Barry Kosky’s staging of the Magic Flute is magical. It exposes aspects of the opera that I think
are particularly relevant for our currently polarized political and social world. Before I go any further, though, a
disclaimer: I am not an Opera Aficionado.
To me, the typical opera is a tragic opera and the climax is when all of
the major characters realize simultaneously that they are, in deep and
intractable ways that are irreversible, screwed - and they all sing about that in
glorious harmony and it is a deeply cathartic experience.
At my liberal arts college we had one year of music theory
(sophomore year) and then, in the Junior year seminar that was mandatory during
each of the four years, we listened to three Operas. The Seminar each year covered soup to nuts –
Junior year we read Don Quixote at the beginning of the year, various
philosophers during the year and some of the formative writings of the U.S. Republic
at the end of the year. Our particular class
that year was an argumentative one. We
disagreed about what the authors – whether they were philosophers, novelists or
political writers – were intending to say.
We also argued about the value of what they were saying. But the discussion of the operas led to (pun
intended) a lot of harmony on our part.
We agreed both about the meaning and about the impact of the works. I think that was largely because the music
created a common emotional experience.
This staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute comes to Cincinnati
from Berlin and is the result of collaboration between Barry Kosky, the Artistic
Director of Berlin’s Komische
Oper, and a British Theater Company known as 1927.
The company is headed by Suzanne
Andrade and Paul Barritt. Their shtick is to mix movie overlays – sort
of like the Mosaica
light show that we first saw in Ottawa
- with live action plays and here, for
the first time, opera. The choice of
1927 as a title for what they do evokes a particular moment in film history –
the introduction of talkies, which Hollywood at the time saw as a novelty that
would never compete with Silent Film.
And the Opera is staged as a silent film. What does that look like?
Franco Zeffirelli's Turandot Set at the Met |
The curtain opens on a blank white screen just a few feet
behind the curtain – and this is the only set during the whole opera. Now as I’ve said, I’m not an Aficionado, but
one of the really cool things about opera is the sets. The reluctant wife and I have gone to see simulcasts of
the Metropolitan Opera at the local movie theater and one of the cool
bonuses is that, during the intermission, you get to go backstage and watch
them changing out the sets. The sets are
elaborate. Indeed, on one of our few
outings to the actual Metropolitan Opera House in New York, we literally had
our breath taken away by one of the sets for Turandot. It was sumptuous – decadent – beyond
magnificent – over the top.
Regional summer operas like ours do not have resident stars
and we don’t build our own sets. I think
there are two opera seasons – winter – in the grand opera palaces of the world
– and summer when the opera stars disperse to lesser places (and some pretty
cool ones like the Santa Fe Opera House – an outdoor theater in the
desert). They bring with them sets for
the operas, but they simply aren’t as sumptuous as the ones from the Met (I
don’t know, frankly, if the Met sets travel – maybe they do, but when we’ve
gone to the opera here the sets have been more basic). Mounting an opera is a huge deal – the sets –
the costumes – are expensive (not mention the divas) and the audience, even in
a place like New York, is limited. So
the sets are stored and the Opera is put on again and again in new seasons with
new singers.
So what better set to travel with than a blank white
screen? But also what better set to use
to bring The Magic Flute to a certain kind of life. The Magic Flute is a fairy tale. From the bit of reading that I have done, it
was intended as a political piece to support the ascension of the new Emperor
in Vienna and to support his movement away from the Catholic Church
(represented by the Queen of the Night – who is also the mother of the heroine,
Pamina) and towards enlightenment era values.
These values were also the values of the Masons and masonic symbolism is
an important part of the characterization of the opposing force - Sarastro –
who at first appears to be the bad guy, but over time we see that he is the one
who frees the hero – Prince Tamino – to be worthy of the princess Pamina.
So, on one very important level, this is a fairy tale about
good and evil and there is no better way to represent that than through the medium
of black and white film. And much of the
costuming and make up use themes of black and white. The characters are frequently bathed in white
light with the grainy overlay of black and white film spots playing across
them. The settings (and some non-human
characters) are projected on the screen and, frequently, the singers are
constrained to a single place – parts of the screen big enough to hold a person
rotate out and the character plays their part from this balcony 15 feet or so
above the floor. Movement is provided by
the projected images – the players stand still while projected wings beat in
the background and they swoop from place to place (or ride flying pink
elephants).
So, the plot of the Magic Flute is both very straightforward
and filled with inconsistent bits that people try to fix or smooth over,
frequently creating other problems, when they stage it. In the opening scene, Prince Tamino is
rescued from a dragon by three representatives of the Queen of the Night. Papagino, the keeper of the birds of the kingdom,
takes credit for this. The three
representatives punish him for this lie by sealing his lips so that he cannot
talk. They then show Prince Tamino a
picture of princess Pamina and he instantly falls in love and swears to the
Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter from Sarastro. The Queen of the night gives him a magic
flute, which will quell discord and bring peace and harmony, the services of
the somewhat clownish Papagino forgiven for his crime and freed of the lock on
his lips, but told never to lie again, who is armed with a set of bells that
have similar qualities to the flute, and a trio of spirits to guide his journey.
