Magic Flute

Opera in two actsLibretto: Emanuel SchikanederpraPremiere: 30.09.1791, ViennaPremiere of this production: 25.11.2012, BerlinPolish premiere of this production: 11.12.2016, TW-ONProduction: Komische Oper, BerlinOriginal German language version with Polish subtitles and audio description

“The distinctive power to move and awaken our deeply hidden creative forces lies in the simplest children's fairy tale, just as the ocean is contained in a drop of water,” writes religious scholar Joseph Campbell in his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The same is true of the story that The Magic Flute tells. The road that Tamino, the main character of this opera, overcomes is both a fairy tale and a metaphor for internal development, the formation of the character's character. The subsequent trials to which Tamino is subjected can be read as tasks performed by each of us. Barry Kosky's staging — reminiscent of the times of silent cinema, enriched with dynamic and humorous projections — dampens these existential questions about love, goodness, honesty. This performance should be written by prescription to all those who have never been to the opera before and to those who consider opera to be a dying and uninteresting genre. I bet Barrie Kosky will charm them!

Watching his The Magic Flute, the viewer may get the impression that this is going back to the beginning of the history of cinema, when places where short films that fit on only one reel were called American movie theaters, and the goal was to provide viewers with simple entertainment. It is at this level that Barrie Kosky's staging idea, with all its sophistication, begins to rhyme with the character of Mozart's Magic Flute — today seen as a masterpiece of elite culture, but written in the form of a cheerful singspiel for the folk Theater auf der Wieden in the suburbs of Vienna, where The audience was driven by an unsophisticated taste.

Mozart wrote The Magic Flute at the behest of the director of this theater, as well as his friend Emanuel Schikaneder, with whom he had already collaborated before, but he did not expect such great success. On September 30, 1791, he conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute from the Harpsichord. The work was enthusiastically received, played throughout October 1791, and some fragments were bisected, as the composer happily reported in letters to his wife Constance. Before the end of the year, The Magic Flute had exceeded one hundred performances in Vienna itself, and then went all over Europe, also arriving at the National Theater in Warsaw, two years after its premiere in Vienna.

“At first glance, the action of singspel seems quite chaotic. We must accept that it is governed by a different kind of logic, which has nothing to do with the world of adults and its rationality, for we are in fairytale land,” writes Guy Wagner, author of Brother Mozart on Masonic themes in Wolfgang Amadeus's music.

For years, the question has been asked what this eruption of pure nonsense that is Schikaneder's libretto is about. As confusing as it may seem, his great advantage was his openness to various interpretations.

In Barrie Kosky's take, it's an incredibly logical and imaginative tale about the fear of loneliness and the fact that no one should be alone. The Warsaw performance is a transfer of a production already famous and shown in many countries from the Komische Oper in Berlin.

Choir and Orchestra of the Great Theatre - National OperasChildren's Choir “Artos” named after Władysław Skoraczewski (roles of Boys/Knaben) extras