good and which bad?
There is a lot of silly background material about Mozart and the Masonic Order that some directors drag in to support Sarastro’s position, but both Kosky and Sharon wisely dump these ideas at the outset. Kosky’s solution—not only to this problem, but to a number of others he perceives—is to structure the production around the idea of silent film, circa 1927. That is why he has brought in as his collaborating director Suzanne Andrade, the co-leader of a British theater company called 1927 that borrows the aesthetics of that film period. (The other leader of 1927 is Paul Barritt, the film artist who created the animations that fill the stage in this Kosky/Andrade production.) What Kosky, Andrade, and Barritt seem to feel—and I pretty much tend to agree—is that the best silent film directors, like Pabst and Murnau and Lang, had much more flexible ideas about human nature, and therefore about morality, than anything we are likely to see on the big screen today. Was Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pandora’s Box good or bad? How about Max Schreck as Nosferatu? Or Alfred Abel as the City Master in Metropolis? It is no accident that the casting and costuming in this Magic Flute allow Pamina to look like Lulu, and make Monostatos (Sarastro’s scariest servant) resemble Nosferatu. But somehow, although the obliquely invoked principle of moral flexibility is excellent, it does not address the emotional confusion that the Queen’s sudden turnabout is likely to generate in the audience. Kosky doesn’t habitually shy away from themes as disturbing as the Destructive Mother, but I suspect he felt it was just too dark a subject for him to take up in an essentially lighthearted production.
Sharon’s solution to the problem is at once simpler and deeper. His basic premise—the equivalent of Kosky’s silent-film approach—is that the whole opera is taking place in a marionette theater, and all the characters, including Sarastro and the Queen, are controlled by the strings that are attached to their arms and backs. This interpretation has the advantage of blending in with current Teutonic theories about free will and determinism as manifested in Mozart’s opera: in other words, no one is free, not even the seemingly powerful figures who view themselves as running the show. Because the Staatsoper program was in German, I couldn’t read Sharon’s lengthy explanatory essay, but my German-speaking companion assured me that it did indeed echo those contemporary philosophical notions about The Magic Flute.
Again, though, the problem lies in the vast gap between theory and practice. It’s all very well to show the singer-actors moving around with giant strings attached to them, but if all the characters have them equally, what are we to do with our sense that some people, in life as in the opera, have greater power than others? Without that sense—without that degree of trepidation and fear, countered by hope and desire—there can be no suspense in a plot like The Magic Flute’s, because if everything is controlled by unseen forces rather than the effort of individuals, nothing is finally worth doing. In any case, I didn’t believe in the strings for one minute. That is, I thought they were a cute device, and I enjoyed the way they occasionally produced delightful flying performances by the singers (or their body doubles), but they didn’t answer my curiosity about why the Queen and Sarastro had suddenly switched roles.
Okay, second problem: what to do about Monostatos, Sarastro’s chief minion? He is supposed to be guarding the captive Pamina, but instead he is constantly threatening to rape her, and in a particularly pernicious deal with the Queen, he agrees to murder his master in return for Pamina’s (forced) hand in marriage. This would all be fine, except that Monostatos is described quite explicitly in the lyrics, including his own, as black—and moreover, ugly because he is black. As he explains it, he has to force himself on Pamina because no beautiful woman could ever love his black self. The opera does not present this as metaphorical blackness; it’s made quite clear that Monostatos is racially black.
Kosky solves this problem by just deleting it. Those racist lyrics have vanished from the show, and his Monostatos is if anything excessively white. That is, his resemblance to Nosferatu comes in the form of a deathly-white bald head and a hollow-eyed pale face on top of a dark-clothed body. This is one way of eliminating a touchy problem, but it is not the right way. Would you resolve any modern-day nervousness about a murderous Othello by making him a plain old Italian general, or address the problematic character of Shylock by changing him to a Christian? No. You cannot deal with a “problem play” simply by erasing the problem. If that is your approach, you should just leave the thing unproduced. Instead, your task as director is to figure out why the genius creator inserted that problem to begin with, and then build your new interpretation on that discovery.
Sharon’s solution is far more inventive, in that he converts Monostatos to a robot. This fits in with his whole marionette/video-game/toy-theater approach, which he applies to other characters as well: Pamina and Tamino, for instance, are clothed to resemble recognizable manga figures. So Monostatos, who moves with a series of stiff, mechanical gestures and has a wind-up key sticking out of his back, is black only in the sense that a black-painted piece of machinery is black. This allows him to sing all of his original lyrics, and that is certainly a gain, but I still feel it’s a cheat. The racial problem, in other words, has not been addressed, simply evaded.
The third major problem with The Magic Flute is a structural one. In the manner of an operetta rather than an opera, it has large swatches of dialogue that are not set to music. That wouldn’t be a problem if opera singers had the same skills as, say, musical comedy performers, who can shift back and forth between the spoken word and the sung one. But most opera singers who can fill an auditorium the size of the Staatsoper’s, though they are trained to project their singing voices in nearly miraculous ways, cannot deliver theatrically projected, natural-sounding speech. As a result, the dialogue portions of The Magic Flute tend to fall flat, puncturing the high energy produced by the singing parts.
