Live-action:

Animated:

Gorgeous nonsense. The Magic Flute (Mozart; Met ‘special holiday encore’/cast)

This is a re-broadcast of an abridged performance broadcast through Met HD in December 2006, which apparently was the first ever Met HD broadcast. It demonstrates the improvements in Met HD broadcasts over the years, as it is distinctly lower-resolution than current Met HD broadcasts, and lacks all the featurettes that enliven the intermissions. The abridgement of The Magic Flute appears relatively minimal, dropping a few slow scenes such as Pamina alone in a garden, but nothing major; the real change is that it’s an English adaptation instead of using the original German. I had not been expecting that, and I am not sure I appreciate it either, because they dropped all the closed-captions—making it harder for me to understand than the German would’ve been.

Nathan Gunn’s Papageno bird-catcher character is a particular highlight as he athletically crawls or cavorts around the stage, and he seems to be having by far the most fun of anyone on stage. The stage settings and costumes lean heavily into surrealism: the Queen of the Night’s female servants have heads mounted a meter above their blacked-out faces, controlled by sticks, for no particular reason other than it looks cool & they can, and one almost expects the cheerfully-malignant vulture character Monostatos, played by quite a chubby actor, to draw eyes on his chest and a mouth on his belly and make fat jokes. The music is excellent, of course, and the Queen of the Night’s aria is justly famous—one can scarcely believe that any human singer is capable of hitting such high notes, and so loudly, for so long.

Its flaw is that, aside from Papageno & Monostatos, the characters are uninteresting and the plot is bizarrely schematic and completely reliant on lazy deus ex machina & narrative convenience. Further, it can’t quite seem to make up its mind if it’s supposed to be a farce, or ultimately a serious meaningful drama. I charitably assumed while watching that perhaps the opera had been brutally cut down in the adaptation process.

It is easy to see why people reach for Masonic interpretations: surely all these heavy-handed symbols and out-of-the-blue twists and cardboard characters mean it must be some sort of contemporary mystery play-like allegory, and there is an esoteric interpretation that renders it a satisfying artistic work as opposed to a series of musical set pieces strung together by a threadbare excuse for a plot? But unless Wikipedia greatly misleads me, no, it’s as absurd as it looks. So Mozart’s The Magic Flute is the Neon Genesis Evangelion of operas—it sounds even better than it looks, throws around a lot of portentous symbolism, but doesn’t make sense so people keep resorting to a Western occult tradition to make it make sense…

I don’t think I will want to watch The Magic Flute again the way I do other operas like Carmen.