Review – Mozart’s “Magic Flute” in Salzburg: Remarkable, but not intoxicating | News and criticism | BR CLASSIC
Review – Mozart’s “Magic Flute” in Salzburg
Remarkable, but not intoxicating
07/31/2022 by Fridemann Leipold
Next attempt: Lydia Steier presented her “Magic Flute” at the Salzburg Festival in 2018. With moderate success. So the director tries again. This time with conductor Joana Mallwitz at her side. Premiere was on Saturday. And the result is something to be proud of – even if it doesn’t trigger a storm of enthusiasm.
Image Credit: SF / Sandra Then
premiere review
“The Magic Flute” at the Salzburg Festival
For the overture, Katharina Schlipf’s revolving stage shows an upper-class doll’s house: there are arguments in the family, the three boys have to go to bed. Then the grandfather tells them the adventures of Tamino and Pamina with the Queen of the Night and the Sun King Sarastro as a bedtime story. And then the dream figures come to life and pull the three famous Vienna Boys’ Choir right into the middle of Mozart’s “Magic Flute”. With this background story, the director Lydia Steier spares her protagonists the stilted recitation of Emanuel Schikaneder’s dialogues. Roland Koch does it with a nice understatement. He also enjoys playing ping-pong with the conductor when he speaks melodramatically to the music. Reacting quickly is required – no problem for the agile Joana Mallwitz.
First slapstick, then Lydia Steier gets serious
Lydia Steier uses Schikaneder’s machine theater with virtuosity, never at a loss for ideas and seasoned with her own irony. For her, the “Magic Flute” is the suburban posse that the clever theater man had in mind. In a winding flight of stairs à la Maurits Escher, Steier relies on revue and slapstick with butterfly dancers and giant teddy bears – when Tamino soothes the wild animals with his flute playing. After the first lift you are somewhat flattened. And the idea of a Nestroy farce comes to mind, after all we are in Austria: does Lydia Steier just want to make a joke with Mozart’s drama?
There was something…
Here’s what our critic thought of Lydia Steier’s The Magic Flute at the 2018 Salzburg Festival.
But with the “Isis and Osiris” world in the second act, she does get serious. The young Tareq Nazmi, who is well known from Munich, proves with rich depth that he has what it takes to be a sarastro. Lydia Steier shows the ruler and his men’s union in a uniform look wearing a suit with a bowler hat – like the gray gentlemen in Michael Ende’s “Momo”. Here they not only steal people’s time, but even their lives. Because they mutate into a squad of soldiers who levy recruits to burn them up in the war. During the fire and water test of Tamino and Pamina, horrible film images from the First World War flicker across the stage – the television images of the present are immediately present.
Soprano Regula Mühlemann stands out
With her clearly guided, youthful soprano, Regula Mühlemann shows that she is a perfect Mozart stylist. As Pamina, she enchanted the audience with her naturalness – and towered over the entire Salzburg Mozart ensemble. With the powerful, if not effortless, Mauro Peter as Tamino, with the boyish Michael Nagl as Papageno and an extremely homogeneous trio of women, it is of good festival quality. While Peter Tantsits, of course not blackfaced, created Monostatos as a vocal caricature, the vocal deficits of Brenda Rae as Queen of the Night were probably of an involuntary nature.
More from the Salzburg Festival?
Here’s why Asmik Grigorian caused our critics to storm with enthusiasm with her performance in Puccini’s “Il Trittico”.
Joana Mallwitz is the ideal opera woman in a ditch, always gesturing with her protégés on stage. The Vienna Philharmonic has trimmed it down to historically informed music-making: the sound is bold, lively and crisp, sometimes a little too compact for the acoustics in the Haus für Mozart. Even at the second attempt, this Salzburg “Magic Flute” is not a great hit, but a remarkable attempt to get to the bottom of the ambivalences of the piece and the characters.
Broadcast: “Allegro” on August 1, 2022 from 6:05 a.m. on BR-KLASSIK