Monostatos dogs chasing Pamina |
Papagino initially rescues Pamina from the clutches of
Sarastro’s henchman, Monostatos (made up in this production to look like Nosferatu)
who is a serious lecher and trying to force himself on Pamina (Who is made to
look like Clara Bow – the film star who started the Bob haircut that was the
rage of the roaring twenties). This
prepares us to see Sarastro as a tyrant – while Tamino is knocking on another
door to Sarastro’s kingdom trying to get admitted into his order. Long story short, Sarastro convinces Tamino
that the Queen of the Night is the corrupt one and encourages him to undertake
the path to enlightenment. This path
requires a long period of silence – so he is unable to reassure Pamina of his
love for her, so she becomes suicidal, only to be saved by the trio of spirits
and then to undergo her own purification with Sarastro. Meanwhile, the truly bad underling of
Sarastro, Monostatos, joins forces with the Queen of the Night, but they are
beaten by Tamino and Pamina who are crowned as the rulers who will rule with
the light of the sun and, in Mozart’s stage direction, the entire theater is
transformed into the sun.
A big part of what makes this one of the ten most performed
operas is the music. It is frequently
fun and funny and it is also quite hummable.
These are just good tunes. And
when the Queen of the Night gets her lather up – watch out! And then there is the flute. See, I think that, in addition to the belief
that a new era was dawning in Austria and Europe – one that would be ruled by
reason – I think Mozart also believed that music would play a big role in
that. What force is a better and more
pure means of uniting people? How better to communicate emotion? But a united people, marching behind one
banner, even if it a banner of peace and progress, can be a bit scary,
especially in the way this opera is staged.
The Queen of the Night and Tamino |
The underlying symbolism of the opera relies heavily on what
we now call gender stereotypes or sex roles.
I think when it was written, it was about the difference between the
masculine – a power that was based on reason and was progressive – and the
feminine – a power, symbolized here by the Queen of the Night as a huge spider
– that is emotional and vindictive and that will trap and devour the
unsuspecting good people in the world. The
message is that the feminine must be overcome by the masculine –
interpersonally when Tamino refuses to console and reassure Pamina, but I think
also within ourselves – so Tamino has to disavow his own wishes to be
compassionate –– and the overcoming process is one of forbearance – the
masculine is disciplined and not wild like the feminine. Historically this anticipates Nietzsche’s
division between the Appolonian and the Dionysian, but it also anticipates the
gender roles of the 1920s quite nicely – 1927 becomes an apt pivotal moment –
and this nicely projects forward to today.
We are in an era where there is a wish for clarity amidst a
profusion of confusing changes. What
direction should we go? To allow what is
happening, whatever it is, to continue to unfold is scary. Gender (for instance) does not appear to be
the stable reliable thing that it once was.
But even if we are on board with some changes, the pace at which things
are changing is difficult for us all. In
his newest book Thank
You for Being Late, Tom Friedman,
a reporter for the New York Times and author, is writing about a confluence of
events in 2008 that created what he calls a “Supernova” of potential
change. The depth of the ways in which
we became digitally interconnected and rewired the world in that year are just
beginning to become clear – but those beginnings are exponentially picking up
speed. For instance, we are moving into
an era of Artificial Intelligence that is predicted to make much of what we do
– drive our own cars – antiquated. Into
this void, well-meaning individuals (and some not so well-meaning) step to
provide a simpler vision – one that provides black and white answers to complex
problems. Jonathan
Haidt, a Social Psychologist, has called the people who cling to absolute
answers to nuanced problems Political
Manichaeists. Manichaeism is a moral
system where the world is divided into right and wrong, good and evil.
Pamina and Papagino |
Part of what saves The Magic Flute from Manichaeism is the
charm of Papageno and his conjured mirror bride Papagena. If Tamino and Pamina are our
better/unrealistically best selves – our manicheistic selves, Papageno
(portrayed here in Buster Keaton style) and his imagined Papagena who has to
regress to meet him and fall in love, are more real and like who we are most of
the time – stretched out in front of the TV promising to do great things -
someday. Papageno cannot keep quiet –
neither to lie to Tamino in the beginning nor to tell Sarastro the truth about the
plot to kill him, but he also can’t keep quiet when he is trying to go through
the quest to become a Sarastran; and neither, of course, can we. Do we have the heart to say nothing when our
love is looking to us for reassurance?
Can we stick with a heartless regimen because it will bring us a
promised reward? Yes, but not as
perfectly as we should (or, thankfully as Tamino does – or if we do, we look as
heartless as he).
But I think Mozart’s genius, which was musical, may have
brought him perilously close to the delusion that there is a perfect solution –
a mathematical solution – to the complex problem of living. Don Giovanni, one of the operas we listened
to in my Junior year, is a reckoning with the tragic aspects of life – but
this opera – a comic opera – suggests that we can figure it out– by following the
dictates of another. This may be even
more tragic - it may mislead us into
believing in simple solutions and that will not end well.
So this opera, one in which the harmony at the end is
congratulatory, may serve, in a production that is a bit arch, as an ominous warning about the tragedy that such
false harmony portends. The world – both
the social and political world, but also the world within ourselves, is much
more complicated than a simple bifurcation into masculine and feminine would
suggest. We are, indeed, masculine and
feminine – but so much more than that – and the task of harmonizing our inner
selves – and of creating harmonies between disparate and irreconcilable but
simultaneously interdependent cultures – is not something that will be solved
by edict or even just by logic. And, by
the way, we NEED the feminine – AND the masculine – and so much more – to address
these complex issues – and we need them to work together – and to be in
conflict with each other – in order to arrive at a destination that is worth getting
to. This delightfully simple and
exceedingly complex opera turns out to be a wonderful, if somewhat indirect,
clarion call for our time.
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