Picture by Virginia Harold
May it’s that The Magic Flute has grow to be an opera about placing on an opera? The piece has at all times invited spectacle – monsters, tempests, temples, and exams – however a specific trend has emerged of turning the spectacle “inside-out,” treating the stagecraft not as a automobile for an interpretation a lot because the interpretation itself. The reside hand-drawing and onstage foley of Simon McBurney’s minimalist Met staging are living proof, however even Julie Taymor’s diaphanous puppet theatre and Kosky and Andrade’s opera-as-silent-film staging in San Francisco appear to gravitate in direction of the brand new philosophy: Let phantasm be on full view, let course of be product, in order that the viewers might marvel as a lot on the sensible magic that conjures up the world as on the world of the story itself.
This strategy has a form of democratic attraction. When the trick is in full view, everybody needs in on the enjoyable. Performers do double responsibility, crossing boundaries that conventionally construction the manufacturing of operatic phantasm – between pit and stage, “character” and “firm,” and, after all, between performers and viewers. When, in McBurney’s manufacturing, Papageno steps in for a glockenspiel participant who has apparently disappeared, the transgression of operatic protocol gives a small shock to the system that summons a brand new theatrical spell – not the old school suspension of disbelief the place the listener unconsciously surrenders to the logic of the story world, however relatively a wide-awake, figuring out kind of complicity. The extra we sit up and take note of “precisely the way it’s finished,” these productions promise, the larger our enjoyment will likely be.
However there’s a model of this strategy that goes additional: one which substitutes complicity for enchantment altogether, teaching the viewers not solely into consciousness of the equipment however right into a posture of comfy detachment, as if the visibility of artifice provides permission to not really feel. Enchantment isn’t ignorance of the trick, however consent to be acted upon by it – an act of keen susceptibility which, like hypnosis, can unlock meanings not accessible on the acutely aware floor. The St. Louis Symphony’s Magic Flute raised the query of which model it actually needed to be.
Though technically a live performance efficiency, its many staged components borrowed freely from its theatrical predecessors. The screensaver-like above-stage video projections recalled Taymor’s eye-wateringly colourful visible language, whereas the “double responsibility” assigned to many performers felt impressed by McBurney. Mei Gui Zhang‘s Pamina was repurposed as a narrator, Will Liverman’s Papageno made his entrance by erupting out of the viewers, and conductor Stéphane Denève stepped past the customary authority of a conductor into one thing nearer to an additional character or grasp of ceremonies: commenting, chastising, and breaking the fourth wall so typically that it stopped registering as a particular impact and have become the night’s default mode.
These selections are comprehensible. They serve to defuse a lot of what intimidates newcomers about opera. Slightly than count on the viewers to reach already fluent in an archaic symbolic language, not to mention a literal international one, the manufacturing meets us the place we’re. Taking this one step additional, the spoken passages had been delivered a distinctly Twenty first-century register of English. Closely enhancing and extrapolating from the unique textual content, the variation (by Cori Ellison) delivered a gradual stream of gags that leaned much more closely on Will Liverman’s Papageno because the night’s comedian engine than is customary. In the meantime, Pamina’s working narration, initially a pleasant information by means of an unwieldy singspiel, more and more restated stage motion already plain to the attention. Apart from reassuring the viewers that “you haven’t missed something,” they appeared to vow that nothing too unfamiliar or troubling right here could be allowed to face unmediated.
The chance of this strategy isn’t a lot that it refuses the opera’s puzzling and uncomfortable thematic overtones, however that it retains them at arm’s size as materials for figuring out in-jokes and modern side-eye. The Magic Flute can face up to quite a lot of tonal inconsistency; it’s no small a part of why the work stays evergreen. However when the opera’s tougher questions – the ambiguities of enlightenment, the definition of “knowledge” and who’s permitted to own it – are flattened into pre-packaged stances, they will then be safely signaled, briefly applauded, after which bracketed from the comfy perspective of the Twenty first century. Take, for instance, an interpolated speech for Narrator-Pamina during which she explains that “because the daughter of a powerful, impartial lady,” she continues to withstand Sarastro’s imprisonment, solely to be repeatedly rebuffed from entry into the neighborhood on the grounds that “I’m a lady.” The road actually succeeded in eliciting gentle boos of disapproval, however the second felt canned.
