Vienna State Opera: The Magic Flute
Vienna State Opera, 24/06/2026
Regietheater takes the magic out of the Flute in Vienna!
Wiener Philharmoniker, Bühnenorchester, conductor, Ivor Bolton, producer, Barbora Horáková.
Some 60 years ago I fell in love with opera, when one of my friends in Harlow gave me a couple of tickets for Covent Garden and I took a friend to 'The Magic Flute'. It was, unusually for Covent Garden, sung in English, but in the days before surtitles that helped make the humour of the opera more accessible to inexperienced newcomers like me! It was a very good cast, headed by Geraint Evans, the great Welsh baritone. I loved it, immediately joined the Friends of Covent Garden and began to go to every production, sometimes more than once. In those days it was only £3 in the upper slips for some great opera productions and some of the best singers in the world. Imagine seeing Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland in 'Lucia' for £3!
Sixty years on, last week I attended 'The Magic Flute‘ in Vienna at the State Opera House, a beautiful opera house, home of the busiest opera company in the world. I have had many great evenings in this opera house. Sadly this was not a good night at the opera; indeed the production was so bad, at times I shut my eyes and listened to the music, which was as expected of a reasonable standard. What the opera was suffering from was the new disease afflicting opera, 'Regietheatre‘, or directors‘ theatre. This is a practice, sweeping the opera houses of the world, but particularly prevalent in German and Austrian opera houses and, sadly, it has afflicted Vienna’s wonderful opera house. The directors or producers of operas want to take charge of the stage presentation and reinterpret the opera to make it “relevant to modern times”, or fit their personal interpretation of what the opera might be about, often very different from the composer‘s. This compulsive reinterpretation has ruined many operas I have reviewed in recent years. I remember with extreme distaste a new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Berlin where the Rhinemaidens, instead of swimming in the Rhine, were white- coated laboratory assistants, experimenting on rabbits and guinea pigs in a brain research institute. It was truly awful and was booed loudly at every interval!
Sadly the Vienna audience the other night didn’t boo the production; the applause was polite but tepid! The Czech producer Barbora Horáková, now living in Switzerland, set the opera in a rambling old haunted house somewhere in the present time. It began with three little boys who in traditional productions tend to arrive from heavenly baskets but here arrive on bicycles and start to wreck the house, before being frightened off by manifestations of supernatural presences. The dragon, who often has a big physical presence in traditional productions, here is merely a fleeting video image easily dispatched by the three 'ladies of the night‘. The Queen of the Night with wings attached appeared in a sliding glass box. The Speaker of the Temple seemed to be a bartender and his temple chorus resembled the central committee of the Communist Party in some east European country! Pamino and Tamina were for much of the latter part of the opera attached to puppets of a grotesque old man and woman ( 'I wanted to show them ageing‘, the director said!) This long sequence encapsulates all that was most depressing in this presentation. Of course it is valid for the two young lovers to visualise their older selves, but to (literally) weigh them down with repulsive images, have them handle complex and unwieldy choreography designed to allow them to manoeuvre the old crones into a position where they might embrace, only to be detached from the young people’s shoulders and suspended above, for all the world like victims of a lynch mob - this isn‘t life affirming (as the producer clearly intended it to be), but a terrible presentiment of agony to come.
Musically, it must be said, it wasn’t too bad. Günter Groissböck sang Sarastro with authority, although could not counter the unconvincing theatrical context. The Queen of the Night, Jessica Pratt, looked good and sounded reasonable. Tamino (Pavol Breslik) and Pamina (Florina Ilie) gave us at the start attractive interpretations, but in the latter stages, their talent was defeated by the grotesque dummies clumsily attached to their young bodies! Papagena (Ilia Staple) had a similar old body attached, but at least that was part of the original libretto and part of the comedy! The Vienna Philharmonic was excellent as usual and Ivor Bolton conducted the opera well. If you shut your eyes it wasn’t too bad, but opera is about theatre as well as music and for me tonight the staging was too painful to watch for long!
I’m not against all modernising of opera. Jonathan Miller’s “Mafia” Rigoletto which I saw at the ENO in 1982 was a great hit and is still in use today. But Miller had a sure theatrical touch, and Ms Horáková unfortunately does not yet have that. The following night in Vienna in a private capacity and on a very different artistic level, I saw my first Lehar operetta 'Der Zarewitsch‘, at the Volksoper. Whilst also containing elements of contemporary reinterpretation, it was executed in a light-handed way, wholly compatible with the 1927 work. The performance was ingeniously staged, using projected paper cutouts. It was charming and humorous, and worked well as a storytelling device, avoiding the use of expensive sets.
However overall I feel the compulsive innovation and the search for “relevance” in modern opera productions often destroys the work itself! So I have now made a personal decision: I intend to avoid Regietheatre where I can. Life is too short to endure any more painful nights at the opera, and I‘m happy to leave it to my talented younger reviewers to assess the success or failure of new interpretations!
Hugh Kerr, Editor, Edinburgh Music Review
photo credit: (c)Wiener Staatsoper/Michael Pöhn
