The Magic Flute - Glyndebourne - cinema screening

[Dave2002]

We almost didn’t go, having been put off by some critical reviews. Yes, it was mad. Head chef - Sarastro- but actually some very good singing from him. Pamina was also very good. The music held together, so in the end we enjoyed it.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I generally avoid any opera with self-publicity-seeking producers with their gimmicks. This would appear to be one of them. Fortunately, this doesn't prevent a good music rendering, but may distract some listeners from full appreciation.

[Dave2002]

It should be possible to view this online for a few more days at ... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opera/wh...-glyndebourne/
- with luck that might even be a freebie.

Sarastro was sung by Brindley Sherratt, and Pamina by Sofia Fomina - both very good.

The music is almost indestructible - though I'm sure some could manage it. Forum readers might shy away from the presenter - KD - though maybe she doesn't feature in the streamed version. The extra film at the cinema was quite interesting, giving more insight into how the back drops were made. I'm not sure if that will be included in the streaming "package". I really didn't get how the "updating" with suffregettes etc. by the somewhat opinionated Doucet et Barbe was supposed to make any sense, but some of it was clever, and perhaps no more pointless than the original plot.

[kernelbogey]

[...]
I really didn't get how the "updating" with suffregettes etc. by the somewhat opinionated Doucet et Barbe was supposed to make any sense, but some of it was clever, and perhaps no more pointless than the original plot.

I saw this last night with a friend. What made it soar above the silliness of Doucet et Barbe's production was the music itself, the singing (universally excellent) and the OAE under Ryan Wigglesworth. It was quite entertaining to watch, but the intrusiveness, and absurdity, of setting the whole action in a hotel owned by the Queen of the Night and with Sarastro as head chef became increasingly wearing, descending into outright farce in the last stages of the second act. Monsieurs D & B evidently took exception to the sexism in this two hundred year old work and decided that the hotel staff should apparently assist the Queen of the Night in taking up the Suffragette movement.

(My attention wandered into a fantasy of the guests in the dining room waiting for their dinner. 'Sorry Sir, Mr Sarastro and his brigade are doing their Isis and Osiris routine now; won't be long'.)

Unfortunately the projector at the Everyman Cinema where we were watching decided to compound the farce by separating the soundtrack from the visuals for the last 10-15 minutes, making a nonsense of the otherwise apparently entertaining action in the duet between Papagena and Papageno - multiple infant puppets appearing, to the appreciation of the Glyndebourne audience. However, Sarastro donning a 'Votes for Women' sash at the end was, er, the end for me.

Memorable will be Caroline Wettergreen an outstanding Queen of the Night (voice and acting), Bjorn Burger [umlaut o and u] as Papageno, and Mozart's music.

As Dave says, perhaps no more pointless a production than the original, though the point B&D seem to miss is that these characters dreamed up by Mozart and Schikaneder are archetypes, and to give them specific modern roles and personalities is otiose.

[Master Jacques]

Singing this of all operas in German is the biggest no-no for me. The production is mostly harmless, though poorly directed when it comes to the performers, who look stranded - all the effort's gone into the visual jokes rather than the characters. The high-paying audience lapped up the inanity of it in a brainless manner, alas.

But few of the singers do anything at all with a text which is neither their first language, nor the language of the audience. It is time to stop this silly, "original language" fetish once and for all: we're not wanting to listen to the thing as if it were a recording, we're wanting to experience a lyric drama. I suppose a lot of the more snobbish canary-fanciers would rather be spared the knowledge of what the characters are saying, or alternatively what's happening on stage (if they prefer to have their eyes glued to the wretched surtitles!)

An embarrassing mess all round. It got me cross.

[Master Jacques]

As Dave says, perhaps no more pointless a production than the original, though the point B&D seem to miss is that these characters dreamed up by Mozart and Schikaneder are archetypes, and to give them specific modern roles and personalities is otiose.

How do you know the original production, with its masonic codes, was "pointless"? I don't suppose its creators saw it that way.

You're right about the archetypes, certainly: but how do you suggest an archetype should be dressed? Surely, unless an archetype can sustain modern dress and "modern roles", it's not a universal archetype at all, is it? As the opera was set in a fantasy version of ancient Egypt, anything goes - it's not how you dress it, which all comes from the imagination, but what you do with the drama (and this show did very little worthwhile, I tend to agree).

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

How do you know the original production, with its masonic codes, was "pointless"? I don't suppose its creators saw it that way.

IIRC (and it's over 10 years since I read this - I'll check ) according to Brigid Brophy's research in Mozart the Dramatist, Schickaneder started working on the libretto after receiving a commission for a work in which the Queen of the Night was the goody, and Sarastro the baddy - but the original commissioner withdrew, and was replaced mid-work by someone who wanted the vices versaed. (Which explains a lot about the plot. Really - if it wasn't for Mozart's Music, we wouldn't give the work a second thought. It could be done in Swahili [with apologies to all fluent Swahili speakers] for all the good hearing the words does you.)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well - I oversimplified details, but the overall idea of the "change of plan" seems correct. The whole topic is discussed between pages 131 -167 of Brophy's book (which includes details pointing out that the Queen is "die sternflammenden Königen" - "the star-enflamed Queen" - in Act 1, and doesn't become "the Queen of the Night" until Act 2: "the blazing star" was [?/is?] a Masonic symbol of Enlightenment. Contemporary reports also reveal that 3 months before the Flute opened (as Schickaneder was writing the libretto), a rival company staged Muller's opera Kaspar die Fagottist, öder die Zauberzyther, which was based on the same fairy tale that he was working with for the Flute.

