Back in the program: “The Magic Flute” ignites the second time – Salzburg Festival 2022
“New productions” are the magic word, used not clumsily, in the revivals of this year’s Salzburg Festival. Both “The Magic Flute” and “Aida” are now back in the program – also to overcome the weaknesses of the first productions, as artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser openly admits, and to uncover the potential of the respective works.
Both Shirin Neshat for “Aida” and Lydia Steier with “Magic Flute” got such a chance – freely also according to the second motto of the director: “The revivals are always better than the original.” This dictum was correct with Steier’s “Magic Flute”. frankly – as could also be seen from the reaction of the audience on Saturday in the Haus für Mozart. No musical theater has been as celebrated as this one. Now one could object, little wonder when it comes to this classic.
The “Magic Flute” restaged
This time director Lydia Steier will not serve up a bedtime story with her new production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute”. This summer, Steier, together with the conductor Joana Mallwitz, examines the piece again and reveals that everything will be different, even if she does not care about the basic constellation.
A reading with explosiveness
It turns out that with the change of location to the smaller stage – but not least against the background of the time we are currently in, with a war on European soil, Steier’s reading of this classic gets new explosiveness. In developing the material, the director was faced with the realization that everything begins as a fantastic story, but then looks like an extended Masonic rite (now, of course, one can object, looking at the performance practice of Emmanuel Schikaneder’s time, that perhaps without this one could do too much interpreted a lot of philosophy and spirit into this work). In any case, Steier distrusted the displacement of night by light, i.e. Sarastro’s ideal gain of ground over the Queen of the Night.
Mühlemann and Steier in conversation
The Swiss soprano & the director on the reboot of “Magic Flute”.
Rather, she no longer wants to distinguish the good from the bad – and assumes that Sarastro’s world is what has been called the “dialectics of enlightenment” since Horkheimer and Adorno. Unfortunately, we know that the most horrific deeds can also be committed in the name of reason. And so the suspicion that Sarastro’s “troops”, which look as if they had stepped straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” here, is completely out of control. The image superimpositions with torture scenes from the war, not least from concentration camps, take on a different explosiveness in 2022. Apparently, a reason can always be given for certain actions and apparently every war can also be reasonably justified, so a general suspicion of this opera production.
The overwhelmed mother hands over to the grandfather
Everything seemed to have started in such an orderly manner, but the grandfather (Roland Koch was great) tells and reads the story of the “Magic Flute” to his three grandchildren in well-measured chapters. Even before that, it becomes clear that this construction will come about: an overwhelmed mother, the queen of the night (?), can no longer and a little later climb up towards the night sky in a dress that is also a tablecloth for the clan.
The framing of the opera with a framework narrative is of course so liberally laid out here that the characters in the framework plot intervene in the opera and warn the heroines of follies.
In the first part, this order of the game works completely. In the second, however, Steirer adds a piece of reflection on the tests of Sarastro, with which she focuses on the practice of rational politics. The indistinguishability of the worlds was to become a challenge – because if one hoped for the end of the opera in the grandfather’s interpretation, the piece actually ended up stranded in darkness between the realms of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro’s. That entails a lot of thinking after an evening that shone with a lot of theater work. The machinery of the theater was used at its highest level that evening. And the grandiose musical direction under Mallwitz really got this machine running in conjunction with the Philharmoniker. And: In 2022, Mozart can sound really symphonic here again.
Great ensemble performance
There was a lot of glamor among the singers, especially since there were a lot of young people on the ramp. Tareq Nazmi was an insidious Sarastro, Michael Nagl a Papageno with reference to the Viennese folk comedy. And Regula Mühlemann also showed as Pamina that one rightly has a lot of credit for her, especially with Mozart. But an entire ensemble deserves praise, from the three boys’ choir to the Vienna State Opera Choir. No matter how you wanted the staging to be hinted at, it was Singspiel and theatre, as it should and must be despite all differences in taste.