Apparently, Kenneth Branagh directed a beautiful movie
version of the Magic Flute that came out in 2006. I found this out recently,
because I’d had Bergman’s Magic Flute in my Netflix DVD queue and, through some
technical error on Netflix behalf, it became Branagh’s Magic Flute (and
available for streaming!)
Branagh’s version of the opera is set in WWI—the dragon
pursuing Tamino is chlorine gas, the three ladies are nurses, the Queen of the
Night shows up on a tank and Sarastro is running a refugee camp. It’s
beautiful—as well acted as possible with such a ridiculous libretto and well
sung. But the story is still racist, classist and sexist.
Manastatos is evil just because his skin is black. The queen
and her ladies are evil simply because they’re ladies--not gentlemen. Sarastro has kidnapped
Pamina, the queen’s daughter to save her from her mother. Papageno is cowardly
and fails all his trials because he’s the comic servant. No one points out the
fact that he’s the one who got into Sarastro’s palace and saved Pamina from the
(equally cowardly) Manastatos while Tamino was playing around with the three
spirits.
In act two, as part of the men’s trials Pamina can see
Tamino, but he may not speak to her. This wouldn’t be so bad if someone had told
Pamina about this in the first place. But, as she has not been informed that
this is part of the plan, she runs off to kill herself because Tamino no longer
loves her.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice these things.
There are other plot problems as well.
For example, all the choruses to songs seem to be trite sayings such
as “A man whose spirit is not weak will
weigh his words before he speaks. For some reason the “isms” bother me more
than the trite lyrics*
And in spite of all of these things, I love Mozart’s last
opera. Not just for the music—for the dragon, the birdman, the magic flute and
glockenspiel and the queen of the night. As my dad said when I discussed this
with him recently—“It’s a Star Wars kind of Opera” and I’m a Syfy and Fantasy
kind of girl.
The theatre group my dad was involved with when I was a kid
put on a production of the Magic Flute. I got to be a dancing savage beast. At
the time I loved the fact that I got to watch most of the opera again and again
as much as the fact that I got to appear in it. Am I syfy geek because I saw
the Magic Flute at an impressionable age, or did I love it so because I would
one day be a geek? Who knows? I do remember that even though I was only in 2nd(?) or 3rd
(grade) I noticed the sexism of the piece—Man=good. Woman=Bad.
And, yes, I know that literature and art are the products of
the culture of the time and that 18th century Vienna was probably
not a particularly enlightened place by the standards of 2014. It would also be
wrong to change the story to be less sexist/classist/racist.
So why do we continue to watch this opera? It’s probably
mostly because the music is beautiful but that’s not it entirely. With all its
flaws it’s still a good story—the same way that Star Wars is still a good
story.
*The opera is in German, which I don’t speak. But I’ve seen
several translations and in all of them suffer from this problem so I blame the
librettist Schikaneder the librettist and not the translators.
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