(sung in English, as The Magic Flute)
The Coliseum
Tamino – Ben Johnson
First Lady – Eleanor Dennis
Second Lady – Clare Presland
Third Lady – Rosie Aldridge
Papageno – Roland Wood
Queen of the Night – Cornelia
Götz
Monostatos – Brian Galliford
Pamina – Devon Guthrie
Three Boys – Alessio D’Andrea,
Finlay A’Court, Alex Karlsson
Speaker – Steven Page
Sarastro – James Creswell
First Priest, First Armoured
Man – Anthony Gregory
Second Priest, Second
Armoured Man – Robert Winslade Anderson
Papagena – Mary Bevan
Simon McBurney (director)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Josie Daxter (movement)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Gareth Fry (sound designs)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Gergely Madaras (conductor)
I seem to be in a minority in
not remotely regretting the passing of Nicholas Hytner’s ENO production of The Magic Flute. Though others loved it,
when first, rather late in the day, I saw it, I found it ‘more
West End than Masonic’, and was still less thrilled upon a second
viewing. For ENO, in a co-production with the Dutch Opera, the
International Festival of Lyric Art, Aix-en-Provence, and in collaboration with
Complicité, to present something new from Simon McBurney was therefore most
welcome. At first, things seemed quite promising. The emphasis upon
theatricality and showing its workings is certainly not out of place in such a
work, even if the use of video – for instance, in writing ‘The Magic Flute’ on
a screen during the Overture – often seems unnecessary. The presence on either
side of the stage of sound booths, in which one witnesses the making – or in
some cases, I think, not actually the making – of various sound ‘effects’, some
more welcome than others, offers the prospect of an interrogation of Complicité’s
brand of theatricality. Unfortunately, little more issues from such intriguing
possibilities. We seem more often than not to be in the world of Wagner’s
celebrated accusation against Meyerbeer: effect without cause. What initially,
and indeed for a good part of the first act, seems refreshing, for instance the
presence of actors with paper birds sometimes to surround Papageno, soon palls.
More fundamentally, despite
the undoubted technical ingenuity on display, theatricality seems to serve as a
substitute for, rather than a means to express, any idea of what the work might
actually be about, or be held to be about. With such a host of possibilities,
which might be presented, questioned, even rejected, not even to ask the
question in the first place leaves behind a sense of lack of fulfilment, rather
as if one had eaten an initially striking yet ultimately un-nutritious meal. I am not entirely convinced that Furtwängler
was right to argue against viewing the work as a brother to Parsifal, although I can understand why he
did; it is a point of view worth taking seriously in any case. However, I
should rather a production and performance that took The Magic Flute too seriously, should that even be possible, than
one that did not take it seriously enough. That need not, should not, preclude
magic, humour, wonder; however, as the Leipzig Gewandhaus has reminded us since
1781, ‘Res severa verum gaudium’. Instead we have yet again the tedious and at the
very least borderline offensive depiction of a ‘Northern’ accent for Papageno
as intrinsically amusing.
Gergely Madaras, making his
operatic debut, often took the music too fast, yet at least he did not fall
into many ‘authenticke’ traps, bar that annoying, increasingly prevalent, trait
of double-dotting in the Overture. The effect of excessive speed tended to be a
little inconsequential rather than hard-driven, such as we have had to endure
from ENO’s Music Director in his ill-advised forays into Classical repertoire. There
were also peculiar instances of scaling back the number of strings – already meagre,
with nine first violins down to just two double basses. Perhaps most serious of
all, gravity was lacking; surely the practice of any number of great
conductors, such as Furtwängler, Böhm, Klemperer, and Colin Davis, ought to
have been suggestive here. That said, there was a sense, when it was not rushed,
of delight in the music. Perhaps a greater sense of what is at stake will come
with greater experience.
Ben Johnson made a very good
impression as Tamino: his acting committed and his singing generally stylish.
As his beloved, Devon Guthrie was competent, but little more than that. Alas,
Cornelia Götz, as her mother, was rather less than that, boasting neither
ferocity nor sparkle. (Quite why she was in a wheelchair, I have no idea.)
James Creswell lacked sonorous dignity as Sarastro, though he was certainly not
helped by the staging. Brian Galliford’s Monostatos was more a theatrical than
a musical assumption, but on those terms made its mark. (I assume, given
McBurney’s remarks concerning The Tempest,
that the strange visual portrayal must have been intended as a Caliban
equivalent. It was not perhaps, a bad idea to replace the problematical Moorish
associations with Shakespeare’s ‘salvage and deformed slave’, though that again
is hardly without its problems for a modern audience; yet again, it was
difficult to discern any fundamental dramatic point being made.) Roland
Wood’s Papageno was sadly lacking in charm, though again that may have been
partly to be ascribed to the production; for some unfathomable reason, his
appearance bore at least a hint of the post-Jimmy Savile. The Three Ladies were a good bunch, musically and theatrically. Otherwise, it was left to Mary
Bevan to offer with her veritably sparkling Papagena, however briefly, the only
real vocal complement to Johnson.
The increasingly common
usage, ‘Three Spirits’, was used for what used to be the standard English, ‘Three
Boys’: odd, given that girls’ voices were used. In any case, the boys, despite
their weird portrayal as skeletal old men – again, for no reason I could
discern – sang well. More seriously, the programme described the Two Armoured
Men as ‘Armed Men’: a common mistake, though the German is perfectly clear, and
the meaning is quite different. A strange piece on ‘Mozart and Maths’ by Marcus
du Sautoy seemingly labours under the delusion that Mozart wrote his own
libretti. (Yes, of course he would suggest sometimes considerable revisions,
but that is another matter.) On the positive side, there is much to provoke one
to thought, far more than in the production, in a splendid short essay by Anna
Picard on the role of women.
