Five hundred years ago, artists and thinkers of the Renaissance revived and examined the works of the distant Greco-Roman past with a respect that bespoke not only of their sensitivity to its beauty and wealth of feeling, but also of their gratitude that these things had somehow managed to survive centuries of neglect and intellectual ruin. Naturally, we in 2019 know better than all that now. Because if the inexplicable and seemingly unstoppable triumph of regieoper—illustrated hereabouts last Saturday by the revival of Barrie Kosky’s and Suzanne Andrade’s production of The Magic Flute for Los Angeles Opera—has taught us anything, it’s that the accumulation of toils, struggles, labors, joys, and sorrows that comprise our past exists today only for us enlightened moderns to laugh and sneer at.
Mozart and Schikaneder’s singspiel—like a lot of products of the German late 18th century; those twilight hours of the Enlightenment, before the night of Napoleon and Metternich cast the whole of it in darkness—is simultaneously silly and profound: A dashing prince and a girl-crazy guy in a bird suit are commanded by the king of some vaguely Egyptian land to submit themselves to a host of trials in order to gain the wisdom to love. Thus from these unlikely roots does one of Mozart’s most human creations spring forth. But instead of allowing this Rasselas-meets-Soupy Sales spectacle to stand on its own strange feet, Kosky and Andrade straightjacketed it into an ill-fitting vision of confused F. W. Murnau and Tim Burton tropes which latched parasitically off the score, feeding off of it zombie-like.
Masking their evident embarrassment and chagrin at the sincerity, loveliness, and even weirdness of Mozart and Schikaneder’s original vision, Kosky’s and Andrade’s hypercapitalist irony also drew with sheepish self-consciousness a veil over the comparative emptiness of their own. Los Angeles Opera’s previous production by Gerald Scarfe, a vivid technicolor riot which rendered The Magic Flute into an enchanting, living children’s storybook was sorely missed.
The musical performance itself was better, if not without its own significant problems.
Music Director James Conlon lead a performance of admirable moderation and proportion, even if the score’s earthy bounciness came off a little flat-footed at times. Bogdan Volkov, as the sweet-toned and expressive Tamino, and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, the imposing and fatherly Sarastro whose voice radiated like a column of pure light that cut through the production’s ironic fog were by far the best of a mixed singing cast. Zuzana Marková’s Pamina was good, if a tad matronly and wooly; while the unidiomatic grit in Theo Hoffman’s Papageno was more suggestive of Baron Scarpia than bumbling bird-wrangler. Miscast altogether as Queen of the Night was So Young Park, whose vocal resources were audibly strained to its limits by her challenging role. Unable to cope with the crystalline etching of Mozart’s coloratura writing, she settled for blurring through it, and only managed to punctuate its top Fs by sheer dint of screaming.
In her prefatory notes for the production, Andrade tellingly described the device she contrived to replace the score’s dialogues—silent film-style intertitles accompanied by stylistically anachronistic music by Mozart, along with an inexplicable bit of the infamous “Oriental riff” for another dash of (bad) taste—as a “gimmick.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word as: “Something invented especially for the purpose of attracting attention and that has no other purpose or value.” I couldn’t have described this production of The Magic Flute better myself.