Ingmar Bergman directed The Magic Flute for Swedish TV, apparently intended as a sort of holiday gift to his countrymen. The opera was shot on 16 mm film and broadcast on January 1, 1975. The film was later reprocessed into a 35 mm print that was shown throughout Europe in that same year to great acclaim. (I recall seeing the movie in the theater when I was at the University of Minnesota). Bergman's film doesn't simply record an actual opera -- instead, Bergman with his singers and an excellent chamber orchestra pre-recorded the score in early 1974. The plan was to post-synchronize the score with an elaborately edited and cinematic re-enactment of the opera specially filmed at the rococo theater at Drottningholm, a royal palace near Stockholm. The old theater proved to be too fragile to support the weight of lights and other modern film equipment and, so, Bergman had the space re-created in loving detail at a studio in the Circus building also on the edge of Stockholm. (The shoot took 50 days and was, according to Bergman, the happiest experience in his life.) The Drottningholm proscenium stage is very deep but narrow -- only about 24 feet wide. Bergman's concept, from which he deviates from time to time, is to stage the show within the constraints imposed the royal theater at Drottningholm. This concept gives the film a tight, almost claustrophobic focus that somehow achieves a high degree of theatricality notwithstanding the intensely imagined cinematic mise en scene that the director employs. The film is luminously beautiful, appearing on the new Criterion disc, in a pillar-boxed format, similar to the aspect ratio that we see in old German films. Of course, the opera is wonderful and Bergman's ingenious production is strangely inspiring, even, uplifting.
I won't devote much attention to the opera's complicated and highly eccentric plot. As everyone knows the opera concerns two pairs of lovers who must endure trials in order to consummate their passion. Tamino and Pamina are noble lovers. Their love story is complicated by what can only be described as a fairy-tale custody battle. Pamina is the daughter of the Queen of the Night, an embodiment of lunar femininity estranged from Sarastro, a figure that allegorizes the solar light of masculine reason. (These gender values are encoded in the opera and, although both the film and the opera transcend them from time-to-time, the viewer will have to accept these Jungian archetypes of male and female as fundamental to the narrative.) Pamina's mother with her Moorish henchman, Monostatos (adding racism to the opera's sexist agenda) are locked in mortal combat with Sarastro's brotherhood, who happen to be Freemasons. Indeed, the Queen of the Night hates Sarastro so violently that she is willing to sacrifice her daughter to attempted rape by Monostatos to achieve dominance over her ex-husband. In one chilling scene, she demands that Pamina kill her own father, Sarastro and hands her a silver dagger with which to accomplish the deed. (The deadly dagger is the counterpart to the life-giving magic flute.) In counterpoint to the elevated and potentially tragic love of Tamino and Pamina are the comic low-status lovers, Papageno, the cowardly and feckless birdcatcher, and his lusty consort, Papagena. The consummation of the noble lovers' passion is friendship and occult wisdom. The comic low-status lovers, by contrast, achieve fecundity by their passion -- the opera ends with Papagena and Papageno crowing about the host of offspring that they are about to produce. Mozart's genius is to portray musically both high and low as equally beautiful -- the tribe of children produced by the birdcatcher and his lecherous wife is a happy ending no less beautiful than the acquisition of supernatural wisdom by the noble lovers. The opera's roots were humble -- Emmanuel Schikaneder who wrote the libretto wanted Mozart to compose some incidental music for a Viennese Sing-spiel intended to capitalize on current interest in freemasonry. About a third of the lines in the opera are spoken and not sung. (In effect, the show is more like a Broadway musical than a typical opera composed in the last part of the 18th century). Of course, the outcome of the unlikely partnership between Mozart and Schikaneder is the most popular opera ever composed.
The principal theme in The Magic Flute is that wisdom can not be achieved without Eros. The Neo-Platonic subject of the opera (actually Platonic as well since the idea originates in Plato's Symposium) is that all knowledge is, at its heart, carnal -- that is, that love is the royal road to wisdom of all sorts, beginning with bedroom techniques and ending in the highest empyrean of the Ideal. The opera also bears a resemblance, oddly enough, to the novels of Jane Austen -- love isn't complete until it is tinctured with friendship and subordinated to reason. The female realm is that of appearance, the glistening and lovely surface of things. Appropriate to this realm is violent passion. The opera exemplifies this thought in one of the most remarkable plot twists in all of literature -- the Queen of the Night initially appears to be the victim of the cruel and tyrannical Sarastro; we are inspired to sympathize with her pathos and support her plight to recapture her daughter from her ex-husband. Like Tamino, we want to come to her rescue. But there is something a little sinister in her high-pitched shrieking coloratura and, in the second half, we realize that the Queen of the Night's rage is, indeed, deadly, unreasonable, and destructive -- from being the opera's heroine she becomes something like its villainess. But this must be qualified. Opposing the Queen of the Night's passion is the sober realism of the solar knights, the brotherhood of Freemasons that Sarastro leads. They are involved in constructing elaborate tedious ordeals and spend their time in dusty crypts full of bones. Reason, particularly as staged by Bergman, has something morbid about it -- too readily, grey reason can decline into being some sort of death cult. And, so, the opera stands for the proposition that the male and female elements of reason and passion, although incomplete in themselves, comprise a perfect unity when each embraces and regulates the other. To this end, we are shown Tamino's growth -- in the opening scene, he is pursued by a ludicrous paper-mache dragon and collapses in a swoon on the stage. By the end of the opera, he has evolved into a courageous figure who has subdued both death and despair in his spiritual development. Mozart's music is all of a piece -- this means that most of the arias sound more or less alike, although all are fantastically beautiful. The opera devises for us a sonic world that is comprised of intelligible elements that cohere with one another. The score gives the impression of agitated motion (passion) that is also grounded in perfect stillness (reason). This effect is achieved by the listener's perception that music, no matter how frenetic, will always resolve in a perfect, classically harmonic moment of complete repose. Somehow, we seem to sense the end of an aria or duet from the piece's first note.
