Word: papageno
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...Maybe I made a mistake in my career years ago," says Prey, 53, reflectively. "I should probably have switched to more dramatic roles earlier." Outstanding as the guileless Papageno in Mozart's The Magic Flute, the rakish Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus and the clever Figaro in both Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Prey has unwillingly become typecast as an operatic nice guy. It is understandable. Who can see him as a villain...
...FELT DISAPPOINTED and unhappy observing this process, because the manifold flaws in Prum's Flute seemed to spring more from logistical problems, shortages of money, inadequate rehearsals, and the like, than from a hopelessly flawed conception. At moments, the subway-staircase flashed into sensibility--as, for example, a disheveled Papageno leered after business-suited women hurrying down the stairs. Somewhere in here there is a fascinating avant-garde Magic Flute piping away, waiting to be heard...
These musical failures were doubly unfortunate because this troupe of singers contains some very fine voices. Of particular note were Daniel Pantano's Papageno, a chubby, winning baritone with plenty of playfulness: Barbara Morash's Queen of the Night, who traversed her role's Alpine vocal peaks of near-yodelling with good control and plenty of voice to spare: and the Three Ladies of Anne Johnson, Penelope Bitzas, and Deborah Harrington, a trio of ethereally beautiful voices. Everyone in the cast was at least vocally adequate for this small-scale production, and it was a shame to watch them...
...PAPAGENO the bird-catcher was clearly Bergman's favorite character, and his comic part has been so embellished that he could almost be taken for the drama's protagonist. His innocent lust for talk, food, sex, and a wife get him into all kinds of trouble; all he really wants is a woman, and he often gazes warmly into the audience, begging someone out there to be his mate and threatening suicide when no one complies. As Taminos's companion he is given a chance to endure the Trials, but he has neither the courage nor the reticence to keep...
...Papageno's fate has often been taken as proof of Mozart's aristocratic bias. Tamino, after all, is initiated and Papageno is not. But Mozart was not a nobleman, and his comedies often satirize aristocratic pretension. It is more likely that Mozart meant to celebrate the common man's virtues as well as the prince's, to suggest that a certain kind of lofty nobleness of character is not for everyone. Bergman took this view so much to heart that he ended the film with his own vision: Papageno and Papagena embracing in a circle of lively, tow-headed kids...