The Magic Flute – 1927 is our time, in Cincinnati of all places.

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.