Seattle Opera Weblog: A Magical Storybook

How did you give you the concept of staging The Magic
Flute with 1927?

Barrie Kosky (Creative Director, Komische Oper Berlin):
Greater than a decade in the past, I attended a efficiency of Between the Satan and
the Deep Blue Sea, the primary present created by the British theater firm
often called 1927. From the second the present began, there was this fascinating combine
of stay efficiency with animation creating its personal aesthetic world. Inside
minutes, this unusual combination of silent movie and music corridor had satisfied me
that these individuals needed to do The Magic Flute with me in Berlin!

The outcome was a singular Magic Flute. Though Suzanne
and Paul had been working in Berlin for the primary time, that they had a pure really feel for
town’s inventive ambiance, particularly the Berlin of the Twenties, when it was
such an essential artistic middle for portray, cabaret, silent movie, and animated
movie. Suzanne, Paul, and I share a love for revue, vaudeville, music corridor, and
comparable types of theater, and, in fact, for silent movie. So, Papageno is
suggestive of Buster Keaton, Monostatos is a bit Nosferatu, and Pamina maybe
a bit paying homage to Louise Brooks. However it’s greater than an homage to silent
movie—there are far too many influences from different areas.

Is your love for silent movie the motivation behind the
identify “1927”?

Suzanne Andrade (co-creator of 1927): 1927 was the
12 months of the primary sound movie. The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson was an
absolute sensation on the time. We work with a mix of stay efficiency and
animation, which makes it a totally new artwork type in some ways. Many others
have used movie in theater, however 1927 integrates movie in a really new means. We don’t
do a theater piece with added motion pictures. Nor can we make a film after which mix
it with performing components. The whole lot goes hand in hand. Our reveals evoke the world
of desires and nightmares, with aesthetics that hearken again to the world of
silent movie.

Paul Barritt (co-creator of 1927): And but it could
be unsuitable to see in our work solely the affect of the Twenties and silent movie. We
take our visible inspiration from many eras, from the copper engravings of the
18th century in addition to in comics of immediately. There isn’t a preconceived aesthetic
setting in our thoughts after we work on a present. The essential factor is that the
picture matches. An excellent instance is Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” [“A
Girl or a Little Wife”]. Within the libretto, he’s served a glass of wine within the
dialogue earlier than his aria. We let him have a drink, nevertheless it isn’t wine. It’s a
pink cocktail from a large cocktail glass, and Suzanne had the concept that he
would begin to see pink elephants flying round him. After all, essentially the most well-known
of all flying elephants was Dumbo—from the Forties—however the precise 12 months isn’t
essential so long as all the things comes collectively visually.

Suzanne Andrade: Our Magic Flute is a journey
via completely different worlds of fantasy. However as in all of our reveals, there’s a
connecting type that ensures that the entire thing doesn’t disintegrate
aesthetically.

Barrie Kosky: That is additionally helped by 1927’s very
particular feeling for rhythm. The rhythm of the music and the textual content has an
huge affect on the animation. As we labored collectively on The Magic
Flute, the timing all the time got here from the music, even—particularly—within the
dialogues, which we condensed and remodeled into silent movie intertitles with
piano accompaniment. Nevertheless, we use an 18th-century fortepiano, and the
accompanying music is by Mozart. This not solely offers the entire piece a
constant type, but in addition a constant rhythm. It’s a silent movie by Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, so to talk!

© Jaro Suffner

Does this piece work with out the dialogue?

Suzanne Andrade: I feel that just about any story may be
instructed with out phrases. You may undress a narrative to the bone, to search out out what you
really want to convey the plot. We tried to do this in The Magic Flute.
You may convey a lot of a narrative via purely visible means. You don’t all the time
want two pages of dialogue to indicate the connection between two individuals. You
don’t want a comic book dialogue to indicate that Papageno is a humorous character. A
intelligent gimmick can generally supply extra perception than dialogue.

Paul Barritt: Going again to silent movies, for a
second—they weren’t simply movies with out sound, with intertitles rather than the
lacking voices. Intertitles had been truly used very sparingly. The makers of
silent movies as an alternative instructed their tales via the visible components. Silent
movies instructed their story via gestures, actions, and glances, and so forth.

Barrie Kosky: This emphasis on the photographs makes it
attainable for each viewer to expertise the present in his or her personal means: as a
magical, residing storybook; as a curious, modern meditation on silent movie
as a singing silent movie; or as work come to life. Principally, we’ve a
hundred stage units through which issues occur that usually aren’t attainable
onstage: flying elephants, flutes trailing notes, bells as showgirls… We will
fly as much as the celebrities after which experience an elevator to hell, all inside a couple of minutes.
Along with all of the animation in our manufacturing, there are additionally moments when
the singers are in a easy white highlight. Immediately there’s solely the music,
the textual content, and the character. The very simplicity makes these maybe essentially the most
touching moments of the night. Throughout the efficiency, the expertise doesn’t
play within the foreground. Though Paul spent hours and hours sitting in entrance of
laptop to create it, his animation by no means loses its deeply human element.
You may all the time see {that a} human hand has drawn all the things. Video projections as
a part of theatrical productions aren’t new. However they usually develop into boring after a
couple of minutes, as a result of there isn’t any interplay between the two-dimensional
house of the display and the three dimensions of the actors. Suzanne and Paul
have solved this drawback by combining all of those dimensions into a standard
theatrical language.

What does The Magic Flute actually imply?

Paul Barritt: It’s a love story, instructed as a fairy
story.

Suzanne Andrade: The love story between Tamino and
Pamina. All through the complete piece, the 2 attempt to discover one another—however
everybody else separates them and pulls them away from one another. Solely on the
very finish do they arrive collectively.

Barrie Kosky: A wierd, fairytale love story, one
that has a whole lot of archetypal and mythological components, such because the trials they
should endure to achieve knowledge. They must undergo fireplace and water to mature.
These are historical rites of initiation.

Tamino falls in love with a portrait. What number of myths and
fairy tales embody this plot level? The hero falls in love with an image and
goes searching for the topic. And on his method to her, he encounters all types
of obstacles. And, on the identical time, the thing of his want faces her personal
private obstacles on her personal journey.

You may expertise our manufacturing as a journey via the
dream worlds of Tamino and Pamina. These two dream worlds collide and mix
to type one unusual dream. The one that combines these desires and these
worlds is Papageno. We’re very targeted on these three characters.
Curiously, Papageno is in pursuit of an idealized picture too: the proper
fantasy lady at his aspect, one thing he craves virtually desperately.

Printed with permission from LA Opera.