LA Opera’s 40th anniversary season concludes with a revival of Mozart’s The Magic Flute conducted by James Conlon in his final 20th season as the company’s Music Director before becoming Conductor Laureate.
The opera follows the adventures of Prince Tamino and Papageno on their search for the Queen of the Night’s daughter, Pamina. To help them conquer the trials and tribulations on their quest, the duo are given magical musical instruments, including a magic flute. It is a fairy tale celebration of true love conquering all in an enchanted fantasy world of good against evil.
Unlike your typical opera, The Magic Flute was not composed for an aristocratic audience, rather, it was written as a singspiel to be performed in the Schikaneder’s theater, known for its mixture of vaudeville and pantomime, visual effects, and scenic extravaganzassort of like a Cirque du Soleil Vegas show of its day.
LA Opera presents The Komische Oper Berlin’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which it first presented in 2016 followed by a subsequent revival in 2019. Premiering in 2012, this production builds on the opera’s populist origins, drawing out its fairytale quality, with a blend of animated silent movie visuals with a sprinkling of quirky British humour. The take on has been hugely successful internationally.
The singers perform in front of a huge screen, interacting in real time with animations projected around them. Because they are interacting with animations, the lead singers Tamino, Pamina, and Papagena, have to learn complicated choreography, similar to puppet theater, except that the puppets are replaced by humans. The singers are now totally integrated in an endlessly colorful universe like a giant comic strip collage.
Characters are depicted in animated forms. So to make Papageno loveable, the production drew inspiration from Buster Keaton, and getting him to pet his animated cat. The Queen of the Night is an enormous bloodthirsty, skeletal black-widow spider queen hurling knives along with her high notes. During her aria ‘Der Hölle Rache’ she sends a swarm of baby spiders to overcome Pamina as she lies helpless in the Queen’s web.
The choreography works with the score. Monastatos’s dogs lunge on their leashes ready to attack Pamina with the same snarling energy as Monastatos’s pointy vocal lines. Pamina and Papageno jump rooftop to rooftop, teasing out jaunty rhythms. Then, there is Pamina’s ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ longing for Tamino while standing below a leafless snow-covered tree, isolated in a snow globe. The production’s dreamspace with its archetypes and cartoon images that don’t make sense is a perfect vehicle for its fairytale character.
For more information and tickets, please visit LAOpera.org/Flute.