THE MAGIC FLUTE AT LOWELL HOUSE
As recorded passages from the Magic Flute play in the background to the Leverett House performance, the real thing takes place in the Lowell dinning hall. This year's Lowell House Opera production aims, according to the program notes, to uncover "the plethora of possibilities in the opera...without trying to create a singular impression," while simultaneously offering "a dawn to dusk retrospective of Western civilization."
It fails in the second task, while succeeding (all too well) in the first. And, although the great music of the opera lends credit to any interpretation, this one, perhaps because of an excessive (and incomprehensible) desire to avoid one single, coherent reading of the admittedly open-ended opera, falls flat.
The music makes the evenings a worthwhile proposition. In spite of dreadful limitations, Teresa Marrin, the music director, has managed to come up with a compelling reading of Mozart's score. Her tempi are brisk throughout (occasionally creating problems for some of the singers), and betray a wager on the comic rather than the mystical. The playing is controlled, and some roughness in the brass is more than forgivable given the splendid delivery of the all-important flute part.
Unfortunately, the rest of the production does not meet the uniformly high standard of the accompaniment. The major roles are well sung, but, apart from Paul Lincoln's effectively goofy Papageno, the characters do not reveal the depth of psychological development implicit in Mozart's music. Oliver Worthington brings to the role of Tamino a lovely voice but little more, and Ling Ning Xu's Sarastro is dignified but unprepossessing. Worst of all, the Queen of the Night (Maria Tegzes), who has a voice that stands up to the test of her role's legendary difficulties, completely fails to command the first majestic and then terrifyingly desperate presence that the music indicates. She slouches across the stage in a posture of submission, and her character doesn't provide the necessary evil counterweight to Sarastro's embodiment of good.
These discrete flaws are tied together by the fundamental problem in this production: the lack of a coherent vision of just what the opera is about. It is evident in the translation of Schikaneder's libretto, which, in cutting huge chunks of dialogue, makes the opera's story seen hurried and almost incomprehensible (even if the original, with its sudden plot reversal, is itself somewhat incoherent). The transitions are sudden, and such delicious scenes as the first act duet of Pamina and Papageno are deflated by a lack of preparation. The half-hearted characterization of the singers conspires with the awkwardness of the adapted libretto to empty the opera of power, and not even the sight gags and Papageno's antics can revivify it.
The set most clearly indicates the confusion that the program notes try to mask as a sophisticated eclecticism. The deconstructionist hodgepodge of arched and beams is neither especially effective nor lovely to look at. Furthermore, the disquietingly oblique references to "the architecture of I.M. Pei, the collections at the Louvre, two thousand years of Western religious tradition, Ptolomy's [sic] astrological maps, the sculpture of Noguchi..." disperse the attention and cannot make up for the producers' failure to face the opera and its performance tradition, making an informed (never mind inspired) reading.
This production, as it aims to provide a new interpretation, unwittingly raises our initial question: can we, chic, savvy post-moderns that we are, that still take Mozart seriously? And the answer that stares this disappointed reviewer in the face: not if we waffle about the expansiveness of his music without stopping to think what it is about. The message that is built into the Magic Flute concerns love, human and divine, fraternal and romantic. The element of farce that is undeniably present in the opera does not obliterate or even minimally detract from the power of this message. It is a message, though, that is only implicit, and that needs to be interpreted--which is what the Lowell House Opera production of the Magic Flute has failed to do.
A good, and an inspiring counter-example is John Eliot Gardiner's recording of La Clemenza di Tito (to be released April 21 on Deutsche Grammophon Archiv). Here, a truly innovative approach (using period instruments) combines with a genuine reappraisal of the opera as a whole, and the result is nothing less than a revelation. Mozart worked on both Tito and the Magic Flute at the same time during the summer of 1791 and at great speed. Yet, while the music of the Magic Flute has met with universal praise almost since its premiere, that of Tito has been disparaged as the product of a sick and exhausted man, and as a hastily-written, half-hearted effort. Eliot Gardiner's recording gives the lie to this bit of received wisdom, by showing how full of life the piece truly is.
Tito is Mozart's second and last opera seria, and shows a master grappling with a heavily codified form and using it to his compositional advantage. Although the form had traditionally excluded ensemble singing, Mozart's greatest successes had been with the extensive ensembles in his great comic operas. Accordingly, he came up with a compromise that went beyond even his ensemble writing for these operas: the finale to the first act, which combines an on-stage ensemble and an antiphonal chorus.
As the scene ends, the ensemble sings piano, and the chorus interrupts with anguished cries, forte. The orchestral accompaniment bolsters the two, and mediates between the frenzied terror of the citizens and the personal, funereal sadness and remorse of the principals--the consequences on respectively the public and private levels of Titus' murder.
All of this is brilliantly rendered by Eliot Gardiner and friends. Furthermore, the principals negotiate the passages of secco recitative with a rare sense for the shape that can be given to each phrase. Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Tito does an admirable job with a role that too easily becomes lifeless and statuesque. Anne Sofie von Otter is a brilliant Sesto, while Julia Varady's Vitellia is truly arresting, combining sensuality with vengeful duplicity. The orchestral playing, through the ministrations of the English Baroque Soloists, is tightly controlled and thoughtful, and the obbligato parts are spectacular. This is a truly visionary interpretation of a work that badly needed one.
To those who will protest that a comparison between a low-budget student production and a high-powered professional recording is invidious, I can only respond that budget and musical talent place no limitation on imaginative and thoughtful interpretation. The difference between the two productions is that Eliot Gardiner, like Peter Shaffer's Salieri, sees a transcendent quality, an absoluteness, in Mozart's music, rather than a mine-field of ambiguities, ripe for exploitation with just the right deconstructive impulse. Granted, ambiguity and equivocation are inevitable as long as we communicate solely in words. But when music is joined to them, absolute, inexpressible meaning is possible. I hope we can still hear it.