“Dear as is Mozart’s Zauberflöte to all musicians and lovers of melody, on the stage that opera has been only tolerated,” wrote Henry Chorley in his celebrated
Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, “The reason, in both cases, is the same,” he explains, “the stupidity of the story”. George Bernard Shaw claimed that Mozart “struck the modern secular humanitarian note” in it but Zauberflöte’s dramatic credibility came into question as the opera was taken up by other theatres outside Germany. Commentators adored the music but abhorred the plot and dialogue. Henry Robertson, reviewing the English premiere in 1811 lamented “that the pleasure that the wonderful music of this opera gives, receives a serious drawback from the almost unprecedented absurdity of its plot and language, which are so incoherent, that they can scarcely be imagined the work of intellect above that of an idiot”. Robertson continues with some xenophobic tub-thumping about the taste of German audiences and the “state of literary degradation” that their opera stage appears to be in compared with “the admirable compositions of Mr Bishop” and warns composers about “the poetry on which they bestow their pains. Without which their music can never become a lasting favourite”.
In fairness this was based on an Italian-language version which was how
Die Zauberflöte was performed for most of the 19th century, garnering the same praise and condemnation, but defying Robertson’s prophesy when Bishop’s 60-odd operas have disappeared from the stage while Zauberflöte is one of the most often performed. One of its only early defenders was the poet and critic
Leigh Hunt, founder and music critic of
The Examiner who “did not participate in the objection made to the nature of the story, which because it is a fairy tale is thought to be frivolous. Alas, how frivolous,” he contested, “are the most grave realities of life!”
After the meanderings of opera plots throughout the 19th and even 20th centuries Zauberflöte’s dramatic shortcomings have long been overlooked and it is securely one of the most of ten performed and most accessible of opera. Opera Australia have countered the problem of continuing to make it accessible by always performing it in English. Until the 1980s, in fact, all the Mozart comedies were sung to English translations (Figaro used the Edward Dent in which innumerable Figaros’ struggled to make the line “like meteors they storm us” to not sound as though they meant women of generous physique and loose morals). Flute remained sung in English until the final revival of the Göran Järvefelt / Carl Friederich Oberle production when it was decided that the spoken text would be in English and the arias sung German. It was an odd decision and appears to be one of the legacies of the late Richard Hickox who conducted the premiere of this new production in 2006 and, although the director David Freeman had preferred it be entirely in English this bi-textural approach is again used.
Freeman was only twenty-one and still a student when he founded his Opera Factory in Sydney in 1973, literally in the shadow of the newly-constructed and grandiose Sydney Opera House.
An equally insightful director of legitimate theatre Freeman was a maverick from the start, but not in the way we understand maverick opera directors these days, with little of the notoriety that some directors attract like fuzzy felt. His interpretations, like an early staging of Handel’s
Acis and Galatea, where Polyphemus was a menacing old drunk in a grubby mackintosh down to his recent
Nabucco (finally working with Opera Australia) where Nabucco’s outburst that he is God was met, not with a bolt of lightening, but a shower of blood in an appropriate, if sickening simile of the carnage wrought by all dictators. Instead of an apprenticeship to, what might have seemed to him a mausoleum, at the Sydney Opera House, Freeman established similar Opera factories in Zurich and then London where, according to one of the most respected and knowledgeable of British commentators Tom Sutcliffe, “his best work was liberating, influential and formative in building Britain’s operatic new world.” One innovation that paid the obvious dividends was Freeman's building an ensemble of singers, ‘theatrical tribalism’ as Sutcliffe calls it, working with them like actors and introducing them to theories from the contemporary theatre by the likes of Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and even Antonin Artaud. He was not without irreverence too, relocating the classically inspired operas to modern-day surroundings and using modern-day props.
