Author : Jos Hermans
First the good news. The opera theaters are crowded again. As recently as June, three months after the Russian Federation's special military operation in Ukraine had suddenly made the so-called "pandemic" disappear, the theaters in Berlin were still only half or three-quarters full. Today we are finding that the art lover has returned to his stable. In Frankfurt, too, the opera is packed, although 10% of those present seem incurably addicted to their totem, the face mask.
Steven Sloane and the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester revive the score of Die Zauberflöte in a small setting with about fifty musicians. Sloane swears by sedate tempos without the music ever becoming tensionless. He focuses on color and detail, everything sounds cozily familiar, and I imagine it could have sounded like this at the Vienna premiere in 1791. Not so, the sterile puppet show that director Ted Huffman has made of it. In his direction of the actors, he is guided solely by psychological character drawing. The fairy tale with its childlike magic and Masonic symbolism is completely ignored.
Sarastro represents an elitist, repressive mentality: if you follow all the rules, behave humbly and remain silent, you will eventually be rewarded for it. Tamino is like a sponge and quickly adopts strange patterns of thought and behavior. The Queen of the Night suffers from post-traumatic stress and cultivates a victim role with a certain talent for manipulation. The best character, Huffman believes, is Pamina because she is committed to truth and honesty in all her interactions. In doing so, Huffman shows all walks of life that we have come to know better over the past three years. Standing in front of the mirror he holds up to us, you might wonder if you have been a Pamina or a follower of Sarastro.
Andrew Lieberman devised a revolving stage with rooms and corridors, a kind of labyrinth that seems to represent Tamino's confusion and quest. All the walls are white; the only set piece is a table lamp used throughout the play as a shining beacon. The three ladies in cocktail dresses, armed with a bottle of champagne, bending over Tamino's sleeping body, are slightly tipsy but nevertheless occasionally arrive at fine harmonies. Papageno appears in a canary yellow suit but he doesn't have to throw in a lot of comedian talent in this production. Tamino shows little commitment after his “coup de foudre” (“Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd schön”). That improves somewhat in front of the temple.
The worst part of this production is that all dialogues echo from loudspeakers, voiced by the same female voice (Heidi Ecks), in an old-fashioned patronizing narrative tone. At such moments, the scene is repeatedly caught in a freeze frame which makes the whole play seem fragmented. It is painful to witness. Only once does the director succeed in exploiting the possibilities of the revolving stage: when Papageno wriggles through the chambers of the labyrinth to reinforce his erotic-spiritual distress during "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen." It's an idea that always works flawlessly, making it the scenic highlight of the evening. But of course, if every director starts doing it, it becomes very predictable again.
"Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann, reichen an die Gottheit an" is the actual core theme in this staging. What that might mean we see from an elderly couple (Micha B. Rudolph and Corinna Schnabel). He is demented and she so patiently comes to his aid that it will leave no one cold who has ever had to deal with dementia. And the music seems to give his memory a boost. As Tamino and Pamina go through the trials, the elderly lady looks for his slippers and takes care of his medicine.
Only at the end does it become clear that the play is to be seen as a flashback of the elderly couple, Tamino and Pamina that is, and the binding lyrics as a kind of inner monologues taking place in their memory. We only get to hear the final chorus offstage. While the rays of the sun drive away the night, the elderly couple sink their teeth into a hearty breakfast.
There is mediocre singing in Frankfurt, at least in the second lineup I experienced, staffed with in-house forces and young performers from the Opera Studio. Kudaibergen Abildin sounds a bit rough and too uncommitted in his acting. Karolina Bengtsson cannot turn Pamina's "Ach, ich fuhl's" into the highlight the piece begs for at that moment. Danylo Matviienko's baritone sounds very thin at times as Papageno. Kihwan Sim as Sarastro performs best in Sarastro's Hallenaria, in "O Isis und Osiris" you can hear that he is Asian with a different relationship to the prosody of the German text. Aleksandra Olczyk jumps lavishly into the Queen of the Night's coloratura which she masters quite well, the rest of her two arias she sometimes delivers rather glaringly.
2022 was a year of utterly useless stagings at major opera houses. Projecting new insights, far-fetched or otherwise, onto old masterpieces is perfectly legitimate but when it is done at the expense of the sensuousness of the original work then it is utterly pointless and even detrimental to the future of the opera genre. Someone needs to explain that to our current directors. If the intendants don't do it, who will ?