Wolfgang Mozart was a bizarre little dude who was obsessive about farts and butts , collected birds, drank to extra, and was pathologically afraid of trumpets. He was sick his complete life and lifeless by age 35, with so many historic illnesses that no person’s positive which one killed him. However in his quick life, he managed to compose over 600 separate musical works, amongst them symphonies, plenty, operas, and piano concerti. Of his 22 operas, Don Giovanni , The Marriage of Figaro , Cosi fan tutte , and The Magic Flute are thought of “the large 4,” that means those that you simply generally see produced.
The final is definitely probably the most produced operas ever, interval. Like many firms, Seattle Opera provides up The Magic Flute each eight or 10 years, and understandably—it’s a advertising and marketing slam dunk, and everybody goes to listen to the coloratura sing the Queen of the Evening’s badass aria, “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” (“Hell’s vengeance boils in my coronary heart”). ‘ TMF is enjoyable for youths and/or opera novices too due to the enormous snake and the ghost youngsters and the rainbow birdperson and the cheerful, Mozart-branded fatuousness of all of it. Visually dazzling and musically merry, even after they’re singing about Hell’s vengeance and stabbing folks to dying, it’s a yummy, simple opera starter package. The grilled cheese of opera.
Properly! Seattle Opera’s leveling up this spherical, of us. Our native store’s 2025 manufacturing of The Magic Flute , opening February 22, features a wonderful, absolutely animated movie that rolls behind the solid, as they work together with it to inform the musical fairy story. Co-artistic administrators Paul Barritt and Suzanne Andrade are the founders of 1927, a British theater firm that mixes animated movie and stay efficiency, and so they labored carefully with Aussie stage director Barrie Kosky over the course of three years to create this juicy, vivid, terrifically weird cowl of the Mozart traditional . This animated manufacturing debuted on the Komische Oper Berlin in 2012, and it’s since seen quick residencies in cities the world over and, in its present tour, all through Germany and in San Francisco. Now it’s Seattle’s flip.
The animated set was hand-drawn by Barritt, who took inspiration from Buster Keaton movies, Monty Python, and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror , amongst different early-Twentieth-century sources. I personally see Gorey, Svankmajer, and Beardsley in there too, and possibly some Metropolis and Yellow Submarine references, together with an overt visible quote from the “Pink Elephants on Parade” quantity in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
Altogether, it’s actually one thing. Vibrant, splashy murals of moths and monsters flutter and swoop, whereas forests and flowers bloom across the solid mid-song. Gamers are costumed in up to date Nineteen Twenties clothes, males’s fits and flapper put on, not the royal finery and parrot costumes you normally see on this manufacturing. As a result of the opera is carried out within the flesh whereas the cartoon film performs behind the motion, it lends the impact of a silent movie carried out with a stay band—however there’s a lot extra concerned right here. Not solely should the solid endure the Olympics-grade athletic feat of singing a two-and-half-hour operatic rating, they have to additionally memorize all of the stage marks, projection cues, and choreography that enable them to leap between the illustrated rooftops or seem in sky-high 2D doorways or dance with cartoon tarantulas. For instance: On this present, the character of Papageno, the chook catcher, has a little bit illustrated black cat who follows him round on the display—a superb sidekick for a birdcatcher!—and so the participant should maintain observe of the place the projected kitty is with out truly with the ability to see him, as up near the display as he’s.
To be clear, projected illustrations have been utilized in opera for many years, and even Seattle Opera has made use of them not too long ago, as in 2022’s Tristan and Isolde or 2018’s The Flip of the Screw . We’ve had the expertise. However this present is probably the most x-treme degree of projected illustration that I personally learn about in an opera manufacturing right here in Seattle, and definitely probably the most deluxe and phantasmagorical. The lushness of those illustrations. The element and the density.
In the event you’re not accustomed to the plot of The Magic Flute , it principally goes like this: A prince, Tamino, will get chased by an enormous serpentine monster and is rescued by three mysterious girls. They present him an image of the Queen of the Evening’s daughter, Pamina, who’s scorching and has been kidnapped by an evil black-magic man, Sarastro. Tamino immediately falls in love with Pamina. Armed with an enchanted flute, he enlists his birdcatcher buddy Papageno to assist him move the buck and rescue the princess from Sarastro. When he delivers Pamina to her mother, the Queen, she tries to power Panima to kill Sarastro with a dagger, however Pamina’s like nah, and so they notice her mother truly sucks. Additionally they resolve that Sarastro is cool and chill, so that they ask that man to marry them, which he does. Plus Papageno meets a scorching birdcatcher chick and so they hook up too. In the long run, they defeat the Queen with lightness and logic.
Mozart died a pair months after The Magic Flute ’s 1791 premiere in Vienna, so this work is taken into account his swan tune. The libretto was written by his childhood good friend, the prolific actor-composer Emanuel Schikaneder; it’s styled as a Singspiel, with appreciable spoken dialogue interspersed among the many songs, like a Broadway musical. There’s a possible undercurrent of Freemasonry right here, with the heroes utilizing logic and motive to overcome symbolic Catholicism—the queen is alleged to characterize Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, who hated the shit out of the Freemasons, of which Mozart and Schinkaneder had been members. Nonetheless, on its floor, the story is about in a zany Aquarian fantasy world and is a bunch of foolish nonsense, ripe for cartoonification.
Lush illustrations apart, the solid of gamers is loaded with vocal dynamos, together with coloratura soprano Sharleen Joynt —who was apparently on Season 18 of The Bachelor ??—because the Queen of the Evening, in her fourth position in a Seattle Opera manufacturing. The position of Pamina is traded between sopranos Brandie Sutton and Camille Ortiz, who’re dolled up like Louise Brooks in a black bob and a Peter Pan collar. Atlanta native Victor Robinson—in his Seattle Opera debut, contemporary off a Grammy nomination for his work on the X: The Life and Occasions of Malcolm X album—and veteran Seattle Opera collaborator Duke Kim commerce off on the tenor slot, Prince Tamino, wearing a plain black swimsuit and tie, Pulp Fiction -style. Filipino tenor Rodell Rosel reprises the position because the rapey unhealthy man Monostatos; in Seattle Opera’s 2017 manufacturing, he was in blue physique paint and a swirly mustache, however right here, he’s a creepy ringer for Murnau’s Nosferatu . The just about completely POC solid is refreshing within the historically very white classical universe, by the best way, and the present’s conductor, Christine Brandes, is thrilling to see in an trade the place girls conductors are nonetheless, maddeningly, scarce.
Without delay candy, sunny, and deliciously nefarious, The Magic Flute is such an ideal alternative to provide the animated therapy, particularly since it is so closely sampled in all the films and cartoons we grew up watching. The Queen of the Evening aria scene shall be definitely worth the journey alone—the Queen sings it as an enormous leggy spider, crouched in her internet as she throws crimson cartoon daggers at her daughter, Pamina, per the lyrics. Plus there are dancing anthropomorphic wolves. (Symbolism? In all probability!) Bizarre-ass Wolfgang would positively approve.
