Flute finale

Last Sunday afternoon I was at the final performance of The Magic Flute, which was also the final performance of San Francisco Opera's 2011-1012 season. I had hesitated before buying a ticket to yet another Magic Flute. On the plus side, I do enjoy the opera, and I was curious about the new production design by Jun Kaneko, and I had never seen Nathan Gunn's Papageno in a live performance. On the minus side, I was dubious about the plan of performing it in English (in a new version by SF Opera General Director David Gockley), and I was generally feeling pretty Fluted out.

I found Kaneko's designs delightful. There are lots of projections, starting as soon as the music starts, usually of shifting abstract patterns involving stripes or polka dots or triangles or some combination thereof, done in glowing blues and greens and crayon-bright reds and yellows and pinks. It all has the purposeful naivete that only great sophistication can produce. The total effect is vivid and even hallucinatory and puts you suitably in another world. I was reminded of the controlled profusion of color and pattern found in kabuki theater. Some of the costumes also looked Japanese-influenced, particularly that of Sarastro (Kristinn Sigmundsson), which in that case was a bit unfortunate since his look reminded me of the Mikado and I kept expecting him to burst into "My Object All Sublime."

If the setting moved me to a different world, the translation kept pulling me back to this one. I suspect one reason for performing The Magic Flute in English is that it is now considered the gateway opera par excellence and performing it in translation seems more family-friendly (though parents please note: when people talk about The Magic Flute as a great opera for children, they aren't talking about your average five-year-old; seriously, what is wrong with you people?). This version wasn't bad; a lot of it fit the music quite well and during the intermission I heard many audience members assuring each other that though of course they would prefer the original German, they found it worked surprisingly well in English. The dialogue scenes are always awkward in German, so doing them in English makes some sense, though (for me at least) making these scenes more comprehensible doesn't make them more entertaining, and I would prune them ruthlessly, instead of adding jokes about drag queens, carb intake, and other obligatory local and topical references. Lots of people did seem to find the jokes more amusing than I did, but for me they were more along the lines of jokiness, and that's the difference between creating a fairy-tale and a vaudeville. My major criticism of the production was that it was a bit too cheerful; there could have been more darkness and danger, more of the threatening undercurrent found in most fairy tales.

Most of the demotic tomfoolery fell on the broad shoulders of our Papageno, and Nathan Gunn, who has performed the role many times, was in warm and fluid voice and as an actor of considerable skill and charm managed to pull off the jokes, even though I would have been happier without them. Even though, like everyone else, I love Papageno, there is a point in every other performance I've seen where I get deeply irritated with him: that would be when he finally manages to stop talking at exactly the wrong time, when his chattiness might be useful in reassuring Pamina, who's been left in the dark. This time I not only wasn't irritated with him, I was actually touched by the abashed and awkward manner in which he reassured Tamino afterward that he could actually keep quiet once in a while. So that is my tribute to Nathan Gunn's performance: he kept me for once consistently on Papageno's side. As usual with Gunn his diction was excellent, rendering the surtitles unnecessary. In fact most of the cast, even those who were not native speakers of English, could be understood without reference to the surtitles, which is not always the case. And like everyone else I love the scene with Papagena at the end, and Nadine Sierra was a delightful Papagena. Instead of the usual "old woman" costume for her first appearance she was disguised as a large vulture, which was amusing.

Sigmundsson as Sarastro was the weakest of the leads; his low notes got very croaky and raspy; he behaved but did not sing with the requisite warmth and nobility. Albina Shagimuratova as the Queen of the Night spun off her two flashy arias with considerable style, though I would have preferred a crueler edge to her performance, because most of the characterization in this opera is simply asserted so every little bit helps. (Indeed, she does command her daughter to kill Sarastro, but given that he's kidnapped that daughter, taken the sevenfold disk of the sun or whatever the hell it is, and been badmouthing her all over town, I can't really blame her for holding a grudge.) The usual racial awkwardness with the villainous Moor Monostatos (Greg Fedderly) was avoided by dressing him like a kabuki warlord or demon, but he was for me a bit too straightforwardly comic, and as with the Queen there should have been more of a sense of real menace from him. (The translation also should have just jettisoned the occasional unnecessary reference to him as a Moor, especially since he really wasn't. If you're going to translate, you might as well take advantage of it.) Lovely Heidi Stober was a lovely Pamina.  She's been consistently fine the other times I've heard her and she stood out this time as well. Her suicide aria was particularly impassioned and heart-rending. With her shoulder-length blonde hair and her angular blue and white dresses she looked like Alice in a Mod World Wonderland.

I've started hearing a lot about Alek Shrader, the Tamino for most of the run, but he was not scheduled for the last two performances, which were the ones that fit my schedule, so I guess I won't hear him until his San Francisco Performances recital next season. Nathaniel Peake, originally scheduled for the Shraderless shows, withdrew and Norman Reinhardt was the last-minute replacement. He has sung the role elsewhere (though obviously not in this new translation) but I understand he didn't even have a rehearsal of this staging. Under the circumstances, it would have been impressive if he had merely kept from tripping over the other singers, but he also managed to give a convincing and lovely-toned performance. I wouldn't have been surprised to hear he had been Tamino through the whole run. He perhaps tired just a shade towards the end, but then so did I, and I was just sitting down watching instead of singing to thousands in a production I hadn't rehearsed, which sounds like an anxiety dream.

It helped that Reinhardt is tall, attractive, and stalwart, because you need qualities like that to counteract Tamino's actual behavior, since he is probably the most hilariously unmanly of all operatic heroes: he enters crying for help, running from a really big snake, and promptly faints center stage. The big snake is handily dispatched by three ladies, who then take turns singing about how pretty Tamino is. He immediately falls in love with Pamina after seeing her portrait (this is not the last example we'll see of his very suggestible nature), but she is actually rescued not by him but by his goofball companion the bird-catcher while he is wandering elsewhere tootling on his flute. He does manage to keep the vow of silence imposed on him by some people he's just met, though he has no real reason to believe what they tell him, as opposed to what the Queen of the Night has told him. A vow of silence is a fairly perverse vow to give the hero of an opera, and I sometimes wonder if this was Mozart and Schikaneder getting in a little jab at chatty audiences. By keeping the vow he comes close to pushing the woman he loves towards suicide, but luckily once again he is saved from the consequences of his actions. Given all this it's understandable that there's some masculine anxiety underlying the injunctions from Sarastro and Co. against the deceitful wiles of women. The translation should probably have removed said injunctions entirely, since they just make a contemporary audience laugh at rather than with the material, but honestly "beware the deceitful wiles of women" is the only specific step we are ever given towards a somewhat vague and sketchy enlightenment. (And when is Pamina ever deceitful? Does she not insist to Papageno that if Sarastro questions them they must speak only the truth? And is she not a woman? I've always found her the most consistently admirable and sympathetic character in the opera.) Despite my gentle mockery here this really is a beautiful and strange opera with a profound message, but it's perhaps best not to examine the specifics too closely and just to let the music move you toward the embrace of charitable justice and benevolent enlightenment.

So I ended up glad that I had bought a ticket. When the final curtain fell the audience roared its appreciation and behind the curtain I could hear the performers give themselves a justified cheer. I found myself lingering in the aisles and the lobby afterward, reluctant to leave. It's always poignant and a bit difficult leaving the house after the last show of the season, even though I know the new season is gearing up in just a few weeks.