San Francisco Classical Voice

Seeing The Magic Flute live is always an intriguing experience because of the way part of the audience reinterprets Mozart's sometimes-troubling opera. This was the case when San Francisco's traditionalist production reappeared on Friday night at the War Memorial Opera House in a solidly sung but dramatically unfocused performance.

Since The Magic Flute is a popular work for children and opera novices and hence standard holiday-season fare, productions play up the fairytale and carnival elements of the work at the expense of interpreting the characters and their relationships. In this context, audiences understandably prefer the stories of Papageno and Pamina over that of Prince Tamino's journey to Enlightenment, though Mozart's magnificent music for Sarastro and his priests maintains some balance between the opera's conflicting parts.

Perhaps buoyed by the season, Friday night's audience took to Papageno and made him the star of the show. Symbol of humanity's basic urges and desires, he can easily be misidentified as the common man. Of course, he has the advantage of being able to break the fourth wall (such as it is in this very presentational opera) and talk directly to us. At various times, this production's bird-man (Anton Scharinger) offered to share a meal with the prompter and made anachronistic comments about the San Francisco tourist trade and Napa Valley vintages.

In the second act aria "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen," Papageno calls out for someone to stop him from hanging himself. This time the audience responded. "Don't do it," shouted a young man from the auditorium, who, having gotten laughter and applause for his timely interjection, reversed himself a moment later. It almost seems beside the point to record that Scharinger's singing was quite pleasing as well. The ovation he received at the end of the night was based on the personal warmth that he exuded.

Modern audiences also identify with Pamina, because she shows herself to be sympathetic and with a range of human emotions. Mary Mills sometimes overplayed the character, lapsing into operatic indicating gestures at some points. You rarely had the feeling that "love guides me," as she sings in the second act. However, she sang with firm tone throughout and gave a full-blooded account of the soprano touchstone "Ach ich fühl's." Elsewhere, she joined Scharinger for a touching rendition of "Bei Männer welche Liebe," a more engaging number than anything Pamina sings with Tamino.

As the Prince, Roberto Saccà turned out to be a good actor, and his idiomatic German diction gave his dialog scenes some crackle. He is a well-trained singer with musical instincts and a voice that is good enough without being exceptionally beautiful. But Tamino remained a closed book in this performance.

The implied hierarchy in The Magic Flute was thus inverted a little bit. That was to be expected, given that much of Sarastro's and the priests' philosophizing drew the expected snickers and suppressed giggles. But Papageno's takeover is also the result of ignoring the main dramatic ideas in the libretto. Sarastro's brotherhood sings some of the most sublime music Mozart ever wrote. But since no production I've ever seen fully explains the conflict between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night (because her explanation of it to Pamina is always cut), that story is reduced in John Copley's production to a bare dramatic contrast between light and shadow, illuminated by David Hockney's famous designs.

The dark, fantastic colors of the Queen and her surroundings are opposed by the pastels of the temple and its grounds. The ungoverned shapes of a natural landscape are replaced by architectural precision and straight lines. And the hieroglyphs that adorn the priests' robes (symbolizing writing, i.e., reason) have no parallel in the Queen's realm.

Even though the Queen's challenge to Sarastro is doomed from the start, she can still best him musically if she brings fire and passion to her two show-stopping arias. Yelda Kodalli didn't have sufficient color or depth of tone in her lower registers to do that, and she barely coped with the role's vertiginous coloratura, going rhythmically slack in the process. She is not a strong stage presence, an impression that is no doubt enhanced by the poor stage direction in her scenes. She also appeared to fix her eye on the conductor a little too often.

In the role of the Queen's adversary, Manfred Hemm was a dignified, if not overly charismatic, Sarastro. His bass voice, reasonably resonant, descended to the lowest register with ease and naturalness.

One of the great pleasures of this revival is the uniform excellence of the supporting cast, many of them Adler Fellows. From the well-matched, vibrant portrayals of the Three Ladies, by Twyla Robinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Catherine Cook, to Scott Wilde's fine Speaker, to Matthew Lord's obstreperous Monostatos, the well-tuned singing of the Three Boys (Michael Bannett, Brian Jolly, Ryan Irwin), and even the three Slaves (Daniel Harper, Colby Roberts, and Jim Meyer), the production benefited from numerous gifted singers. As Papagena, Suzanne Ramo again displayed excellent comic timing to go with a lovely lyric voice. The chorus sang well, especially the men in the "Isis und Osiris" prayer. Donald Runnicles led a swift performance from the orchestra pit.

(Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph D in musicology from UC Berkeley, specializing in opera, and is a lecturer for the San Francisco Opera.)

©2000 Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved