McBurney's Zauberflöte, Met Opera, May 22, 2023

My love of Zauberflöte dates back to 1976, when my parents took this six-year-old kid along to see a screening of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman’s ingenious adaptation of the opera. I was completely smitten. Back home, I immediately coopted my family’s copy of Karl Böhm’s recording of Zauberflöte for my own little record player and it became the defining soundtrack of my childhood.

            The Met’s new presentation of Mozart’s Zauberflöte, directed by Simon McBurney, with set design by Michael Levine and conducted by Nathalie Stutzman, draws from the worlds of postmodern theater, contemporary dance, silent film, vaudeville, and the circus, utilizing kinetic stage platforms, live video projections, sound amplification, manually operated sound design and shadow play. Although quite happy to finally see the house’s former, disastrously faux-playful production replaced, I went to see the new Zauberflöte with some trepidation, fearing a muddled multimedia spectacle.

            The first thing I remarked when I took my seat was that the orchestra pit had been raised, effectively integrating the orchestra to become an extension of the minimalist set, a barren, suspended, square platform. To my great surprise, the house lights were still on and the sputnik chandeliers still down when Maestro Stutzman quite casually started the overture. After a few bars, the chandeliers began to drift upwards and the lights gradually dimmed. What had at first appeared to me like a technical glitch revealed itself to be a highly effective, deceptively simple trick to settle the room and ever so gently lift us to a higher sphere. It’s amazing how one visual gesture can convey a director’s freedom and complete understanding of theatrical magic. The rest of the overture featured live projections of hand-drawn titles that reflected its whimsical elements and sent another strong signal of authoritative competence and artistic sensitivity.  I heaved a delighted sigh of relief: I knew we were in good hands.

            This wildly original, tender and dynamic Zauberflöte magically manages to transform the monstrously large Met Auditorium into an exquisitely intimate theater with a breezy outdoor feel, centering the action onto the kinetic platform that takes up only a third of the vast stage; the proscenium; a walkway set up between the orchestra and the auditorium; and even the first rows of the audience.  Its gentle pacing allows the work to breathe and aligns itself seamlessly with the opera’s exquisite score, its humor and its emotional depth.  I don’t want to spoil it for the reader by enumerating the countless and often surprising details McBurney worked into it but will name a few examples to illustrate why this is one of the most outstanding productions I have ever seen in this house.

            The production cuts a striking balance between whimsical moments that let us in on the magic by breaking the fourth wall, and emotionally charged, very well acted scenes of high drama that solidly stand for themselves. The platform, lifted or lowered at different heights and angles, shows that the artistic team thankfully trusts the audience’s imagination to fill in most of the scenery, minimally and effectively enhanced by live video projection and sound effects created by two artists set up in street-fair style booths that flank the stage. A supporting cast of silent mimes proves that blank pieces of paper, simply folded in two, can perfectly represent a flock of lively birds. One insouciant wink at the theatrical contract of make-believe has Tamino (played by Lawrence BrownLee) and Papageno (played by Thomas Oliemans) coerce members of the orchestra to join them onstage to play the flute and a glockenspiel, the respective magical instruments they had been handed. Significantly, this is taken a step further in Act II when it appears that Bryan Wagorn, the player of the glockenspiel, is arriving late from his coffee break, leaving Papageno to fend for himself in his desperate attempt to call forth his Papagena (a perky Ashley Emerson) with the instrument. The Three Ladies (played with spunky gusto by Alexandria Shiner, Olivia Vote and Tamara Mumford) exhibit a sexual hunger bordering on the burlesque. By contrast, the three scenes with the Queen of the Night exhibit the gravitas of Greek tragedy. This Queen of the Night, a tour de force interpretation by Kathryn Lewek, is reminiscent of another great operatic villain, Klytaemnestra. A real witch on wheels (literally,) she is staggering on the brink of madness, torn between self-pity and rage, and hell-bent on a self-destructive, downward spiral. Lewek highlights every note of this exceedingly difficult role with a very specific emotional wavelength, most notably in the coloratura parts, which are so often done like a vocal show-off rather than a heightened expression of the extreme emotional states of despair or fury. It was both riveting and harrowing and, thankfully, never teetered on the edge of camp.  Erin Morley’s Pamina is a smart, modern-day princess who tries to follow her mother’s murderous orders against her heart but, saved by the adorable Three Boys (Deven Agge, Julian Knopf, and Luka Zylik – who quite convincingly play their parts as haggard old men with rickety walking sticks), becomes the noblest figure in the entire opera by voluntarily shouldering the burden of life-threatening trials alongside her Tamino (and delivering a most elegant, aerial summersault along the way). Papageno, played with selfless abandon by Thomas Oliemans, is a tragicomical, middle-aged outsider who is as desperate to find love as he is oblivious to the bird shit in his hair. He delivers several of the wittiest details of the night, such as when he, facing the auditorium and declaring that there is “no one there,” intonates the iconic opening bars of New York, New York on his pan flute. Monostatos, usually a rather thankless role, is well exploited here by Brentan Ryan, who portrays him as a nerdy, manqué sexual predator with a submissive streak.

            At the end, the two romantic couples are blissfully united and the world has realigned itself in a new, harmonic order. Most notably, McBurney added a deeply moving, innovative detail of graceful redemption of reconciliation by letting Sarastro, sung with warm fatherly gravitas by the towering Stephen Milling, resurrect the fallen Queen of the Night and reintegrating her into civilized society.

            There are people who proudly dismiss Zauberflöte as a quaint fairytale or disdainfully scoff at its handful of sexist or racist snippets (which, as McBurney proves, can very easily be dispensed of without any losses). Even worse to me are those who patronizingly declare the opera to be a cute, low-entry opera for beginners. They must be deaf, dumb and blind: Mozart and Schikaneder’s masterpiece is an ageless, sophisticated, magical tale about the pure power of love, the struggle against darkness, and the commitment to our better selves. It also happens to contain some of Mozart’s most sophisticated musical passages, including the transcendent Overture, the wistful Speaker scene, and the deeply moving prelude to the royal lovers’ final, joint trials.  Like no other composer, Mozart knew how to let the floor give way to the eternity below and around us, letting us float for brief moments in divine suspension, but he never indulges in it for more than a few bars at a time before gently taking us back to earth. These musical moments rarely fail to leave me sobbing with an overpowering sense of emotional release that is beyond logical comprehension. Last night at the Met, the director’s confident, musical and playful touch and care, and the excellent cast lived up to this kind of religious experience, leaving me filled with gratefulness and an inner glow that continues to resonate. The production stands as a prime example for the utmost necessity for any artist to be resolutely playful within their discipline. Why else would one choose a life in the arts, if not to insist on the freedom to be playful, especially within our profession, an interpretative, live art form that literally calls for imaginative solutions? Of course, good playfulness can only flourish on a solid base of knowledge, sensitivity, musicality, craft and technique, out of which real artistic freedom that transgresses any limitations can arise.  Unfortunately, it’s an exceedingly rare thing to witness well done. McBurney’s graceful Zauberflöte, arriving at the Met a long ten years after premiering in Vienna in the very theater where Mozart presented it a mere two months before his tragic, untimely death, does it magnificently. The last two words projected onto the stage’s screen remind us of what truly matters: Beauty + Wisdom.