part of an opera review: The Magic Flute

[calimac]

I'd had no idea Mozart could be so boring.

I've seen other Mozart operas staged before - The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte - and they were all beautiful and imaginative. But this - this is a cut-rate opera. Mozart throws off an endless series of empty display pieces, and that's all that there is.

Furthermore, it's nearly three hours long. At the end of the first of two acts, I gave up and bailed out. I was sorry to miss the Queen of the Night's famous aria, which is in Act 2, but judging from the performance of her Act 1 aria, I probably didn't miss much.

The one good thing about the show, which I'm sorry I missed the rest of, was the staging, which featured the cleverest and most imaginative animated backgrounds imaginable. The singers stood in front of a white wall, sometimes on little platforms emerging from the wall when they needed to be high up. The animation was projected on to the wall and they interacted with it. That only explains how it worked, but what the designers did with it can hardly be adequately described.

Comments

[oursin]

Shows what da Ponte brought to the mix?

[calimac]

As that's the relevant variable, it could well be what makes the difference.

[sturgeonslawyer]

I've never seen The Magic Flute (nor heard it all the way through) ... but when we were in Vienna, 26 years ago this month, we went to a tourist-oriented concert of Mozart's Greatest Hits or somesuch -- as one does when one is a tourist in Vienna, unless one opts for the similarly-oriented Strauss program, and one CD of Strauss's Greatest Hits has me pretty much set for life -- and the "Pappagena/Pappageno" duet was the unquestioned highlight moment of the show, gaining laughter from an audience who (mostly) could not understand what the two folks on stage were singing about, but they sang and acted it in a manner that brought the humor home to us all.

The orchestra was good also, but during the first part of the program, we -- who had, in the past 48 hours or so, flown from SFO to Warsaw, and taken a (much delayed) train from there on to Vienna; so we were pretty exhausted -- rather dozed until something we all knew ("Eine Kleine Nachmusik," of course) came along. The second half featured singing, and kept us awake much better, especially, as I said, this bit.

[calimac]

I could have said that any given one of these numbers could be enjoyable to listen to. I've heard that famous Queen of the Night aria many times, and have enjoyed that. But an endless series of them quickly palled.