Word: sarastro
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...Queen, it seems, has chosen Tamino to help her retrieve her beautiful daughter Pamina from the evil clutches of the Sorceror Sarastro, the Queen's devilish adversary. Setting out for Sarastro's palace with comedic bird-catcher Papageno for company and a magic flute to charm away all evils, Tamino eventually finds Pamina unscathed and virtue intact but ready for love once the right man has come along...
...Magic Flute at Glyndebourne. From the moment the curtain rose on Hockney's version of an early Italian Renaissance landscape, complete with a dragon quoted from Uccello, the audience was saturated in color: deep purples of the night sky, the green and pink of formal gardens in Sarastro's domain on the yellow Nilotic sands, blue cataracts and blazing gold art deco sunbursts...
Weird, heavy and polychrome, the 15-story Portland Building might be Sarastro's Temple of Isis magically transposed from some second-rate set for Mozart's The Magic Flute into the shadows of banal skyscrapers along Portland's Transit Mall. It takes up the entire block between the Italian Renaissance city hall and the neoclassical Multnomah County Courthouse...
...characters are superbly drawn. Lit from front and back simultaneously so that his hair glows around him like a halo, Sarastro is presented as a wise, paternal New Testament God. The Queen is very female and very nasty, the kind of role Bette Davis made unforgettable. Her malevolent, teeth-gnashing character is a product of the Mason's profound anti-female bias (as Sarastro explains the abduction to Pamina: "You need a man to guide you."). Prince Tamino, the initiate-to-be, has both ineffable simplicity and moral sturdiness. A trusting character, he's not terribly bright. He understands nothing...
...into a vast mosaic of human faces (cutting to the beat of the music), and he returns obsessively to a belond angelic little girl who by some odd coincidence looks a lot like Liv Ullman and a touch like Bergman himself. Between acts his camera wanders around backstage, where Sarastro reads the score to Wagner's Parsifal, the Queen of the Night drags grimly on a cigarette, a court page reads comic books, and the two lovers play checkers in a coy parody of The Seventh Seal...