The Magic Flute -- Performance Review

The Magic Flute

San Francisco Opera Performance

November 17, 2015

This opera is strange.  It is a confused, convoluted pastiche of kitch and nonsense that doesn't really reach a culmination.  It just ends rather nonchalantly.  It is really two operas.  The first act and the second act are very distinct and have little to do with each other except that they use the same characters.  Other than the characters, there is not a great deal of continuity in the story line between the first and the second acts.  The concept of the opera seems to change between acts.  The first act opens with Tamino being pursued by colorful dragons which are slain by three maidens who fall for the young Tamino.  It is never explained who the dragons are or why they are chasing Tamino.  They simply drop out of the story all together.  Nothing is made of the interest the three maidens show in the young Tamino either.  The three maidens who rescue Tamino are apparently recruiting him for the Queen of the Night who needs him to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the clutches of the evil Sarastro.  So the first act seems to be setting up a rescue chase after a damsel in distress being held against her will in the power of an evil villain, Sarastro. 

But the villain turns out to be not so bad.  He is the head of a mumbo jumbo cult whose purpose seems to be to validate masculinity through trial and hardship.  He evolves into a fatherly figure who dispenses wisdom and serves as a model of goodness, as well as a repudiation of the Queen of the Night.  The second act gives up this rescue quest of the kidnapped damsel all together, seems to renounce the queen's construction of the situation, namely Sarastro being an evil villain and Pamina his prisoner, and the opera becomes two parallel quests for masculine validation.  On the one hand Tamino's charge is to endure various trials that test his character, virtue, honesty, and self discipline.  Sex is presented as a reward for accomplishment and virtuous character.  The other side is masculinity equated with sensuality, sex, having children, and a rather carefree, immature, irresponsible spirit represented by Papageno.  Monogamous marriage is idealized, at least on Tamino's side.  Papageno seems to favor monogamy with exceptions that are accepted with good spirit.  The program says this opera is supposed to be ribald and salacious.  But there was nothing ribald about this performance.  It was rather sanitized.  It was in English, and I wondered how much of the original was expunged to make this palatable to a straight laced American audience.  The Queen of the Night (Albina Shagimuratova) is not regal or nocturnal.  She does sing some very difficult arias that the audience responded to with well deserved enthusiasm.  The Magic Flute does not perform any magic and only plays an incidental role in the opera.  From the libretto we see that the Magic Flute

will confer great power upon you, to transform the sorrows of mankind; the mourner will become merry, the bachelor a lover.  . . .  A flute like this is worth more than gold or crowns, for by its power will human joy and contentment be increased.

But it does not accomplish this.  Perhaps it reflects the fact that Mozart supposedly did not care much for the flute as a musical instrument.  If that is true, it makes sense that it does not pan out as a transformative force for the sorrows of mankind.  This whole opera is not very well thought out. 

The performance by the San Francisco Opera was excellent in every respect that I could discern.  There was one feature of the staging that I objected to and that was the way  they used color as a backdrop for every change, every aria, every nuance of the opera was accompanied by a change in the color scheme on projection screens that formed the set.  It created a kind of emotional subtitling of the entire opera.  It was as if they didn't think we could get it just from the music, just from the dialog, just from the body language and plot.  They wanted to visually impose on us how we should regard what we were seeing with the changing colors and patterns on the screens.  I found it oppressive and annoying.  The background should not upstage the opera.  In this case the background screens, often in bright primary colors and linear patterns that continually changed and evolved, became so assertive that they competed with the opera itself.   Actually, maybe we didn't even need the opera.  They could have just shown us the light show on the screens accompanied by the orchestral music.  That might have worked better than the opera and cost less to produce. 

All together this opera was not satisfying, but not due to any failing in the performance, but rather, in its failed vision and construction.  It is just a poor concept and badly put together.  Mozart's strength was in music composition, rather than dramatic and philosophical conceptualization.