Bergman's direction is intensely cinematic. He reverses the dimensions that we expect in opera. Generally, with opera, we have the sense that a great distance divides us from the strange figures bellowing their songs in outlandish costume on stage. Bergman eliminates the distance -- almost all of the opera is filmed in enormous close-ups. (These close-ups are so huge as to be unflattering -- we can see each blemish and tiny scar on the faces of the leading ladies: for instance, Pamina has three minute pock-marks above her upper right lip. These tiny marks appear like lunar craters in the microscopically detailed close-ups that fill the screen.) The effect of these close-ups is to destroy the audience's sense of space in some of the sequences -- the imagery seems dreamlike, happening within someone's reverie and not in any real or identifiable space. Some of the sequences shot in close-up are fractured into cubist assemblages of full-frontal and profile images. The scene in which the Queen of the Night implores Pamina to kill Sarastro is shot like Bergman's Persona -- the images are drowned in icy blue darkness and consist of huge mask-like friezes of women's faces, sometimes superimposed upon one another. The mise-en-scene is replete with witty effects: when Tamino plays the magic flute, charming human-sized animals come from hiding to cavort before him. (He is a kind of Orpheus.) These shots culminate in a brief image of three bats hanging from the ceiling upside-down and dancing like Sesame Street characters. The characters are, often, glimpsed off-stage -- when Papageno is first introduced, Bergman shows us a subliminally short image of Papagena waiting off-stage for him. The singer playing Papageno is taking a nap when the opera begins and almost misses his cue -- we see him roused from sleep and rushing through the labyrinthine backstage to appear just in time before the audience. In a reprise of one of his most famous images in The Seventh Seal, Bergman shows the players acting the roles of Tamino and Pamina playing chess backstage during intermission. We also see some of the supernumeraries furiously smoking directly under a sign that tells them that smoking is forbidden. At intermission, Sarastro (played indelibly by the Swedish opera singer Ulrike Cold) studies a score of Wagner's Parsifal while a little boy who is one of Monostratos' henchmen reads a comic book beside him. The allusion to the Wagner opera is not happenstance -- in the second act, Bergman stages a number of scenes with the Masonic brotherhood, posing the freemasons in their robes and cowls like celebrants at the Last Supper. This staging reminds us that both Parsifal and The Magic Flute involve celibate brotherhoods of pure knights tempted by female lust -- in other words, there is a connection between the cults of purity in both operas. A kind of heightened realism animates the scenes where Pamina and Tamino are united -- we see Sarastro's pride intercut with shots of the Queen of the Night who seems matronly and dignified with ladies in waiting: it's as if both of the warring parents have set aside their feuding for the wedding. (Immediately, after the wedding, of course, the Queen of the Night and Monostatos mount a full-fledged attack on the bastion of reason but are repelled without any discernible effort by Sarastro's and his brotherhood.) More questionable, perhaps, is Bergman's staging of the Overture. After some limpid shots of great oaks trees on the Drottningholm palace grounds, the overture is accompanied by rhythmically edited shots of an ideal audience comprised of all the nations on earth -- Bergman shows people who look like Eskimos, European philosophers, Asians and Africans gravely attending to the music. The meaning is obvious -- Mozart writes for all mankind. And this notion, although questionable in some ways, is suitably uplifting. Less effective, I think is the ongoing leit-motif of images of radiant little girl -- she looks like a pre-pubescent Liv Ullmann -- smiling cherubically as the show progresses. This seems a stretch to me and overly obvious and manipulative. But it's a minor defect. (Watch the montage of people in the overture closely -- you'll see a flash of Bergman and Sven Nyquist, his great cameraman, among those close-ups.)
The Criterion disk comes with some fascinating extras. Peter Cowrie has interesting insights into the opera and Bergman's staging. (He points out the Brechtian influence in some scenes involving aphorisms presented on flip cards for the audience's delectation.) Even better is an interview between the haughty, aristocratic-looking Bergman and a little troll of an interviewer who seemed hell-bent on getting under the great man's skin. "Why would you film The Magic Flute?" the troll asks. "Everyone knows its boring as hell." There is a wonderful documentary about the making of the film. In it, we see several female singers in minor parts, apparently knowing full well Bergman's propensity to sleep with the actresses in his films, casting an appraising and openly lascivious eye on the director. Bergman is endearingly like every high school music director that you've ever known -- he is avuncular, comically passionate about the project, tyrannical, deeply manipulative, and charming at the same time.
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