Die Zauberflöte / Il Flauto Magico

Singspiel in two acts, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  • Libretto Emanuel Schikaneder with Karl Ludwig Giesecke
  • Conductor Michele Mariotti
  • Director Luigi De Angelis
  • Choir and Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna
  • Chorus Master Andrea Faidutti
  • Scenery and Lighting :Luigi De Angelis and Nicola Fagnani
  • Dramaturgy and Costumes Chiara Lagani
  • Italian text version Chiara Lagani and Greta Benini
  • Assistant Director Gianni Marras
  • Assistant Director Giorgina Pilozzi
  • Assistant to the Director Greta Benini
  • Assistant to Costumes Paola Crespi
  • Video ZAPRUDERfilmmakersgroup
  • Scenographic Design Nicola Fagnani
  • Mask Construction Federico Capitani
  • Chorus Master of Children’s Voices Alhambra Superchi
  • Relations Elena Di Gioia
  • A production of Teatro Comunale di Bologna
  • In collaboration with Fanny & Alexander

Year : 2015

CHARACTERS

  • Sarastro: Mika Kares
  • Tamino: Paolo Fanale
  • The Speaker: Andrea Patucelli
  • First Priest: Simone Casolari, Andrea Patucelli
  • Second Priest: Cristiano Olivieri
  • Third Priest: Carlo Alberto Brunelli
  • The Queen of the Night: Christina Poulitsi / Sonia Ciani (May 23 and 24)
  •  Pamina: Maria Grazia Schiavo
  • First Lady: Diletta Rizzo Marin
  • Second Lady: Diana Mian
  • Third Lady: Bettina Ranch
  • First Boy: Marco Conti
  • Second Boy: Pietro Bolognini
  • Third Boy: Susanna Boninsegni
  • Papagena: Anna Corvino
  • Papageno: Nicola Ulivieri
  • Monostatos: Gianluca Floris
  • First Armored Man: Cristiano Olivieri
  • Second Armored Man: Luca Gallo
  • In video: Emma Minzi and Alfonso Cafaro

DAS KÖNIGREICH RÜCKEN / DIRECTOR’S NOTES

Tradition is the guardian of the fire, not the cult of ashes.– Gustav Mahler

The Magic Flute contains a moral that I like:that love is the most important thing among human beings, and the most important in the world.– Ingmar Bergman

As we traveled from place to place, my brother created his own kingdom, which he calledthe Kingdom of the Back [Das Königreich Rücken].This kingdom and its inhabitants were equipped with everythingthat could make them good and happy children.He was the King of this land, and this idea graduallytook such deep root in him that he pushed it so farthat our servant, who could draw a little,had to make a map of it, while hedictated the names of the cities, market squares, and towns.– Maria Anna Mozart

We imagine two children, Fanny and Alexander, in an unspecified Eden, in an undefined time.They guard a small puppet theater. They are the guardians of the gaze. They live in a parallel Kingdom, of which they are the rulers. They are two, perhaps brother and sister? We are not told. They point us towards a possibility, a path. Their toy theater is a faithful reproduction of an opera theater.They have used monochrome fabrics to construct a stylized set and cut out figures, inventing a fairy tale. We imagine ourselves as spectators, contained within the hall of that theater, subscribers or visitors who want to attend the opera. We are part of the same world on which the two children look out, from their Kingdom of the back. We are contained within their gaze. They appear to us as giants. They have given us special glasses, through which we can almost touch them and feel them even closer, as if they wanted to involve each of us, one at a time, pointing out that the story we are witnessing concerns us deeply. From the outside, they open and close curtains, wings, diaphragms, constantly altering the stage space, following the music’s flow, inserting fantastic, illusory objects within it.As in every proper Eden, there is a serpent-dragon that appears at the beginning. For our two children, our two demiurge deities who determine the entire course of the opera, it is a toy with which to play very seriously. It is a threat, but without it, nothing could happen in the story they are building. It is perhaps the trigger of everything. The serpent-dragon points us to the path of ambiguity, the sinusoidal curve, the impossibility of staying on a straight line, duality, the path of yielding. It points us to an opportunity, the doubt inherent in every question. There is no vital act of creation without at least one initial question.

