To draw on silent movies as inspiration for an opera production might seem perverse, but this Magic Flute is a truly magical mystery tour from start to finish. The Australian director Barrie Kosky is on a roll. His staging of Handel’s Saul was the best thing at Glyndebourne this summer. Now his Komische Oper Berlin production of Mozart, conceived with Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt of the animation company 1927, has belatedly given opera-lovers at the Edinburgh Festival something to rave about.
There is no set. Instead, the characters play in front of a screen on to which Barritt’s enchantingly comic animations are projected. And what a dream world they conjure. Movie buffs will spend hours disentangling references. I detected Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the whirring, clock-like machines of Sarastro’s chillingly mechanistic universe; Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari for the spooky landscapes, Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks and Max Schreck in Nosferatu for the depictions of Tamino, Pamina and Monostatos respectively, and (from a slightly later era) Disney’s Dumbo and Fantasia for the glorious array of anthropomorphic creatures dancing across the screen. They include flying elephants, the Queen of the Night as a terrifying spider with lethal spikes for legs, and the magic flute itself as a winged cherub spraying healing notes over disconsolate souls below.
These fantastical animations should be an incoherent jumble, but miraculously they make sense — or as much sense as The Magic Flute ever does. And thanks to brilliant human co-ordination and state-of-the-art computers, the melding of cartoons and live action is inch perfect and split-second precise.
Wisely, or timidly, the directors don’t try to resolve the opera’s contradictions or suggest an overriding moral, although the way in which Dimitry Ivashchenko’s Victorian-patriarch Sarastro and his dour acolytes transform Maureen McKay’s spirited Pamina into a black-clad matron suggests that feminism isn’t top of the agenda in this supposedly enlightened oligarchy.
However, Kosky does get rid of the worst racist and misogynist smears in the original dialogue by the simple expedient of dumping the dialogue altogether. Instead, silent-movie captions are accompanied, in a droll twist on several sorts of “authenticity”, by Mozart’s fantasias played on a fortepiano. Elsewhere, musical standards don’t quite match visual razzle. Apart from Olga Pudova’s stunning Queen and Allan Clayton’s vibrant Tamino, the voices are nothing special, the chorus sounds weedy, and the punchy approach of Kristiina Poska, the conductor, is undermined by her inability to keep orchestra and vocals together. Perhaps she needs a computer too.
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