“The Magic Flute” at Seattle Opera

“The Magic Flute” at Seattle Opera

I don’t know what I was expecting when I purchased tickets to the Seattle Opera’s production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” (February 22 – March 9, 2025.) I suppose I pictured a tasteful orchestral recital punctuated by a few sopranos, tenors, and baritones frolicking on stage amongst a nominal sprinkling of hand-painted bucolic scenery. Perhaps one of them would pretend to play a wooden flute while being matched, note for note, by the actual flutist in the orchestra pit below. Thus, it was an immense surprise when I found myself confronted on stage by a hallucinogenic animated film in which real people—that is, opera singers—appeared standing now and then in five narrow doorways suspended high on a wall above the stage: one on stage left, one on stage right, and three right smack in the middle.  If one watched closely, the doors periodically pivoted in and out, alternately revealing and then concealing those flesh-and-blood singers. 

During the two-plus hours of run time, I failed to concentrate on the music because my addled brain, exposed to the visual onslaught of a cinematic spectacle, returned again and again to one troubling enigma: what was it that kept the singers who appeared in the cutout door frames from falling twenty feet or more to the stage?  I could see no visible mini-balconies on which they stood, and when the doors pivoted halfway shut, the singers appeared flattened against them, as if squashed by the giant animated spider that personified “The Queen of the Night,” one of the opera’s key personas. The optical illusion was so intense that one had to ask oneself, were the singers who appeared in the doors mere cinematic images, of a piece with the LSD-inspired imagery surrounding them? They were no doubt real, but were they at least strapped to the doors by lap belts? As afraid of heights as I am, I hoped so. After all, one doesn’t normally go to the opera expecting to applaud the antics of Cirque du Soleil.

The overall effect was to render the opera as two-dimensional as a movie screen, and in fact the production was designed by an amazing animation company based in London called “1927,” whose stated goal on its website is to combine animation with live performance. Named for a year at the pinnacle of the Jazz Age, 1927’s animators were so clearly inspired by the height of the silent film era that they even employed melodramatic script to explain to the audience the goings-on on stage, or rather, on screen. For example, Pamina, the opera’s heroine and the daughter of the Queen of the Night, might say, “Tamino, do you still love me?” in a quasi-Gothic font.

Back to the Queen of the Night for a moment: please explain to me why it was that Pamina described her mother as “sweet?” Can we really be expected to believe that she was blind to the fact that her mother’s body consisted of a skeletal carapace supported by the scaffolding of at least four menacing pairs of inverted L-shaped daddy-long-legs? These were narrow, gigantic, and lethal animated legs rendered in black ink with periodic nodes reminiscent of a rose’s thorns; legs whose feet hammered the stage with all the grace and noise of a tap dancer’s shoes. No, this production should not have been called “The Magic Flute.” A more accurate title would have been “The Magic Mushrooms Flute.” The Van Gogh Immersive exhibition that I attended in Los Angeles in 2022 was no less hallucinogenic than this “Flute,” although its optimistic meadows of sunflowers and deep blue starry skies were more colorful than 1927’s production, which relies primarily on blacks, whites and reds—the black of those legs, the white of mama’s bulbous head, and the red of lover’s lips, of beating hearts, of blood.

Much has been made of the Masonic mythology in Emanuel Schikaneder’s original libretto for “The Magic Flute,” and in fact, Mozart belonged to the “Zur Wohltätigkeit” Masonic lodge in Vienna. The Masonic mythology in “Flute” was in turn inspired by ancient Egyptian legends. When, in Act II, Tamino and Pamina are forced by the ostensibly evil Sarastro to endure three purification rituals of Freemason-style initiation before being allowed to reunite and kiss, direct appeals are made to the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris. Isis was a mother goddess, while her husband, Osiris, was god of the dead and of agriculture.