The Magic Flute is the opera of ambiguity, where there are always at least two paths to follow, where light is partially contained within the night and vice versa, where nothing can ever be fully unfolded, clarified, but everything belongs to the sinuous, fluid kingdom of music. To the magic of music. It is no coincidence that the double serpent wraps around the staff of Hermes-Mercury. And mercury is a liquid metal, yielding to the forms in which it is contained. Hermes is the deity of crossroads, of the intermediarity of planes, of variables, who frequents both high and low, often bringing messages from one side to the other, between wakefulness and sleep, connecting seemingly distant worlds.In The Magic Flute, there are many alchemical figures, interconnected, mirror-like pairs, symmetrical, complementary: Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, Tamino and Papageno, Tamino and Pamina, Papageno and Papagena, Monostatos and Papageno, Pamina and Papageno. None of these figures ever belong solely to one aspect of the world, but in each is embedded the doubt of belonging to its opposite or its mirror image. Sarastro would be a figure of light, solar, but at the beginning of the story of The Magic Flute, he is presented to us as evil; likewise, the Queen of the Night, at first, the doubt of her goodness as a suffering mother is insinuated. Monostatos is black, drawn to the whiteness of Pamina… Papageno mirrors Pamina because his love is blind, pure, they both fall in love without having seen the object of their desire… Papageno and Tamino show us two parallel paths to undertake an initiatory journey from different angles…The Magic Flute seems to tell us that there is no act of inner growth without an alchemical process, one that first concerns oneself and the relationship with the other, and that one cannot reach the sublimation of the albedo without having gone through the nigredo, one cannot know love without the fluid power of music. The Magic Flute, seen through the eyes of two children, offers us an opportunity: to follow the trajectories of the mercurial, childlike gaze to the end. And that becoming an adult must be determined by a correct balance between the forces of the puer and those of the senex, never forgetting the sources from which they spring and that define them.

In 1974, Ingmar Bergman produced a Magic Flute for Swedish television, set in a magnificent baroque puppet theater. It is no coincidence that the Superintendent of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Nicola Sani, asked the Fanny & Alexander company to stage The Magic Flute as their first production. For this, we wanted to honor the lineage of our name from the Swedish master, paying tribute to him. The fantastic machines of the Drottningholm theater, the possibility to change scenes very quickly from one setting to another with a system of multiplications, are at the origin of our scenographic project, starting with a synthesis of the forms and colors of the various settings (green for the forest, blue/black for the night, red for Sarastro’s palace), activating a changing, fantastical mechanism. Many of the scenic dynamics are inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s direction, with frequent references to the gestures and choreographies used in his film. His insistence on the unfolding of the story outside the wings, in a meta-theatrical dimension, is the basis for transposing Sarastro’s palace setting into the very theater in which the opera is being performed, so Sarastro in our vision becomes the Artist Creator, the Superintendent of the theater, and his priests are the theater staff themselves, dressed like his masks, wearing the same costumes as the choir for the occasion.The costumes are based on an essential, childlike, and fantastical principle: it is as if they had been imagined and designed by those two initial children, whose vigilant gaze accompanies and perhaps contains the entire story. Their character has something elementary, stylized, and childlike: the prince naturally wears a blue cloak; the princess has girl’s clothes in pink and light blue, in her, the blue of the night and the red of the fiery palace are softened; Monostatos is a brigand with a cloak; Papageno and Papagena are green like their forest, with only symbolic attributes of feathers and leaves; Sarastro’s cloak is crimson. The color of the costumes, mostly painted and decorated, alludes to the ideal design of a child painting the fairy tale figures in their album, stylized figures wrapped in a sense of pure mystery. And it is precisely in that remote, secret, and invisible place that the ghost of every theme, every character, every vision, perhaps every note of this Flute is kept: it is in that place, perhaps, that our video overture opens, a remote and invisible place where a double gaze has its roots, a double childlike face, a double of our own gaze, of artists and spectators.The magnificent overture of Bergman’s film, at the center of which are the faces of the spectators listening in rapt attention, is animated through the use of the anaglyph technique (3D), a technique that highlights the role of the active witness of each individual spectator, opening the experience to a childbirth of imagination, the authentic possibility of a creative act of imagination.

