It is something of a commonplace to say that when we listen to music we are “taken out of ourselves,” or “transported into another world”, something which, in opera, is often taken literally. Music was associated with magic from its very beginnings. Add words and drama, and you have the power to summon up worlds that are not our own, but which can illuminate and enrich it in ways that can be startling. This week we look at phantasmagorias and fairytales – works that deal with the magical, the mythical and the fantastic, sometimes with profoundly unsettling results.

Handel: Alcina

Magic is associated with sexual desire in Alcina, Handel’s great examination of the nature of pleasure and transience. Its heroine, at once sorceress and seductress, uses her charms to create an erotic island paradise to which she lures men. Handel views her world as morally fallible, but also mourns the eventual passing of its beauty in music of devastating poignancy. The only upload, rather surprisingly, features the controversial modern-dress 1999 Stuttgart production by Jossi Weiler and Sergio Morabito. It’s worth putting up with its occasional eccentricities. The narrative, which can sometimes seem confusing, is admirably clear, and the erotic complexities are nicely teased out. Images that suggest a sexual liberalism that pushes at the boundaries of gender are gradually replaced by something altogether more conservative and constricting.

There are fine performances from Catherine Naglestad and Helene Schneidermann as Alcina and Bradamante, though the star of the show is Alice Coote, on better form here than in a recent London performance of the same work. Rolf Romei’s Oronte looks better than he sounds, but is utterly compelling.

Mozart: Die Zauberflöte

Die Zauberflöte is a thing of paradoxes. Opera’s ultimate fairytale-cum-adventure story, it was written as a piece of popular theatre in a form closer to pantomime than any other genre, though the deployment of Enlightenment and masonic imagery in the text adds layers of complexity to the narrative. The score itself is surely one of the greatest ever composed, and for centuries, the opera was widely perceived as one of the noblest utterances of the human spirit. More recently, however, there has been a growing acknowledgement that the piece is limited by value systems that are ultimately white and male, and despite its moral demands for “truth, even though it be a crime”, the opera is sexist and racist, issues which many recent productions have ducked by rewriting the text.

Jonathan Miller’s 2000 Zurich Opera staging sticks with Emanuel Schickaneder’s original libretto and carefully considers the work in terms of the intellectual traditions, whether religious, rationalist or arcane, that were prevalent around the time of the premiere in 1791. So Matti Salminen’s Sarastro presides over a male-dominated commune of Rousseau-ist philosophers, while the Queen of the Night (Elena Mosuc), frequently identified with the Catholic church, first appears on the arm of her confessor at the head of a religious procession. Volker Vogel’s Monostatos, meanwhile, is a disaffected black military man, dressed to look like Toussaint Louverture whose revolution on Haiti also took place in 1791. The great performances here come from Piotr Beczala’s beautifully sung Tamino and Anton Scharinger’s very funny, Viennese-accented Papageno. Franz Welser-Möst conducts. As an alternative, try Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 Swedish-language version, for many the greatest film of an opera ever made.

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen - Die Walküre

Surveying Wagner’s Ring cycle on YouTube is a bit like trying to negotiate a minefield. There’s a lot of material out there, but things are bitty, with plenty of extracts, but few complete operas, and even fewer complete cycles with all four operas. The upload above is the Walküre from the 1991/92 Daniel Barenboim/Harry Kupfer Bayreuth cycle, one of the finest of all productions of the work, and probably still unsurpassed in terms of what we possess on video. Kupfer’s direction is rooted in psychological and emotional detail, though he also uses the vast depth of the Festspielhaus stage to suggest a literal resonance of the narrative into infinity.

Watch Siegmund and Sieglinde’s terrified flight from Hunding from 2:00:27 onwards to get a sense of the physicality, emotional directness and compassion that characterises the whole thing. Then settle in for the full four hours to see John Tomlinson’s staggering Wotan (a really charismatic war god, for once), Poul Elming and Nadine Secunde’s anguished yet deeply sexual Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Anne Evans’s deeply touching Brünnhilde. In terms of music theatre, Wagner doesn’t get much better than this. You can watch Rheingold from the same cycle in two parts – here and here – but at the time of writing, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung sadly aren’t available complete on YouTube. You can also watch the Götterdämmerung from Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making post-industrialist 1979 cycle here; though, as with Kupfer’s cycle, we don’t at present have an upload of all four operas.

From the vast amount of historical material out there, have a look at some rare footage of Kirsten Flagstad, probably the greatest Wagner soprano of them all, as Brünnhilde. And here is Wieland Wagner rehearsing Leonie Rysanek and James King in Die Walküre.

Humperdinck: Hänsel und Gretel

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Hansel and Gretel is arguably the greatest of all fairytale operas, and something of a seasonal family favourite since its first performance in Weimar on 23 December 1893. It casts its spell with great subtlety: Humperdinck deploys Wagnerian methodology of considerable complexity to conjure up the sense of enchantment and threat that combine to create its impact. A number of recent stagings have treated it as closer to nightmare than fairytale, though this 2006 Dresden Semperoper by Katharina Thalbach – better known in the UK as an actress rather than a director – negotiates a fine balance between social conscience and genuine wonder.

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The grinding poverty in which Antigone Papoulkas’s Hansel and Anna Gabler’s Gretel are brought up is forcefully done. But the enchanted forest is a place of genuine magic, in which Hansel and Gretel are kept company by Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Red Riding Hood and her wolf. The great Iris Vermillion is among the most recent of divas to throw caution to the winds and play the Witch; initially glamorous, but be warned there’s an alarming transformation - a bit like Anjelica Huston in The Witches when the slap comes off. The dashing Michael Hofstetter is in the pit.

Strauss: Die Frau Ohne Schatten

This broadcast from Swedish television captures the remarkable occasion in 1978 when the great dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson returned to Stockholm to sing the Dyer’s Wife in a revival of Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Die Frau Ohne Schatten. The role, which Nilsson sang for the first time when the production was new in 1975, became her calling card in the later years of her career, and on this occasion vast numbers of people from all over Europe congregated at the opera house to queue for returns. She was tremendous form for her home crowd, acting beautifully and singing with that engulfing, oceanic sound that made her unique. But it’s by no means a one-woman show. There’s a fine Empress, admirably fragile and vulnerable, from Siv Wennberg, and a superb Nurse from former Bayreuth Wagner mezzo Barbro Ericson. Berislav Klobucar conducts. The opera itself was still something of an unknown quantity in the 1970s. Though Lehnhof does a big production number on it, he treats it very much as an oriental fable, with the narrative admirably clear, but ducking the opera’s awkward elision of essential humanity not only with altruism but with reproduction, which nowadays seems uncomfortable. The introductory and interval material is included; don’t fast-forward through it all, since some of it is in English, and Lehnhoff, in interview, is fascinating.