The Magic Flute can be a problematic piece. As with Parsifal, another German composer’s last opera, key scenes are imbued with an ambiguous mysticsm, and much of the drama takes places in and around exotic religious locales: Sarastro’s [Zoroaster’s] quasi-Masonic temple for The Magic Flute, Amfortas’s monastery of the Knights of the Holy Grail in Parsifal. These themes can tempt production designers and directors into orgies of faux religiosity and conductors into Furtwänglerian excesses of stately tempi, further discomforting modern audiences who already find the ‘message’ of the operas alien to their psyches. Each composer provides certain excursus from these moods, and it is how directors approach these that often sets the tone for the whole opera. Wagner provides biblical temptresses who laughed at Jesus and an evil magician who wields the centurion’s spear – little hope for levity there. Mozart provides a world of magic populated by astonishingly diverse characters who, crucially, are aware of the audience – aha, this is where the director can grab the opera by the scruff of its neck and make it his or her own.

The excellent programme notes for this Welsh National Opera production do not contain the normal stumbling synopsis followed by a few abstruse essays by obscure academics on perverse side issues, but instead transcribe two extended interviews with the Director (the R.S.C.’s Dominic Cooke) and the Conductor (Jean-Yves Ossonce), interspersed with full-colour drawings of the costumes and attractive line drawings of crustaceans (see below)… These interviews reveal a thorough understanding of the opera and delineate a cohesive argument underpinning this delightfully Surrealist production that deliberately accentuates the conflicts, contrasts and contradictions of the opera, wheeling as it does from bawdy music hall to reverent concert hall.

I do not want to describe too much of the staging: despite using just a single, spare set (overtly recalling René Magritte) to depict the many locales, the action provides an endlessly inventive and humorous visual feast that caused many a ripple of warm laughter, or even applause, across the auditorium. I cannot resist mentioning the Dragon: a vast off-stage lobster, sensationally realised, trying to get to Tamino through the sets’ many doors with its various claws, antennae and other appendages. It reminded of one of those cartoons of Jerry behind the skirting board avoiding Tom’s furry paw as it snaked through the mousehole – and yet, the lobster, with its very mobile eyes, seemed just to want to say ‘hello’, echoing the theme of conflict caused through misunderstanding that underpins all the interactions of Sarastro’s and the Queen of the Night’s many pawns. The magical animals were deliciously characterized and the choreography throughout (by Sue Lefton) was of the highest order, and was notably sensitive to the simple but striking costumes (by Kevin Pollard).

And what of the music? There was no apparent desire to produce a cohesive soundscape: it was splintered from the opening seconds with an astonishingly pert drum backing the ceremonial chords, the singers meandered between idealized vocal tones in some arias and exaggeratedly broad regional accents from across the world in the spoken repartee. Individually the characterization tended to work well, for instance the gentle Welsh lilt of Prince Tamino (Peter Wedd) well counterpointing the earthy Kiwi tones of burly birdcatcher Papageno (Teddy Tahu Rhodes). The Queen of the Night (Katarznya Dondalska) created more continuity between her spoken and singing voices, bringing a rich continental growl to both and reaching the notorious peaks of her vertiginous rage aria not with the customary bell-like tones, but as full-throated shrieks that just so happened to hit the pitches and rhythms spot on. The applause (from an audience even keener than the production director to interrupt the opera’s flow) was considerable.

The audience ambled out well satisfied and in obvious good humour. This was a very attractive, enjoyable production. However, to my heart the parts were so much greater than the whole. With a few exceptions such as Papageno and Papagena’s duet, whose ineffable silliness was undercut from the outset by the prevailing surrealist humour and by their own apparent caution, every moment was a pleasure; but these are what I remember, not the overall sweep nor the humanity of Sarastro’s labours (this was, after all, an opera written in part to soften prejudice against freemasonry). In so energetically avoiding the camp excesses of religiosity and exoticism, the production neglects moments of dignity that ultimately ground and centre the work. Or is that just my own nineteenth-century sensibilities looking for succour that neither this post-modern interpretation nor Mozart’s own world-view saw need to provide for?

Julian Stewart, 12/7/05