Singers are savvier about their acting and more open to re-interpretation of their repertoire these days and embrace the good, bad and the ugly for the sake of their art. Fortunately this production is mostly all for the good and the choreography and staging is jointly the work of Debra Batton and the Legs on the Wall physical theatre. Founded in 1984 Legs on the Wall specialise in aerial rope work and devise spectacular routines that can see them suspended from skyscrapers hundreds of metres above ground. Freeman and Batton begin the action with overture showing Tamino being lead by the three boys into the forest where he is, at first, enchanted by hoping frogs, butterflies and birds. Wearing mottled body stockings the Legs on the Wall troupe hover at first among the forest of ropes or manipulate the puppets including the gigantic claws and head of the dragon. Occasionally they enter into the sung music. When the Queen of the Night, suspended above the stage, begins the frenetic allegro of her first aria they twirl around her adding physical gymnastics to her vocal ones. Most memorable are the way they mime the prowling, snarling lions that guard Sarastro and his temple so that the Legs on the Wallers become so integral to the production, growing on you with each appearance, that you look for them in each new scene. They way Freeman has made these mimes and acrobats integral to the magic of the story recalls his similar use of mimes as the demons that were so integral to the supernatural horror in his production of
Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (one of his most brilliant opera stagings). Diligently Freeman allows most of the vocal music its own space in his staging. Instead of ossifying it is set in relief, Mozart’s sublimity alongside Freeman’s imagination. There was not one moment when I felt that the puppetry or acrobatics upstaged or interfered with the music. It even complimented some scenes in a way I never expected like in the fire trial which introduced some thrilling fire juggling where Pamina and Tamino were surrounded by the acrobats twirling batons of fire which Crane and Goodwin reach into to display their courage (their own as well their characters'). You can’t help thinking Mozart and Schikaneder would have been delighted by this.
With its acrobatics and occasional burst of circus-like theatricality comparisons with Julie Taymar’s abridged Metropolitan Opera production are inevitable. But where Taymar appears to have got everything wrong, Freeman seems to have got everything right. Damien Cooper’s marvelous lighting, where shafts of green, blue or amber light pick through the tangle of ropes creates a continually beautiful stage picture. The room in which Tamino and Papageno undergo the first trial spins around while disembodied arms grasp at them and the three ladies and assorted animals appear and disappear. Otherwise the orderliness of the rest of the temple with its cool, green agate walls inlaid with Masonic symbols, is equally effective.
As Pamina Sara Crane is ravishing to look at – in a costume like a princess from Edmund Dulac’s storybook illustrations - and as lovely to listen to. Her voice is rich and silvery and in her dramatic transition in the second act, warm and sensuous. Playing a human and suffering woman rather the usual girlish princess, Crane makes complete vocal sense of Pamina’s music straightaway; in her first scene she sings the heavenly duet with Papageno with a lusciousness sounding totally aware of the joy of love. Her soaring “Die Wahrheits” in the act one finale are pure and noble while “Ach, ich fühl’s” follows the heartbroken sighing in Mozart’s accompaniment. Her desperation in her near suicide gives way again to soaring nobility on “Tamino mein, O welch ein Glück!” as they begin the final trial. It’s no surprise that this Pamina is welcomed into Sarastro’s virtuous society. Crane sang Janthe in a rare staging of Heinrich Marschner’s
Der Vampyr in Freiburg in 2002 and is a credible actress too. She appears to be a natural for singspiel and was the most successful among the with the dialogue, giving the same subtle weight and emphasis, for example, in her words to the silent Tamino as she gave to the following music in “Ach, ich fühl’s”.
As the Queen of the Night Lorina Gore's costume is all white, an odd choice considering her nocturnal associations. Her act one aria is sung while suspended on a huge crescent moon and is melodramatic - presumably to hoodwink Tamino and gain his sympathy – while her second act aria is sung and acted vehemently instead of with the glacial, almost mechanical, delivery that (if the singer can manage it) makes the character more sinister. Daniel Sumegi is an excitable Sarastro who sounds almost panic-stricken as he reveals the Queen of the Night’s plot to the priests at the beginning of act two. When singing his voice is warm and fatherly, not like a dark bass, but in “In diesen heil'gen Hallen”, very comforting after the Queen's hysterical outburst. As Tamino Andrew Goodwin also looks straight out of Dulac’s Arabian Nights. He has a big-sounding and pleasant voice but without the palette of vocal colours of his Pamina. He was never short of charming but the portrait aria was short on rapture and his cries when discovering Pamina is alive were more defiant than ecstatic.
