Word: magic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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INGMAR BERGMAN HAS left the New Wave and its tormented pessimism far behind. His light-hearted, sunny, extraordinarily intelligent film version of Mozart's The Magic Flute proves that the judicious egotism of one master can actually enhance the genius of another. Bergman has gotten both practical and romantic all of a sudden; having perceived all the traditional problems of staged opera, he has pretty much solved them all, making room for his own rose-tinted theatrics. To make the story move more smoothly he shuffled several scenes out of their original order, omitted a few, altered the plot...
Like most operas, The Magic Flute has its cultists, opera purists have harrumphed at Bergman's "popularization" of the original libretto. But he's done the rest of us a service--to the uninitiated The Magic Flute's message can be hard to fathom, seeming alternately simpleminded and ponderously abstract. The opera is an allegorical celebration of the ideals of the Masonic brotherhood, a secret, illegal society to which Mozart belonged, and the elaborate rituals that take up over half the opera are closely modeled on the initiation rites of the Order. Eighteenth century audiences would have instantly recognized...
There is no trace of the oppressive, gaunt quality of Bergman's earlier films. The Magic Flute is a work of such magic and belief that Bergman's agonized mysticism seems to have found a total release in the expression of another artist's orderly, God-filled universe. The film is sensitive, joyful, full of serious wit. One hates to say it, but classical opera is rarely so sexy or so much fun as this...
There was little else to amuse the Russians. While the rest of Europe was spawning Dante, Chaucer and Rabelais, recorded literature in Russia until the 18th century consisted mainly of sermons, lives of saints and other edifying ecclesiastical texts. The oral folk tradition in Russia was truly a magic spring. As in the fairy tale, it flowed inexhaustibly, reviving, consoling and enlightening all who partook...
Henry Kissinger dominated world affairs as the most remarkable Secretary of State in modern times, but the magic was fading. The tenuous peace he had engineered in Viet Nam, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1973, unraveled when the Communists triumphed in Southeast Asia. Kissinger's laboriously constructed policy of détente was showing considerable wear as critics at home and abroad?not least of them the great Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn?complained that the Russians were exploiting the arrangement. But his critics were unable to present cogent alternatives to detente, and much of the opposition was based...