Between the modern jokes, St. Louis-specific references, and the working feminist commentary, there was little room left for the rating to do its slower, stranger work. Slightly than enable the music to inform us when to belief or doubt, when to chortle, and when to doubt our personal laughter, the narration did – with the consequence that the music may really feel like an afterthought relatively than the principle occasion. And certainly, from the beginning, the orchestra’s studying of the rating felt blandly cautious. Whereas competently performed with out technical points, the overture lacked the mandatory sense of an invite to journey, the bubbling-over of barely-contained curiosity. In Act I, this warning changed into a tug-of-war with the soloists over tempo: the singers needed to run, carried by the agitation of the opera’s early scenes, whereas the orchestra held again. Whereas disagreements over tempo turned much less apparent over the course of the night (Denève appeared significantly attentive to holding Liverman’s Papageno in test in Act II), the orchestra’s taking part in by no means fairly coalesced into an interpretation – considerably shocking for a live performance efficiency.
The night’s greatest singing equipped the dramatic and musical momentum that the orchestra lacked. Ben Bliss, by now a well-known Mozartean presence, introduced his in depth expertise within the function to bear, shaping and propelling the whole night. Like a less-experienced dancer elevated by safe partnering, the orchestra appeared to discover a new expressive ease when accompanying Bliss in prolonged scenes, reminiscent of Tamino’s strategy to Sarastro’s temple. A lot has been written about Bliss’s instrument, which is vivid however not harsh, well-supported and sleek all through its vary. Fortunately, these characterizations maintain up. I’ve little so as to add past noting how welcome his intuition for period-appropriate ornamentation is in an age when Mozart’s scores are often learn with pious literality.
Bliss’s nice advantage as an artist is that he could make a sure form of male heroism legible exactly by not overloading it with persona. He reads as an avatar of the heroic tenor, projecting whole-hearted earnestness onto his roles with out extreme self-regard. In Don Giovanni, that high quality may even grow to be the purpose: In Bliss’ palms, Don Ottavio’s righteous guarantees to revive justice learn as naive and hole in comparison with Don Giovanni’s suavely assertive amorality, serving to splinter the viewers’s belief within the heroic archetype itself. For Tamino – a personality who lacks psychological inside life – Bliss is near ultimate, not much less as a result of he adjusted his Tamino to the room. His hallowed prince took on a subtly self-effacing Midwestern niceness (Bliss is a Kansas native, in spite of everything), resembling nothing a lot as a goofy, sometimes-beleaguered younger dad. All through, he was blissful to play together with the working gags with out ever giving the impression that he was above them.
Mei Gui Zhang’s Pamina was a profitable stage presence: bodily vivacious and a succesful actress. Vocally, nevertheless, her instrument is small, and it developed an alarmingly harsh high quality when pushed in quantity. Her “Ach, ich fühl’s” arrived in short-breathed phrases: a sequence of little sighs the place one lengthy, suspended line might need been extra devastating. Powell Corridor isn’t huge (if something, its shallowness can create stability issues in denser moments) and but her sound typically appeared to dissipate earlier than penetrating into the area. I couldn’t escape the sensation that her singing – fairly, however shut and contained – was meant for a microphone relatively than for the room.
In her ultimate scenes, nevertheless, one thing appeared to shift. Zhang appeared to search out extra bloom and ease, as if she had stopped managing a picture-perfect portrayal lengthy sufficient to let her voice open absolutely. The query is why it took so lengthy. Whether or not it was blended course or a gradual warm-up, the outcome was that Pamina’s voice – so essential to the story’s emotional core – solely turned audible close to the top.
Zhang assumed her twin function as narrator gamely, however the selection itself remained puzzling. One may solely conclude that the dramaturg, like many latter-day Disney screenwriters, determined {that a} princess locked in a tower (or temple) awaiting rescue was merely not fascinating to fashionable audiences, and due to this fact needed to be given “extra to do.” Pamina’s verbal interpolations lent her character a sure girlboss vitality that didn’t match her music, and moreover appeared pointless. Her struggles, on the finish of the day, should not unfamiliar to the modern-day psyche: Seemingly forsaken by her complete social world – household, mates, and lover – Pamina experiences a dislocation of identification so wrenching that it practically brings her to suicide. It’s these struggles that make her reclamation of her life and her love – marked by the hair-raising F-major modulation of “Tamino mein, o welch ein Glück!” – so shifting. This harmonic and emotional revelation makes the remainder of the plot (initiation, pairing off, and restoration) really feel like a real private victory, relatively than a phoned-in blissful ending. However for SLSO’s Pamina, this romantic blissful ending felt like a let-down – on the finish of the day, the added commentary didn’t truly rework Pamina’s standard destiny. One was left questioning what, precisely, this modernization was meant to perform past reassuring us that the manufacturing is aware of which elements of The Magic Flute make modern audiences uneasy.