Kanen Breen's Monostatos might have stepped right out of a 1970s ‘black-sploitation’ movie. Sporting an Afro wig and unexaggerated Negro make-up he is no harem-eunuch buffoon. The character’s pent up and threatening sexual menace toward Pamina is underlined giving his scenes with her a nasty edge. Breen's diction is always exemplary too; every word of his breathless, 60 second aria was audible. Freeman retains the flavour of Schikaneder’s original dialogue in these scenes allowing the equally nasty and far from archaic racism to resonate on modern audiences for all it is worth. The Three ladies look positively Valkurian (or perhaps like the college-girl warriors from
Princess Ida).
As Papageno Andrew Moran is given some gimmicks and dialogue that you will either love or hate. In a red fright wig and false nose he also looks like a bad impersonation of Ronnie Barker and is given some broad and often low brow jokes. After an abrupt start where Freeman seems to be overly colloquial (“he’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic” for example) in order to attune the audience to his adaptation, his text usually stays in the spirit of Schikaneder’s except when it involves Papageno (“you blow your flute and I’ll blow me diet” and so on). In act two his song with the bells becomes a kind of 18th century meta-theatre, the character constantly engaging the audience directly. Love it or hate it, Moran does, however, know how Papageno’s music should go, especially in the second act when, despite the clowning between verses, sings with a geniality that recalls some really great recorded Papageni like Kunz and Hüsch.
When the three boys make their formal entrance they are mall rats, on skateboards or scooters. Later they sing and swing on the ropes and, in act three, when they admonish Tamino and Papageno they are just floating heads – they must be having the best time of their choirboy lives! There are dozens of incidental details; in her suicide scene Pamina caresses her cheek with the dagger as though it were Tamino’s hand (Schikaneder’s libretto has occasional merits and Pamina’s likening the dagger to a bridegroom that brings a marriage of death is one of them). The three boys smile and laugh with Pamina, sharing her joy after they tell her Tamino loves her and later two of Sarastro’s lions gently nudge Tamino and Pamina toward each other as they prepare for the final trial; all these touches bring extra dramatic point.
Musically Jari Hämäläinen oversees a small-band Mozart sound (it’s amazing how finely textured this opera is so often). The marches spring and in the water and fire trials there is forward sounding propulsion in which the suspenseful timpani strikes pound like a pounding heart-beat effect in a Bernard Herrmann score.
There are a few unfortunate glitches in the programme which attribute roles to the wrong singers but on the plus side it contains an excellent essay on Schikaneder’s theatre, the Singspiel as a genre and Freemasonry customs in Vienna at the time, including a fascinating titbit about Lodges admitting females and thus giving extra contemporary meaning to Pamina joining Tamino in the initiation into Sarastro’s community.
Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) Singspiel in two acts
Music – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto – Emanuel Schikaneder and Carl Ludwig Gieseke
First performance – 30 September 1791, Freihaustheater auf der Wieden, Vienna
First Australian performance – 18 November 1948, Princess Theatre, Melbourne
First performance of this production – 20 February 2006, Sydney Opera House (unless,
like Hugh Jackman you prefer calling it the Opera Center)
Tamino - Andrew Goodwin
Pamina - Sarah Crane
Sarastro - Daniel Sumegi
The Queen of the Night - Lorina Gore
Papageno - Andrew Moran
First Lady - Amy Wilkinson
Second Lady - Sian Pendry
Third Lady - Dominica Matthews
Speaker/Second Priest - Stephen Bennett
First Priest - Graeme Macfarlane
Monostatos - Kanen Breen
First Armoured Man - Andrew Brunsdon
Second Armoured Man - Richard Anderson
First Boy - James Emerson
Second Boy - Sam Bissett
Third Boy - Joshua Timewell
Animals - Legs on the Wall (Eve Fernandez Adan, Dean Cross, Catherine Daniel, Rick Everett, Lee Anne Litton, Alejandro Rolandi, Lillian May Tulloch, Darren Vizer, Tully Ward, Meiwah Williams)
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Jari Hämäläinen
Director - David Freeman
Revival director – Cathy Dadd
Set & Costume Designer - Dan Potra
Lighting Designer - Damien Cooper
Choreographer - Debra Batton
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
4, 9, 16, 18, 21, 23, 30 April 2, 6 & 8 May 2009
180 minutes (including 1 interval of 30 minutes)
Cherry Ripe: Vocal Treasures of the 18th and 19th Centuries
