Mozart Makes Magic at the Met

Next time you find yourself duped by the forces of evil, rest assured that deliverance is nigh. If you simply believe in brotherhood and love, you will enter into a priestly order of divine beings by passing through a series of odd Masonic rituals that enable you to confound the conspirators aligned against you. And, if you play your cards right, you might even manage to fall passionately in love and pick up a nifty flute with animal-charming powers along the way.

Such is the message—and the basic plot—of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Set to the libretto of Mozart’s fellow Freemason Emanuel Schikaneder, it offers such an idealistic view of human nature and interpersonal relationships that it seems in danger of being laughed to scorn by modern audiences. But on the March 17 closing night performance of its recent Die Zauberflöte production, New York’s Metropolitan Opera demonstrated just how powerful and convincing Mozart’s final opera really is. In the hands of the Met’s skillful musicians, directors and set designers, Die Zauberflöte gave its audience a journey into a magic world where good triumphs over evil, night yields to dawning day and people can attain perfection.

The entrance of the audience into this magical world was beautifully accentuated by set and costume designer David Hockney’s whimsical approach. Typically, the Met’s sensational stage effects create a realism that puts Hollywood to shame, but Hockney understood that Die Zauberflöte is not about realism, and his vision transported the packed house from the banalities of real life into a divine fantasy realm. The stage, adorned with simple painted backdrops, was awash in pastels, and the singers wore brightly colored costumes (sky blue and gold for Sarastro and his priests, green and red for Tamino). Even the moments of melodrama weren’t allowed to take themselves seriously. The dangerous monster that nearly kills the protagonist during the opera’s opening scene was more Puff the Magic Dragon than fire-spitting beast as it hopped humorously about on two legs.

The overall effect was something like watching a three-hour cartoon, which only made the impact of Die Zauberflöte’s idealistic vision more powerful. This opera is, after all, a fairy tale—albeit a bizarre one full of Masonic rituals and Egyptian gods. And like all fairy tales, Die Zauberflöte seeks to teach us a moral. Its particular lesson—the transformative power of brotherhood and love—would lose much of its force if we forgot, even for a minute, that what we are watching is markedly not the world in which we live. Fortunately, the Met’s production didn’t allow this to happen. All the juvenile charm served to crystallize the distinction between our reality and a magic land of ideals that comes spookily close to heaven on earth.

And the music was indeed heavenly. Particularly striking were Michael Schade as Tamino and Hei-Kyung Hong as Pamina. Both possess remarkably clear and lyrical voices whose timbres match seamlessly. Their seemingly identical musical conceptions created the well-blended texture and flexible phrasing that are so crucial for the underlying drama, in which Tamino and Pamina overcome the ordeals of initiation into Sarastro’s order and progress towards enlightenment only through cooperation and mutual support. Their journey was admirably accompanied by the Met orchestra, which played with impeccable precision and clarity.

This is not to say that the performance was unflawed. Conductor Sebastian Weigle’s brisk tempi proved a mixed blessing. While the overture exuded an almost electric energy, other numbers seemed slightly rushed. Tamino and Pamina’s Act II duet could have luxuriated longer in its loving lyricism, and Weigle’s charge into part two of the Queen of the Night’s big first act aria was a bit too fast for soprano Mary Dunleavy, resulting in an awkward adjustment as her coloratura fireworks begin. Nor was Dunleavy vocally perfect. In her Act II showstopper she seemed so obsessed with hitting those high Fs that the other notes of her arpeggios were just a bit sharp. Yet she nevertheless awed the audience and enchanted Tamino. The literal pyrotechnic flashes that accompany her appearance, and her equally pyrotechnic vocal part, were sufficiently sensational to seduce us. So while the music wasn’t quite perfect, it was miraculously close.

Such near-perfection is representative of Die Zauberflöte itself. Although it contains what is arguably Mozart’s most mature and varied music, as a piece of drama it doesn’t always attain the same sublimity. There is, for example, no explanation of why the evil Queen of the Night has at her disposal three virtuous wonder-boys who help Tamino thwart the Queen’s plans after leading him to Sarastro’s temple. Nor is it obvious why Sarastro, that paragon of priestly piety, employs as his prison warden an old lecher bent on ravishing Pamina.

But these holes in the plot are things to think about the day after the performance. During our three hours in Sarastro’s magic kingdom, they do not occur to us. The charm of the characters, the glory of the music and the loftiness of the ideal they extol simply overwhelm even the most cynical listeners. This is especially so at the Met, where even an average night means a breathtaking performance. When the great gold curtain falls over the Lincoln Center stage, the audience leaves knowing they witnessed a masterpiece. And—for one night, at least—we believe the words of Sarastro’s priests. Their world of “virtue joined to justice” where “earth is indeed heaven and mortal men are like gods” is, fleetingly, our own.

Die zauberflöte

written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

conducted by Sebastian Weigle

New York Metropolitan Opera