Word: zauberflã
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...entrance of the audience into this magical world was beautifully accentuated by set and costume designer David Hockney’s whimsical approach. Typically, the Met’s sensational stage effects create a realism that puts Hollywood to shame, but Hockney understood that Die Zauberfl??¶te is not about realism, and his vision transported the packed house from the banalities of real life into a divine fantasy realm. The stage, adorned with simple painted backdrops, was awash in pastels, and the singers wore brightly colored costumes (sky blue and gold for Sarastro and his priests, green...
Such is the message—and the basic plot—of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberfl??¶te. Set to the libretto of Mozart’s fellow Freemason Emanuel Schikaneder, it offers such an idealistic view of human nature and interpersonal relationships that it seems in danger of being laughed to scorn by modern audiences. But on the March 17 closing night performance of its recent Die Zauberfl??¶te production, New York’s Metropolitan Opera demonstrated just how powerful and convincing Mozart’s final opera really...
...overall effect was something like watching a three-hour cartoon, which only made the impact of Die Zauberfl??¶te’s idealistic vision more powerful. This opera is, after all, a fairy tale—albeit a bizarre one full of Masonic rituals and Egyptian gods. And like all fairy tales, Die Zauberfl??¶te seeks to teach us a moral. Its particular lesson—the transformative power of brotherhood and love—would lose much of its force if we forgot, even for a minute, that what we are watching is markedly not the world...
Such near-perfection is representative of Die Zauberfl??¶te itself. Although it contains what is arguably Mozart’s most mature and varied music, as a piece of drama it doesn’t always attain the same sublimity. There is, for example, no explanation of why the evil Queen of the Night has at her disposal three virtuous wonder-boys who help Tamino thwart the Queen’s plans after leading him to Sarastro’s temple. Nor is it obvious why Sarastro, that paragon of priestly piety, employs as his prison warden...
...zauberfl?...
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