Abstract
Mozart’s Magic Flute remains an uncontested favourite with audiences. The opera is great fun, but also explores the major themes of human existence – love and solitude, vengeance and the proximity of death, earthly pleasures and the loftiest ideals. It is at once a dreamily beautiful fairy tale, a noble mystery play and a piece of sturdy Viennese suburban theatre.
This season, we shall again be showing our production by Tatjana Gürbaca, which does justice to Mozart’s comedy and the profound dimensions of the mystery play in equal measure. Gürbaca associates the spheres of the Queen of the Night with an earthy, wildly anarchic world, contrasting it with Sarastro’s temple – a realm of clearly defined power structures and bourgeois order. With a great deal of imagination for her setting, Gürbaca has these contrasting worlds collide, combining the sheer fun of theatrical disguise with profoundly melancholic scenes, and showing the female figures as consistently strong women. The very emancipated Queen of the Night rebels against Sarastro’s ossified male society, and Pamina, hungry for life and love, confidently seeks her own path in life. The cast consists of outstanding members of the ensemble: once again, Swiss tenor Mauro Peter will sing Tamino, and Ruben Drole will delight audiences as Papageno. Olga Kulchynska – celebrated last season among other roles as Gretel in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel – will sing Pamina. The Austrian conductor Sascha Goetzel comes from the city in which The Magic Flute was premièred – Vienna.