The Modern ‘Magic Flute’

The house lights fade. The Maestro gives the downbeat, and the auditorium promptly fills with the majestic opening strains of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Two minutes in, however, just as the music quickens to the lively tempo of the overture’s main theme, squiggly lines materialize within the black limbo space of the stage. They draw themselves out in free-form curves that suggest orbital paths — or shooting stars. Other figures take shape — a telescope, a bird — and then, live human figures, women in 19th-century costumes, bleed through. The effect is magical and perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the music, and while more traditional operagoers may be surprised, the visual stamp is unmistakable. William Kentridge, the celebrated South African artist, has taken on Mozart’s final opera and fashioned the composer’s Masonic fairy tale into a beguiling meditation on the theme of Enlightenment. The production, first mounted at Brussel’s Royal Opera House La Monnaie in 2005, will be presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music for four performances beginning April 9.In recent years, Mr. Kentridge has gained international prominence as South Africa’s leading multimedia artist — working in charcoal, film, theater, puppetry — with both group and solo exhibitions in venues world over to his credit. Born in Johannesburg in 1955, Mr. Kentridge endured both the Apartheid and South Africa’s shaky transition into a post-Apartheid society, and the artist’s work reverberates with the legacy of his times.He is perhaps best known, however, for his unique approach to single-frame film animation in which he painstakingly photographs one single charcoal drawing, making minute changes and erasures on the same piece of paper with each single frame exposure, rather than employing a traditional multiple cell method. The resulting effect is haunting — faint traces of former charcoal strokes linger ghostlike, ever shifting — as the drawn image seems to become an organic protean organism living through time. The films resonate with a multiplicity of metaphors on the themes of apartheid and historical transition: social structures in constant flux, ongoing cycles of subtracting and adding, destruction and construction.Animations, now in the form of projections, are an integral part of Mr. Kentridge’s design for “The Magic Flute.” (He is also credited with co-designing the scenery with Sabine Theunissen.) Taken together with the artist’s background in puppet theater — he has been a frequent collaborator with South Africa’s wellknown Handspring Puppet Company — “The Magic Flute” seemed a natural fit for Mr. Kentridge. But in fact, Mozart’s opera wasn’t the artist’s first idea. As he explained it in a telephone conversation from his studio in Johannesburg, Mr. Kentridge’s productions with Handspring led to a co-production with La Monnaie in 1998 of Monteverdi’s “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse.” And on the strength of that production, he was asked to direct another opera. “We spent about four years trying to find an opera which was right. And at one stage I spent maybe two years thinking about Wagner,” Mr. Kentridge said. That project never solidified, but when “The Magic Flute” was eventually suggested, the artist jumped at the chance.Mozart’s final masterpiece (he died nine weeks after its premiere in 1791) is a somewhat complicated, enigmatic fairy tale set in an imaginary Egypt, featuring wise Priests, an evil Queen, ritualistic trials, and, of course, the titular magic flute. Some critics have criticized Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto as being silly or confusing, especially when compared to the sophisticated librettos Lorenzo da Ponte penned for Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” or “Don Giovanni.” Mr. Kentridge, however, quickly dismissed such notions. “The contractions that are there … make it psychologically interesting,” he said. “One of the themes of the opera is people making themselves. Tamino and Pamina, through the trials, construct who they are, from being young innocents to being [virtuous] at the end. And by the same token, the Queen of the Night, who unmakes herself during the opera, [is] at the end of it a kind of psychotic madwoman, but she is not necessarily that at the beginning.” It’s a quintessentially Kentridgesque notion; If charcoal drawings can make and unmake themselves, why not characters on stage? And by extension, why not human beings?Mozart’s opera is a key product of 18th-century Enlightenment, and the very word “enlightenment” in all its literal and figurative permutations clearly fascinates Mr. Kentridge. Accordingly, he’s set his production in the 19th century, in order to utilize one of his favorite metaphors, photography. “The Magic Flute” already brims with light and dark dichotomies, but Mr. Kentridge’s approach is far less cut and dry. Yes, the Queen of the Night is evil and Sarastro, the Priests, and the Temple of the Sun embody everything good and wise, but, “if one thinks of them as not being unrelated good and evil, but rather, almost provoked by each other the way a photographic negative and positive [do], they are complimentary,” Mr. Kentridge explained.Introducing the medium of photography to 19th-century Egypt also implies a colonial context, and indeed, colonialism’s notion of bringing light to the Dark Continent parallels the Enlightenment. But while Mozart was understandably idealistic about the Enlightenment, Mr. Kentridge is more sensitive to it’s the darker side. “In 1791, the terrible dangers of [Enlightenment] are not yet completely evident. But three years later you have Robespierre who has described himself as a Sarastro figure who, on the basis of his certainty of his own knowledge, is prepared to chop everyone’s heads off,” Mr. Kentridge explained. “The history of the last two centuries has shown the danger of that combination of the monopolies of knowledge and power.”It is a subject Mr. Kentridge has continued to explore. In his 2005 installation piece “Black Box/Chambre Noire,” Mr. Kentridge examined Enlightenment’s perverse relation to colonialism. Commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the piece evolved directly out of the philosophical questions raised by the artist’s previous two years developing “The Magic Flute.” Now in a post-“Black Box” mentality, Mr. Kentridge conceded to having shifted his attitude slightly about Mozart’s opera. The production at BAM will have subtle changes from the original Monnaie production: clarifications, adjustments, “inflections,” as Mr. Kentridge put it, including some reworked video projections.If all this makes “The Magic Flute” lovers slightly anxious, it needn’t. The director emphasized his belief that an opera should be staged fundamentally as its creators conceived it. Which is to say that Mr. Kentridge’s production is filled with plenty of humor and magic: The delightful animations are seamlessly integrated into Mozart’s glorious music, and the happy ending is utterly intact.Mr. Kentridge has every intention of returning to opera production, and is, in fact, slated to stage Shostakovich’s 1930 “The Nose” for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009–2010 season. Given that the satiric piece concerns a disembodied nose which takes on a life of its own, the visual and theatrical possibilities for Mr. Kentridge’s creative mind are endless. More animation? Puppets? New Yorkers will have to wait and see.Begins April 9 (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).

The Modern ‘Magic Flute’

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