End of the line virtual reality? Walter Sutcliffe, director of the Bühnen-Halle, presents a cleverly thought-out ‘Magic Flute’ that poses the big question of wisdom and enlightenment while playing with stereotypes with relish. Fabrice Bollon conducts the Staatskapelle and provides the appropriate airy, breathing and pulsating music.
In the beginning is the word. For the new production of ‘The Magic Flute’ at the Halle Opera, Dorota Karolczak has brought a huge book onto the stage, which acts as a central hub, sometimes open, sometimes closed, and throws out Tamino, Papageno and the other actors. It is the ‘Theory of Wisdom’, which shows the knowing masonic eye in the centre of the triangle on its pages. After all, Mozart’s work cannot be reduced to a children’s fairytale opera, but is also a profound Masonic piece. By the time Tamino sings ‘The wisdom of these boys is eternally engraved in my heart’, the central theme has been established.
It is a thread that raises, develops and continues the question of knowledge and wisdom. At the beginning, an Amazon, a knight and a legionnaire have killed the snake, and anti-hero Tamino faints. The three ladies (Anke Berndt, Yulia Skolik and Lena Herrmann as a beautifully harmonising trio) roast their prey by the fire.
A dragon is also a bird, and so Papageno can sing his famous aria as a colourfully costumed Native American with mohawk feathers on his head. This is also quite deliberately a play on cultural appropriation, which is very apt thanks to the over-exaggerated, sometimes grotesque portrayal and exaggeration of all the characters.
Lars Conrad plays and sings the role of Papageno in a wonderfully natural way. With a warmly flowing, dark timbre and clear expression, this is extremely convincing. Chulhyun Kim‘s Tamino, with his bright, ringing tenor and occasionally indifferent intonation, cannot match this.
Ki-Hyun Park‘s Sarastro could be Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati conspiracy movement himself. The dystopia begins with his entrance: with a warm, flowing, very clear bass, he sets Papageno and Tamino down. Doubts about knowledge were already there beforehand, as the book only contains the umpteenth repetition of a phrase: ‘The doctrine of wisdom says that…’. Sarastro tears up the book.
After the interval, the letters have become numbers. The virtual era of (illusory) truths has dawned, and the now perforated stage book is fed by cables and supported by a halogen scaffold. In the film ‘Matrix’, taking a red pill stands for the truth, while the blue variety makes you forget. Today, that film is also the foundation of crude conspiracy theorists, and so it fits perfectly when the Sarastro from the AI world gives his people the red conspiracy pill. Tamino has not made up his mind, because he wears one red and one blue shoe. Things turn out badly for Monostatos (Robert Sellier with a crystal-clear, dark-coloured tenor): like Michael Jackson once did, he desperately tries to get rid of his dark skin colour by painting his face white. Nevertheless, the Sarastro clique brutally beats him up.
The virtual world of The Magic Flute is spinning faster and faster, nothing works without mobile phones and AI glasses, and Tamino and Pamina (Franziska Krötenheerdt with a glowing, flooding soprano) dive completely into the artificial cloud art world on the net. Papageno can choose his cloned girlie Papagena (Rebecca Ibe with an expressive, beautiful-voiced soprano) via his mobile phone in the swipe Tinder world. The production now shows the abysses of the brave new network world in a delightfully tongue-in-cheek and charming way.
Only the three boys (Philine Götz, Linda Rabisch, Maya Hatoum) resist and try to snatch the smartphones from the actors. Real or fake? Is this virtual reality? In the end, the three in front of the curtain hold up the Magic Flute as a glimmer of hope. Long live art.
The choirs, under the direction of Frank Flade, scored with their powerful harmonic compactness, while the Staatskapelle followed its GMD attentively, virilely and with beautiful clarity and conciseness.
The discovery of the premiere evening, however, was Vanessa Waldhart as the Queen of the Night, who, with her finely lyrical interpretation, did not play the avenging angel at all, but made us sit up and take notice with her nuanced and absolutely precise colouratura and spherical intonation. A great performance!
Lots of applause at the end for everyone involved.