– Luigi De Angelis

NOTE TO THE TEXT

For the Italian version of the text, we wanted to account for the nuances and linguistic tone imprinted by Ingmar Bergman in his 1974 Swedish film Trollflöten, which this production of The Magic Flute pays homage to. The key to Bergman’s Flute, as the director states, is love: “the most important thing between human beings, and the most important thing in the world. To emphasize this aspect, I had to make it explicit: this is one of the few changes I made to the original libretto.” We sought to highlight this substantial guiding principle by adopting Bergman’s free translation of the original text – at least in certain parts – which is carried through in the complexity of the main characters. This principle is fully expressed in Sarastro’s words (love as the culmination of wisdom and the beauty of art) and in the transformation of the two lovers who journey through the horrors of the night realm, playing their flute with their eyes closed, until they reach the light.

The entrance into this version of The Magic Flute, as it was in Bergman’s version, is through the eyes of two children: the theater, with all its alchemical enchantments, the opera itself, and us, the spectators—everything and everyone is enveloped by it and perhaps generated by it. Therefore, additional figures of children will be introduced, beyond the three spirits who guide the way as indicated in the original libretto. You will encounter two foundational children, Fanny and Alexander (who greet you in the overture), as well as many other children, their emissaries and accomplices, who populate the stage in various roles: slaves, priests, companions on the journey and adventures of the characters in this fairy tale. In the Italian version of the libretto, they will be referred to as “children,” or “Slaves/children,” or “Priests/children.” They produce shifts in meaning and perspective, reminding us that what is happening may only be their dream, and we are part of it. “I move with the speed of seconds… I always live in my dream and from time to time I return to real life,” Bergman said of himself. This statement is quite Mozartean in nature, and resembles Tamino’s initial words after escaping the terrible dragon: “Where am I? Is this a dream or reality?”

The characters in this puppet-play are simple, emblematic figures with two dimensions. They love and hate suddenly; here, the villains fall, the good triumph, the princess is imprisoned, and the prince is beautiful and brave. Yet the extreme grace of their musical incarnation gives them unexpected depth, the purity typical of what is alive and human. And so, in the world of living puppets, the child’s world and the adult’s world coexist, intertwined in the complexity of human passions. Pamina is the sweet maiden, but she is also the one who crosses fire and death; Sarastro is not a rigid figure: his stature is hieratic, but he embraces the loving tenderness of a father and the playfulness with the children, the primary members of his community; the wicked Queen is primarily a woman, and what we read in her is exasperated and dark sorrow, icy violence, but also seductive sensuality; Monostato is as dark as his love and his soul, making Pamina tremble; even Papagena, the herald of life and spring, has an arcane, mysterious, and enigmatic appearance: an old woman’s face, a girl’s body, escorted by children. The linguistic rendering in Italian will clearly reflect the color and depth of these figures, sometimes liberally, in search of a sense of complexity that moves the dual essence of each character. Bergman does not hesitate to warm the tone of adjectives, neutralizing the rhetoric of certain formulas to find a rhythm and special harmony in the enchantment of his dream.

In the libretto, we chose to present the classical German version, accompanied by the original captions, alongside a freer, Bergman-inspired version, leaving the spectator to compare and reflect on the parallel senses.

Final note: in this edition of The Magic Flute, Sarastro’s choral-community represents the people of the theater staff, the masks: their interventions come from the audience, the stage, the entire theater. Sarastro is surrounded by children, the theater’s masks (priests, slaves, and attendants), and the community of spectators, who are, after all, actors in their own right, more or less consciously, in a story all dedicated to the magic of art and music and the power of love. The love and beauty of art is also reflected in some of the most moving passages of the libretto, such as the famous duet between Papageno and Pamina, which has a Lucretius-like quality, and the imposing finale of the chorus in which beauty and wisdom are completely and finally fused with the image of Love (“Love has won, and crowns beauty and wisdom”).

Chiara Lagani

ph. Rocco Casaluci