Brophy's research isn't as conclusive as I'd remembered - as she makes absolutely clear - but it struck me as so logical an "explanation" of the plot's "change of mind" and contradictions that it's obviously become engrained in my memory as "factual".

[Dave2002]

Singing this of all operas in German is the biggest no-no for me.

Have I missed something? Didn't Mozart and Schikaneder write it in German? Maybe it's just any opera in German that you don't like.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Have I missed something? Didn't Mozart and Schikaneder write it in German? Maybe it's just any opera in German that you don't like.

Well - MJ does make clear that it's a personal issue (the "for me" bit). Not one I agree with - I'm very much an "original language fetishist" - but it can create oddities in singspiels: using the original German for the singing, but a translation of the spoken bits would be my choice - but that's bizarre, isn't it!

[Master Jacques]

Well - MJ does make clear that it's a personal issue (the "for me" bit). Not one I agree with - I'm very much an "original language fetishist" - but it can create oddities in singspiels: using the original German for the singing, but a translation of the spoken bits would be my choice - but that's bizarre, isn't it!

Thank you for reinforcing my "for me" rider! Of course I don't dislike "any opera in German", Dave2002: if I was a German, in Germany, of course I'd want to hear this opera that way - just as I'd want to hear Peter Grimes in German, too. I'm very happy to hear opera in their original languages on record, provided I have a libretto and translation close to hand.

This fetish (sorry for repeating that!) for "original language productions" (always with those awful surtitles which drive a wedge between audience and drama) is a fashion that's crept in during the last few years, along with the growth of champagne-country-house opera and all the other status symbol stuff which gets in the way of "opera as drama", which is the only sort worth spending all that money on.

Puccini saw it that way too, by the way: he only agreed to come and conduct the British premiere of La bohème (at the Theatre Royal, Manchester) on condition that (a) he was allowed to supervise the costumes and sets; and (b) that his opera was performed in English. He wanted audiences to hear it in their own language, rather than indulge the false idea that it was somehow "better" in Italian.

ferneyhoughgeliebte, I have had some experience of bilingual productions of operetta and other genres using spoken dialogue as well as sung numbers - they never work, as the audience is disorientated and alienated by suddenly losing the connection between stage and performers, once the subtitles and foreign words get turned on.

What's our difficulty with having The Magic Flute in English, for an English audience? We may feel that operatic drama is silly, but not everyone feels it ought to be, let alone buried in a language few listening can understand. Mozart, like Puccini, would have thought performing it in Sussex, in German, was simply ludicrous. Even Wagner tried to insist that Tannhäuser should be performed in London, in English - though of course Covent Garden overruled him and did it ... in Italian!!

[Master Jacques]

And if I could - very briefly - anticipate one obvious objection to the above. Yes, there were Italian opera companies in most of the major cities of Europe during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Remember that these were the province of the aristocracy, who were keen to keep their operatic pleasure exclusive, so that the common people couldn't understand it. Much the same is true, I'm afraid, today.

(And Handel's Italian operas in London were always presented with the "house lights" firmly up, and with everyone clutching word books with translations - much more like the way we sit and listen to a CD recording with libretto). That's how da capo worked: first time round, you followed the text to get what was going on, and how the composer was setting it; second time round, you dropped the book and admired the singers' ornamentations.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

What's our difficulty with having The Magic Flute in English, for an English audience?

Well, for me there are three difficulties:

1) The rhythms, accents, and vowel sounds (which the composer had in mind when they wrote the Music) are either altered to accommodate the new translation - or the new translation uses a sort of English that itself needs "translating".
2) Singers can't be heard - diction is lost beyond the first three rows - so it might as well be in the original language (or, indeed, Swahili). This, of course, isn't a problem exclusive to foreign language works - even in English-language operas, singers either adopt a sort-of Noel Coward-ish diction, with risible results in works like Peter Grimes, or the individual words get lost in the vocal line over the orchestra. That's why there have to be surtitles projected even in operas sung in English.
3) It is unfair on performers to have to learn a role in a translation that will only be used for that individual production - all British companies using an English translation get somebody to tinker with a new translation in an attempt to get closer to the vowel sounds and rhythms of the original language, whilst still making some sort of sense in English. British singers - and, indeed, foreign visitors, have to learn a new translation every time they take place in a new production of the same work. This wastes rehearsal time - time that could have been spent on more useful (and, for me, more Musically important) matters.

