Next week, the Michigan State University College of Music will stage four performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
WKAR’s Scott Pohl takes us Inside The Arts with a preview of this beloved opera.
This production of The Magic Flute will be performed in English. That should make it easier for an American audience to follow the story.
Director of the MSU College of Music opera theatre, Melanie Helton, says The Magic Flute is quite funny. “There’s a fair amount of dialogue,” she explains, “and the last thing you want to do is sit through lots of German dialogue, and the last thing I want to try to teach my students is pages and pages of German dialogue.”
According to Helton, Mozart wrote The Magic Flute for the people, not for royalty, because it had been commissioned by a theatre in Vienna. Emanuel Schikaneder, a man Helton describes as something of a comedian, wrote the libretto. Both Mozart and Schikaneder were Masons, and Helton says misogyny was a feature of Masonry at the time. This production, she says, is being adapted for modern audiences. Helton explains that “because the original text is quite racist and quite sexist, as was the end of the 18th century, we’ve kind of…I don’t want to say we’ve sanitized it, but we’ve brought it up to sort of modern standards to where I’ve said to the students ‘look, if there’s anything that you think is just a little bit cringy, let’s change it.”
As an example, instead of saying “women are evil,” they’ll say “the queen is evil.” Another tweak comes with the story’s villain, Monostatos, a Moor. Rather than the traditional trope of a Black man being the villain, this Monostatos will be costumed as a lizard.
But what about the music? “You have the combination of wonderful sort of folk tunes that Papageno sings, but the Tamino, who’s a classic, classical character who has these gorgeous arias,” Helton continues, “and the most famous aria, is probably The Queen of the Night, which has seven high F’s, which is above the staff, and you’ve probably heard it on commercials quite a bit.”
The MSU College of Music last performed The Magic Flute ten years ago as the first program staged in the renovated Fairchild Theatre. That production won first prize in the 2014 National Opera Association college production competition.
Helton has done much of the pre-production herself. Inspired by Game of Thrones, she describes the result as medieval, with a modern twist.
With four performances, The Magic Flute has been double cast to allow singers down time between shows. Freshmen will mostly be in the chorus. A couple of big parts went to sophomores, with juniors and seniors, plus a handful of graduate students in the other roles.“Nobody is a backup,” Helton concludes. “The casts are equal. We do not have a first and second cast; we call them Green and White. Instead of having maybe 15 principal roles, we have 30 students with roles.”
The MSU College of Music production of The Magic Flute is scheduled at the Fairchild Theatre November 13th, 15th and 16th at 7 p.m., and November 17th at 3 p.m. There will be a preview lecture 45 minutes before the opening night performance.