As for Will Liverman’s Papageno, I had an odd response: I wanted I had heard him sing extra. In his early scenes, tempo disagreements made it onerous to savor his precise vocal work. Afterward, the present appeared decided to make use of Papageno mainly as a supply system for complaints about meals and alcohol, leaving him with surprisingly few moments during which his singing may do the characterization. By the top of the opera, nevertheless – a lot as with Zhang – one thing shifted. His baritone acquired a beautiful cohesion and ease and his sound all of the sudden relaxed, the phrases not rushed. I may have listened to far more of that.
The most important applause of the evening got here for Rainelle Krause’s Queen of the Night time. Krause has an uncommon instrument. Within the center register the voice is pale and missing in projection, however as she ascends into the stratosphere, the sound acquires a special physiology altogether: it comes into focus, brightens, and all of the sudden carries. The very high has a curiously hole sound, just like the flute cease of an organ. And as for the first-order technical calls for of the function: Can she hit these notes, cleanly, repeatedly, and in tune? Sure, Krause very a lot can.
However the Queen isn’t solely an athletic occasion. These excessive Fs are supposed to really feel just like the tip of an emotional whip being cracked: betrayal and fury so concentrated that love itself threatens to curdle into violence. The function belongs to a well-known operatic archetype – the damaging and mystical mom who may kill to defend her little one, or kill the kid who refuses her instruction. It’s the similar psychic territory that animates Norma and Azucena, each moms whose powers can flip holy or horrifying. Visually, Krause evoked all the fitting signifiers, delivering campy, witchy, moonlit glamour (is Chappell Roan taking notes?). But as a result of her center register lacks the bodily heft to ship actual emotional punch, her decrease passages felt obstacles to be gotten by means of on the best way to the cash notes, relatively than the locations the place the character’s anguish and hazard is introduced.
The supporting forged did their work ably all through. Particular point out belongs to the Three Girls (Teresa Perrotta, Jennifer Feinstein, and Daryl Freedman) whose mix had heat and cohesion that lit up the stage each time they appeared. The St. Louis Symphony Refrain, directed by Erin Freeman, sang with heartfelt dedication; the initiation music specifically achieved a spare, ritual readability that the manufacturing elsewhere appeared decided to demystify.
By the top, the night’s ambitions had been unmistakable; so, too, had been the prices. The singers had been typically requested to compete with the staging’s busy commentary – narration, gags, and Denève’s unusually lively presence – and that competitors appeared to blunt their greatest work. The busyness, nevertheless, was clearly intentional. Denève has been quoted describing The Magic Flute as a piece that “promotes the concept that women and men ought to have equal energy,” and the dramaturgy persistently steered us towards that conclusion. The outcome was much less a dramatization of the opera’s ethical and political tensions than a pre-digestion of them: we had been coached in what to really feel about its contradictions and mysteries earlier than the music had the prospect to make them felt, and earlier than we had time to grapple with them ourselves. Slightly than an opera that spoke by means of its music, we got an opera that spoke for its music.
Such is the paradox of disenchanting The Magic Flute (or any opera). When the manufacturing is at pains to satisfy the viewers the place they’re, to ensure everyone seems to be in on the enjoyable, and that everybody agrees on what’s humorous, outdated, or just irrelevant, it removes the circumstances below which enchantment can occur: the liberty to be momentarily uncertain, to be seduced with out being coached, and to let the music unfold its which means within the privateness of 1’s personal consideration. What replaces it’s an always-on interpretive steering system – a manufacturing decided to be in every single place directly, filling each silence with a joke, a cue, or a clarification, in order that no ambiguity is left unresolved, no lingering questions left to path us out of the corridor.
Was I entertained? Fairly. Enchanted? No.
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra below conductor Stéphane Denève performs up the schtick in a live performance efficiency of The Magic Flute – and obscures Mozart’s magic within the course of.
