Magic Flutes

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Casting problems also dog the period-instrument versions from Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner. Proving his anti-Romantic point, Norrington conducts the fastest Flute on disc. Some numbers verge on the garbled. Gardiner, never one to underplay an accent, is less doctrinaire, though the faster music can still feel harried. He has a delectable Pamina in Christiane Oelze, whose ‘Ach ich fühl’s’, phrased in long, grieving spans, achingly distils the girl’s loneliness and desolation. For mingled simplicity and vocal beauty few duos match Oelze and Gerald Finley in ‘Bei Männern’. But Cyndia Sieden is a lightweight, disengaged Queen (her coloratura evokes a mechanical doll on speed), Harry Peeters a feeble Sarastro.

The scene starts with an orchestra piece – The March of the Priests. If you’re familiar with the Canadian National Anthem … That’s it.

Anon. (25 October 2014). " Die Zauberflöte" (PDF) (Program notes). Metropolitan Opera. p.41. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-11-25 . Retrieved 2015-11-24.

But the Flute is a siren song that no opera company chief can resist for long, so Kosky had no choice but to relent. It wasn’t easy for him. The problem is to do with what The Magic Flute actually is. For Kosky, it’s not an opera. “If you sat in the first season of the Flute in Vienna in 1791, you’d have realised that it’s end-of-the-pier meets panto meets Mozart’s profound music meets vaudeville. It’s structured like a revue, and it’s got nothing to do with Così fan tutte or Don Giovanni or the Da Ponte operas. The piece exists only half through Mozart’s music, the rest is Schikaneder’s words and his theatre. And that’s what’s genius about it. That’s why if you do a ‘concept’ production, it’s a catastrophe. It’s best to treat it like a surreal fairy story and let the deeper resonances just wander through.” Kosky’s epiphany about the piece led him to his collaborators: the animation and production team of London-based company 1927. “It was instant love: I knew the piece very well and they didn’t know it at all. They’d never even been to the opera. It was a perfect marriage.” He and his family lived well, though, and at his death, he wasn’t forgotten by his fellow Viennese , as is sometimes described. He still was one of the most famous musicians and composers in Vienna . Pavol Bresik as Tamino in Robert Carsen’s Rattle-conducted Baden-Baden production ( photography: Andrea Kremper)

An Opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The overture, composed after the other parts of the opera were complete, begins with a solemn three-chord sequence from the brass, associated with the Priests of the Temple of Wisdom. (The number three is highly significant in Freemasonry and recurs as the number of ladies, boys and temples.) [36] It transitions in an adagio to a lively fugue [37] in E-flat major. Halfway through, there is a false ending. After another three-chord brass sequence, the fugue resumes in E-flat minor, returning to E-flat major. The three child-spirits are often portrayed by young boy singers but also sometimes by mature women, particularly in studio recordings