Not-so-Magic Flute

For no particularly obvious reason, we have seen four Magic Flutes in the last couple of years, the latest yesterday at the SFO Opera. My guess is that this is an opera just impossible to screw up completely: there is too much glorious (and accessible) music; at least some of it is bound to come through. In many ways, it is an ideal “first opera” for newbies—easily reworked for kids, and I’ve seen one fetching version with puppets. The only qualification would be that it isn’t quite an “opera” at all—more of a barrel-house frolic with an overlay of transcendence.

We shared our outing yesterday with a gang of relative newbies—three guys with good taste & good ears but not a lot of first-hand opera experience. In a word, I’d describe the experience as “unfortunate.” Not bad, precisely; as I just suggested, I’m not sure Magic Flute can be altogether bad. Anyway, the singing was passable, the clowns got a few laughs, and the staging (more infra) is good fun.

But it lacked viscera: the kind of power and energy that can kick it all into outer space. There are a lot of suspects here, but I’d say the main culprit here was size: the SFO stage proved just too big for the job—it allowed singers to spread out and wander way (from each other, and themselves). The result was no challenge, no engagement, no drama.

Size alone isn’t a necessary disability; the Julie Taymor Met production, on an even bigger stage, somehow seems to rise to the occasion (maybe just because you spend so much time worrying that the set will fall down). Last year’s Santa Fe production (thanks in no small part to Natalie Dessay), kept up the pace even though spread out in front of an entire mountain range. But in SFO, the whole production veered somewhere close to marmorial—perhaps the kind of thing you have to put up with in La Clemenza di Tito, but not what you want from.

I’m left then, with an odd irony. Of all the productions I’ve seen in the last couple of years, maybe the best was that glorified pocket opera I saw earlier this month in Budapest, with the chorus singing from faux audience boxes and grownups doing voice-overs for the three blessed children. Technically it was the least polished, and in terms of raw singing talent probably the weakest. On a tight budget, they even skipped the monster: he lived and died offstage, and thus did not have to draw equity wages. But as the least cluttered and least ambitious of the four, it was the one that most allowed Mozart to show through.

Note re staging: San Francisco is recycling a 15-year-old production, first conceived by the late Peter Hall, with designs by the sometimes cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe. I’m a big Scarfe fan, and he did produce a few lovely touches—e.g., a set of stage animals that are as sweetly funny as anything this side of the original Sesame Street. But I wonder if the staging itself (along with the size of the stage) might have been part of the problem. I’m not enough of a theatre person to pass judgment, but it seemed to me there were a lot of times might have been simply pushing people into the wrong place, as if conspiring to make it harder for them to do their job.