To clue us in on this esoteric analogy, 1927’s animated cues dish up a lot of cyclops eyes and pyramids reminiscent of those on a one-dollar bill. But other audience members may have experienced the same whiplash I did when I saw those Egyptian symbols accompanied by animated clockwork animals—black creatures propelled by visible moving gears inside their bodies, where one would have expected to see hearts and lungs. Did ancient Egyptian mythology emphasize clockwork dogs and giant clockwork human faces?  Of course not. So then why did we see so many of them in Act II? Because, I assume, 1927’s animators meant to connote the Enlightenment religion of Deism, with its concept of “Deus ex Machina,” or the invisible God behind the Clockwork that runs the Universe. These concepts would have been familiar to audiences at “The Magic Flute’s” debut in Vienna in 1791.

That notwithstanding, the counterpoint of 1927’s conflicting animated imagery is as nothing compared with the whiplash of the outlandish story, which is so excessive as to make the lurid plots of so many other operas seem almost ho-hum. In Act I, the Queen of the Night leads us to believe that Pamina has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro. Indeed, she commands the hapless Tamino, whose stage presence as the leading man rarely rises above the dramatic intensity of a cardboard cutout, to rescue her equally insipid daughter. Next up, though, a high priest of Sarastro’s temple informs Tamino that the Queen is the real villain of the piece. He doesn’t deny that Pamina has been delivered unto Sarastro, but he spins it as more of a rescue mission from the Queen’s evil clutches than an abduction. It turns out that Sarastro is some sort of high priest of a quasi-Masonic Society of dark-suited men whose purpose is to bring Beauty, Wisdom, and Light into our dark, fallen world.

While the sartorial choice of these priestly men calls to mind the mysterious dark brethren of the bizarre orgy cult portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” I was at least relieved that someone besides myself had noticed the more disturbing fact that Pamina’s mother is, as I said, a menacing, giant daddy-long-legs with the white, oblong face of an evil extra-terrestrial conqueror. Oh, Sweet Mama! In Act II, she commands Pamina to kill Sarastro, even though we have learned that he is actually a force for Good.

Pleasant little girl that she is, Pamina recoils at the thought of murder, although I wished that committing arachnicide had occurred to her. Poor girl, she has been separated from Tamino on Sarastro’s command, in order to complete the absurd purification trials that Sarastro has dreamed up for both of them. Thus it is no surprise that, when Sarastro orders Tamino to remain silent (trial number one) and to abstain from conversation, food, and women (trial number two), Pamina falls into despair and contemplates suicide due to what she interprets as rejection from her cardboard-cutout lover/hero.

In this hallucinogenic, silent movie of an opera production, the only real flesh-and-blood  human beings are provided by the comic-relief figures of Papageno and Papagena, whose storyline parallels that of the leading man and woman. In his horniness, bonhomie, and gourmandize, Papageno reminded me of that Shakespearean character so beloved by audiences, Falstaff. At the end of the trials Papageno is rewarded by an introduction to the Papagena he dreams of, a flesh-and-blood wench whose tits and ass are of a larger dimension than Pamina’s. Pamina is so thin and nondescript that one could easily picture her, in a different silent movie, tied to a railroad track with a train bearing down on her, rather than standing, as she does, at the top of a craggy animated precipice, ready to jump to her death.

According to Britannica online, “The first performances of ‘The Magic Flute’ likely utilized elaborate stage devices typical of the late 18th century, inspired by Baroque theatre innovations. During this period, theatre productions often featured intricate stage machinery to create spectacular visual effects. This included the use of perspective scenery, moving wings, and machinery for rapid scene changes, as well as devices for supernatural or magical illusions. Theatres were equipped with overhead pulley systems for flying scenery and mechanized stages for moving set pieces. These devices allowed for the creation of dramatic effects that were integral to operas and other theatrical performances of the time.”

In other words, the audience of the original performance in the Vienna of 1791 would have been treated to state-of-the-art theatrical devices that must have seemed no less awe-inspiring then than the animated spectacle that 1927 furnished to Seattle Opera does to us now. If you love groundbreaking animation more than traditional opera settings, in which the singers take center stage, then this production of “Flute” is a must-see. Now it has departed Seattle, but it premiered in Berlin in 2012, and I’m sure it will soon find its way to other cities.