The Magic Flute Analysis

Not surprising that The Magic Flute has been staged by contemporary innovative directors- it’s craziness makes it ideal for being a director’s medium. Modern opera criticized for being boring or whatever, but here are three directors who, although they faced criticism themselves, approached opera with fresh perspective and with a desire to change what they felt where stiff conventions that no longer

Richard Wagner was supremely interested in the music of other composers, both that of his contemporaries and those who had influenced the operatic stage before him. As an opera composer and librettist himself, he listened to the offerings of other composers carefully, forming his opinions with even more caution. In his anaylsis of Mozart’s work, Wagner credited the composer with “creating true German opera”

Modern music critics continue to scratch their heads when considering Wagner’s gushing remarks on Mozart. In a review posted to the Flos Carmeli Arts Blog on February 26, 2010, Steven Riddle describes Mozart as a German composer who writes music that is “flexible, nimble, light and lovely”, while Wagner’s is “like a beautiful bludgeon- slow and ponderous”. While they possess little similarities in style as composers, it was not simply Mozart’s music that enamored Wagner. The Magic Flute inspired Wagner with its characters and their keen development, as well as Mozart’s clear voice as an interpreter of the drama within the music. He praised Mozart for his ability to create a genre that was unlike any previously seen in the German Opera. The Magic Flute was an opera that lived between Opera Seria and Opera buffa (both common in German opera at the time), but also contained many musical styles of the ornate Italian opera. ...

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...e gaps caused by heavy editing to the libretto. He gave voice only to the most important characters, Pamina and Tamino, Papageno and Papagena, the Queen of the Night, Sarastro and Monostatos. Particularly bold was his cutting of the Three Ladies and the Three Spirit Children, who he deemed merely mechanisms of exposition and magic. What Brook yearned to create where characters who were true individuals as opposed to singers in a pageant of the superfluous. His work with the Queen of The Night particularly reached this goal. While she is clearly the villainess of Flute, Mozart’s music gives her a complexity that Brook highlighted. Her revenge aria, in which she mourns the loss of he daughter to Sarastro, is mostly known for it’s treacherous colatura. In Brook’s Flute, the aria began softly and tenderly, reaveling the bevered mother underneath the evil Queen.