emblems of love
by Douglas Messerli
Emanuel
Schikaneder (libretto), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (music) The Magic Flute / Los Angeles, LAOpera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion,
December 15, 2013.
Let
me begin by admitting to what some may see as sacrilegious: of Mozart’s major
operas, I least like his The Magic Flute.
To me both Don Giovanni and Cossi fan tutte, the latter almost a
variation of his last opera in its testing of faithfulness and love. With its
heavy Masonic iconography, its fantasy and fairy-tale silliness and
inconsistencies, and in its abstracted and often undeveloped characterizations,
The Magic Flute is more about the
idea of love and its challenges than actually a tale of two lovers willing to
suffer the trials and tribulations of physical and psychic attraction. The fact
that in this opera Mozart has so abstracted love, along with its comic book-like
and fantasy figures is obviously what makes this opera so attractive to
children—or, at least, to parents who would wish their children might grow to
love opera. The very fact that Tamino, chased by the dragon, falls in love with
a picture of Pamina, as opposed to a real being is what makes this tale a
voyage safe for the kids. Indeed, throughout the entire opera, the two lovers
hardly have more than a few moments together, kissing only at the end—an end
that represents, at least symbolically, a life after death—after all they have
been silenced, tempted, burned to ashes, and tied to the ocean floor
beforehand.
Even Papageno, the bird-catcher, who has a
far more course vision of love than his compatriots, doesn’t get to kiss his
Papagena until after both have been nearly consumed in an explosion—another
kind of after-life
experience—that
renders his and her vision of a heavy-populated household as sexually neutered.
Papagena—at least in the LAOpera production I saw the other day—may be a highly
sexual flirt (she appears in the production I saw as a mix of a cabaret stripper
and a baton-twirling majorette), but by the time the couple gets down to their
chorus of “Pa’s,” they have quite literally been burned.
In short, Mozart and his librettist seem
completely disinterested in their characters’ motivations, interactions, or
even consistency. They are simply lovers who must undergo predetermined and
quite inexplicable trials and tribulations to prove their worthiness for one
another or evil monsters determined to get in the way. We easily comprehend why
Don Giovanni takes to the streets: he is a womanizer in search of yet more
lovers. We can well perceive why the braggarts Ferrando and Guglielmo want to
test their lovers’ faithfulness. But we have little idea
why—particularly given the spider-like manifestation of Pamina’s
mother in the LAOpera production—Tanino has fallen in love or why, without
really knowing him, Pamina responds in kind, going so far as to attempt suicide
and, later, follow Tamino into the throes of death if not death itself. In
short, all of the Mozart’s characters in this opera seem to exist in a kind of
gap, are separate and isolate, never quite able to reach out to one another
until the highly spiritualized ending. And I think this isolation of the opera’s
figures also plays out in Mozart’s music as well. The dialogue passages which
separate the opera’s arias help to further isolate the opera’s set pieces, some
of which are obviously quite beautiful, but for me, at least, seldom coalesce.
Given the isolation of character and gaps
of logic and plot of The Magic Flute,
directors and designers generally fill the spaces with extraordinarily elaborate
costumes and fabulous fairy-tale like sets which enchant audiences young and
old and keep them from too carefully questioning and the why and where the
characters actions and travels in their attempt to enter the temples of
knowledge and wisdom. And in that sense, I have to admit, the LAOpera
production I saw, based on the remarkable Komische Oper Berlin production with direction by Suzanne Andrade and Barrie
Kosky and animations and concept by the two-person group 1927, consisting of
Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barrit, is definitely the most innovative version of
the Mozart opera in years.
Their brilliant blend of animation and
live-singers, discards the long dialogical interludes with something similar to
silent-film intertitles, often presented in the flourished letterings of the
first two decades of film-making, with the similarly outdated links of words
such as “meanwhile…” or “on the other hand,” etc. But, fortunately, that is
only the beginning of 1927’s involvement with animation. In this work, film is
not projected upon a backscreen or front scrim as in, say, the recent MET
production of
The Nose but becomes
part of the on-stage action itself, using the singers to create links between
cartoon-like images borrowed from the entire history of cinema, from Westerns,
horror films, and science-fiction pictures and their images to figures that
might remind one of the paintings of Andy Warhol and Henry Darger. The
monstrous Monostatos (Rodell Rosel) becomes a kind of Nosferatu, to Papageno’s
(Rodion Pogossov) Buster Keaton. Pamina (Janai Brugger) is turned into a Louis
Brooks and Perils of Pauline figure, while Tanino (Lawrence Brownlee) is turned
into a sort of Harold Lloyd-like nerd. Birds fly across the stage, along with
pink elephants (clearly a reference to Disney’s Dumbo), monstrous legions of slightly
leashed dogs and the trotting and faithful bird-loving cat. The three boys who
accompany Tanino and Papageno into the underworld are transformed into
sweet-faced butterflies. When Tanino plays his magic flute, notes flutter
across the entire stage, and with Papageno opens his box of magic bells, a
whole chorus of young nymphets flutter about the proscenium as they were the
performers in a Busby Berkeley number.
If at moments this can move a little too
far in the director of Disney’s Fantasia,
the work’s evil figures call up images that seem to salute the convoluted mechanical
constructions of Monty Python and Gabe Ruberg. The terrifying aria wherein The
Queen of the Night orders her daughter to kill Sarastro (Evan Boyer) becomes a
horrifying series of images in which her spider claws turn suddenly into
daggers pinning Pamina into the prison of her will.
All of this energized image-making, in
short, creates an often exhilarating and nearly always entertaining subtext to
the opera’s music. The only problem is that in its stage-craft requirements
that the singers take their places on the entire screen both vertically and
horizontally of the stage, they are forced to stand upon small pedestals almost
as friezes or, in the case of the three boys and three ladies in framed
tableaus. Since they seldom can move through space, the actors seem even more separated
and isolate from one another, only reiterating the problem of Mozart’s work.
The brilliant interchanges between the “real” and the “imaginary,” moreover,
merely remind us that Mozart’s figures are emblems of beings—lovers and evil
forces—as opposed to psychological figures determined to explain and enact
those emotions.
As a lover of artifice, of course, this
does not truly trouble me. Mozart’s work, in this case, was never intended to
be a psychological exploration of why people fall in love or try to defeat its
forces. Leave that to somewhat like Bergman, whose The Magic Flute-influenced film I have previously described (see
above). Here love, the lovers’ willingness to suffer its torments, and the
knowledge that suffering rewards is as inexplicable as why Adam and Eve became
determined to eat the forbidden “apple” which expelled them from their own
magical lives.
Los Angeles,
December 16, 2013
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