Sharon’s solution to this was to have the pre-recorded voices of children speaking the lines of dialogue. And who were these children? As it turned out, they were the pullers of the marionette strings, the young girls (and perhaps a boy or two) whom we saw playing with the miniaturized set at the beginning and ending of the performance. This framing device fit beautifully, of course, with Sharon’s whole idea of the characters-as-marionettes, but it didn’t actually make much sense. Children are the likely audience to a marionette theater, but they are rarely if ever its creators, because manipulating the strings of a marionette requires a lot of skill and even a certain amount of height and strength. In general, only an adult can manage it. Puppets, maybe; stuffed animals and manga figures, certainly; but marionettes, no. And are we really to believe that “fate” or “chance” or whatever you want to call the thing that determines all our actions is a bunch of children having fun? Do children of that age (they looked about twelve to me) actually understand things like Monostatos’s unbridled lust, or Pamina’s fear of death, or the Queen’s hatred of a rival, or even Papageno’s desperate longing for a life-companion? Can any of the adult emotions that are generated by The Magic Flute survive the idea that it is all just child’s play? I realize I am being stupidly literal-minded here. But I do think the children-as-puppetmasters gimmick, though it truly delighted the many children in the audience at the Staatsoper Family Night I attended, is another form of cheating. Or if not cheating, then sentimentality—the kind of lost-innocence nonsense that appealed to people like 1960s California hippies and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Besides, on a practical level I found it distracting and annoying to hear those high voices speaking the words of dialogue as the singers stood mute onstage, their mouths shut tight. Only Papageno was allowed to speak as well as sing his own lines. But if he could do it, then why not anyone else?
At first, I thought Barrie Kosky’s solution would be the better one. He too had understood that singers can rarely speak well, so he decided that, in the spirit of silent film, he would convert all the lines of dialogue to inter-titles written on a screen. Brilliant, I thought. Well, it wasn’t, because it turns out that a flat screen and a three-dimensional opera simply aren’t a good combination. After about five minutes of being entertained by the device, I was bored out of my skull for the rest of the opera’s duration. The real problem was that the depthless “film screen” occupied the entire rectangular set, with all the performers emerging from it, one at a time, and standing absolutely still on slender raised platforms as animations played around them. Thus each singer was reduced to the status of a talking head, sometimes on top of its own body, sometimes with animated legs or arms, but always locked in place and spotlit for those few moments of song. All the while, as these human bodies were frozen on their respective platforms, a series of colorful, ever-multiplying animated designs, of the classically decorative and musically timed variety, played over the rest of the screen. It was like one of those digital greeting cards you sometimes get from friends, only instead of lasting for two minutes, it lasted over two hours. To my mind, the worst thing about this approach was that it utterly neutralized one of the Kosky’s greatest skills as a director, which is his instinct for how the bodies of the actor-singers should function in a performance. He is the most physically astute opera director I’ve ever encountered, and everything from his Semele to his Bassarids to his Cages aux Folles to his Threepenny Opera has depended on the way the characters look and move onstage. Tying himself to this heads-poking-through-holes filmic strategy was like cutting off his right arm, directorially speaking, and the results were predictably dismal.
A final problem with The Magic Flute goes back again to the question of character. There seems to be no getting away from the fact that Papageno, a supposedly secondary figure, always steals the show. It’s not just that he has the best pomposity-puncturing lines (though as the fearful member of the cast—the Cowardly Lion or Sancho Panza, as it were—he is bound to earn our friendliest sympathy), but that even his songs, which were initially written for a non-singing actor, are in some ways more engaging than anyone else’s. The duet between Papageno and Papagena, when he at long last finds her and they alternate their “Pa-Pa” stutters with each other, never fails to bring down the house. Nothing could be more stunning, of course, than the Queen of the Night’s coloratura, particularly in her “Hellish Rage” aria, and the soprano who plays that role always earns more applause than anyone else. But nobody actively likes the Queen of the Night, just as nobody really warms to the innocently victimized Pamina or the stalwart if naïve Tamino. Yuval Sharon does his best to enliven the two leads, first by making them into cuddly manga characters, and then by releasing them from their marionette strings to keep house in a middle-class kitchen. Like Pinocchio, I guess, they go from being dolls to being real people, and we are meant to identify with them as a result. Barrie Kosky tries to achieve something of the same thing by making them resemble Louise Brooks and Buster Keaton. But they are not Brooks and Keaton (who, in any case, had beautifully elastic bodies to support their beautiful heads), so that doesn’t work either.
I do not have an answer to this difficulty, just as I don’t to any of the others I raised. But I suspect that if the problem of The Magic Flute were ever to be solved, it would have to do with looking toward Papageno. Somehow he, the mere bird-catcher, needs to be placed at the center of the production, though without altering the size of his singing role in any way. Perhaps he could be part of the framing device, the holder of the marionette strings. Or maybe all the other characters could be dressed as birds of one kind or another, as if to echo his view of the world, so that Sarastro would be an eagle or a vulture, Monostatos a crow, the Queen of the Night a combination of a nightingale and a screech-owl, and Tamino and Pamina a couple of turtle-doves. I know, I know, I am being too literal again. Anyway, it’s not my job to think up the solutions, just to criticize the lack of them. I leave it to the opera directors of the future to come up with something better.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book is Scandinavian Noir; her next will be about the city of Berlin.
