For as many years as I can remember there have been radio broadcasts of Saturday matinées from the New York Met. Suddenly there is a huge technological leap forward as they are broadcast live in widescreen, high definition television. Admittedly, we in the UK have to wait eight months before we can see them but it is still very exciting. That is why I should not be too grumpy about this production of the Magic Flute, directed by Julie Taymor. It is the first of a series of what the Met calls special holiday presentations. It cuts an hour off the usual running time, mainly by omitting most of the dialogue but also by omitting some arias or by reducing them in length. The object, I imagine, was to produce a Magic Flute that the whole family, including young children could enjoy. Curiously though, I could only spot a couple of children among the usual audience of well-heeled, middle-aged New Yorkers.
Visually this production is spectacular, as you might expect from Julie Taymor. There are animal dancers in fantastical costumes, wild animal puppets, and a huge prehistoric bird that caries the three boys across the stage. As the Queen of the Night sings, a troupe of puppeteers is required to manipulate her sensational costume. All the costumes are magnificent: I could have spent the entire production just trying to work out how they constructed Sarastro's cloak.
But, and there has to be a but, this emphasis on the visual is at the expense of the music and the drama. Eliminating the dialogue means that the opera makes even less sense than usual. Taymor gets round Mozart's racism by having a whiteface Monostatos. She gets round Mozart's sexism by making Sarastro an equal opportunities employer with half of the priests in his brotherhood being women.
René Pape is about as good a Sarastro as you can get. Ying Huang is a delectable Pamina, although I fear that she suffers more than the other principals from cuts in her music. Matthew Polenzani is an uninspiring Tamino, although it is an uninspiring role. Erika Miklósa is an unexciting Queen of the Night. Nathan Gunn plays Pappageno as a straightforward idiot with no hint of the complexity that this character can have. I last saw Nathan Gunn as Buzz Aldrin in Jonathan Dove's opera "Man on the Moon" so I was amused to see that his Pappageno costume looks like a green spacesuit. I did enjoy the moment where the Three Ladies strike him dumb by snatching his codpiece and locking it to his mouth. Otherwise, the Three Ladies are a miscalculation, on Taymor's part. They are unable to project their characters because they have to perform behind Disneyesque masks. The three boys, on the other hand, looked fantastic with white beards down to the ground. Unfortunately their singing is painful to the ear.
Although this broadcast is in English, it is also subtitled in English, presumably for the benefit of deaf opera lovers. Sorry, I said I would not be grumpy, but I think I have been.