The folly of English translation was aptly demonstrated - for me - in Opera North's otherwise splendid Kat'a Kabanova last year: the programme book had an excellent essay on how carefully Janacek had matched the rhythms and contours of the local dialect version of Czech in his vocal lines. What we heard was a translation that was read quite adequately on the page as English, but when sung sounded very nearly - but not quite - totally unlike any language spoken on planet Earth.

("Clever clogs" comments aside - my main objection is 1) above: I've come mainly for the Music - I get the story, and the libretto in the weeks before the production i'm going to see [it's all part of the build-up of excitement in preparation for the production]: I want to hear the vocal Music as close to how the composer imagined the rhythms, vowels, and accents when s/he wrote the Music as it can possibly be.)

[Master Jacques]

Well, for me there are three difficulties:

1) The rhythms, accents, and vowel sounds (which the composer had in mind when they wrote the Music) are either altered to accommodate the new translation - or the new translation uses a sort of English that itself needs "translating".
2) Singers can't be heard - diction is lost beyond the first three rows - so it might as well be in the original language (or, indeed, Swahili). This, of course, isn't a problem exclusive to foreign language works - even in English-language operas, singers either adopt a sort-of Noel Coward-ish diction, with risible results in works like Peter Grimes, or the individual words get lost in the vocal line over the orchestra. That's why there have to be surtitles projected even in operas sung in English.
3) It is unfair on performers to have to learn a role in a translation that will only be used for that individual production - all British companies using an English translation get somebody to tinker with a new translation in an attempt to get closer to the vowel sounds and rhythms of the original language, whilst still making some sort of sense in English. British singers - and, indeed, foreign visitors, have to learn a new translation every time they take place in a new production of the same work. This wastes rehearsal time - time that could have been spent on more useful (and, for me, more Musically important) matters.

The folly of English translation was aptly demonstrated - for me - in Opera North's otherwise splendid Kat'a Kabanova last year: the programme book had an excellent essay on how carefully Janacek had matched the rhythms and contours of the local dialect version of Czech in his vocal lines. What we heard was a translation that was read quite adequately on the page as English, but when sung sounded very nearly - but not quite - totally unlike any language spoken on planet Earth.

("Clever clogs" comments aside - my main objection is 1) above: I've come mainly for the Music - I get the story, and the libretto in the weeks before the production i'm going to see [it's all part of the build-up of excitement in preparation for the production]: I want to hear the vocal Music as close to how the composer imagined the rhythms, vowels, and accents when s/he wrote the Music as it can possibly be.)

Thank you. I'm tempted to leave it at that, but here are some points for thought:

(1) So you don't believe in translating novels either? Because exactly the same difficulties and strictures - which are real - apply. Don't you feel as much is "lost in translation" by reading Tolstoy in English, as by listening to Mussorgsky in English? I do. But the gains of having them both in translation far, far outweigh these (comparatively minor) losses. A good translator's job is to make everything sound as natural, unforced and inevitable as the original. That ideal is quite often achieved, in my experience. Auden, Dent, Porter, Pountney.... and a host of others. Some - rare - translations are better than the originals, as in literature. I'd cite Auden's Magic Flute for starters. It's all about what you're used to: I learnt Marriage of Figaro from Dent, and in Italian it sounds wrong to me!

(2) If singers can't be heard, that's not the fault of the translation but of the hall/conductor/director/individual singer. I don't recognise the picture you paint of "tinkering" from my own experience, or from any others I've come across. New translations evolve, of course, and that's good, not bad.

(3) Lazy singers might not like to learn new translations (that's doubtless part of the problem) but as they learn their roles before starting rehearsals, the time they have to spend on it takes nothing away from the musical or theatrical preparation process. The great thing about a translation - as opposed to the often fustian originals - is that new ones can be done for each generation. Quite a few Germans in the 1970s were asked whether they were envious of ENO getting to use Andrew Porter's Ring text, as opposed to the impossibly antiquated original - and they were!

(4) Again, there are bad translations of Janacek, I quite agree - but the best are natural and unforced. Again, I would rather hear Vixen in (say) Hammond's brilliant English than struggle to learn Czech in order to appreciate Janacek's wonderful word-setting. Have you seen Felsenstein's German version? It reaches parts that German singers doing it in Czech simply could not reach. They still can't, as the recent Frankfurt CD set (starring the excellent Louise Alder) demonstrates.

My own (Glyndebourne) experience of Vixen was salutary. I looked at the audience. Hardly anyone was looking at the stage. Nearly everyone was watching the surtitles above it. They were laughing at the jokes before they were uttered. The Russian and English principal singers did nothing with the Czech. It was a dessicated experience, of little point.

Ultimately people go to the opera for all sorts of reasons. They go to dress up and eat and drink, they go for the frocks and sets, they go for the music (and often close their eyes), they go for the social status. Some go for the drama - which is mainly why the composers wrote the things in the first place - and those people do not relish seeing it sold short and diluted, by being forced to watch singers performing in languages they don't understand, to audiences who don't understand it either (and apparently don't want to).

[Dave2002]

Scottish Opera's Magic Flute is in English - and is brilliant, and very funny. Not all opera done in English (albeit with a slightly different accent ) is anything like as good as that.