C'est Mozart qu'on assassine ?

To tell the truth, I don't like Mozart's music very much. I listen to the Requiem (perhaps it's Salieri I like actually)from time to time, and I don't hate the Clarinet Concerto in A major, but Mozart usually doesn't make it to my play list. Most of the time I find his music...annoying. As opera works go, I much prefer Puccini's or Wagner's, or Purcell's mini operas. So far my favourite memories in l'Opéra Bastille are Robert Wilson's Madame Butterfly, and the wonderful production of Tannhaüser I saw last year.

Yet I really enjoyed Die Zauberflöte,The Magic Flute, I saw on Sunday. The voices weren't great although Pamina was really good (The Queen of the Night missed a note in the famous aria and Jose Van Dam is really getting old)but I did love the extravagant and controversial production.

When it was showed first in 2005, the reactions were visceral and many conservative operagoers called it an outrage, a sacrilege. Minor changed have been made since then so the show I saw was still very original, unorthodox, daring, smart and funny. However there was no boos and no screams of horror this time. The audience may be used to Gérard Mortier's avant-guard choices now(I wonder if the Tristan and Isolde by Peter Sellars, that uses Bill Viola's videos, is still controversial, for I remember the boos it received years ago). Personally I think that Alex Ollé and Carlos Padrissa from the Catalan theatre group, La Fura dels Baus, did a great job with The Flute.

It was as if Lewis Carroll met Pedro Almadovar, with Mozart playing in the background...I guess that Amadeus would have agreed.

Modern productions with bizarre mise en scène and videos aren't always relevant; sometimes the interpretations are far-fetched and a stroke of inspiration may have only a shocking value; this one fits in the story and is quite meaningful. Papageno comes out as a sort of convincing drag-queen (see the picture above), the video was cleverly used, and the idea of using machinery(the Queen of the Night is brought on stage sitting at the end of a camera crane and is held aloft over the orchestra) and huge air-filled plastic mattresses—that either call to the mind the world of dreams and the world of madness(the stage then becoming a padded room in which those crazy characters are stuck!), or are turned into walls, doors, labyrinths and even a cocoon for chrysalis-Tamino –was simply spot-on, even though the shifting was sometimes a bit noisy.

I also loved the two parodies of magic acts, when the Speaker shows up, inside of a box, to be split a few minutes later, or when Sarastro is pierced by Pamina's swords; the chess game was also a brilliant idea, very well thought up.

The masonic allegory that Mozart imagined is replaced here by something more modern, or maybe more universal. The first video projection says it all in the first scene, as we can make up the shape of a brain on the central mattress. Everything happens in the brain...What's in a brain?–yes I'm stubborn when it comes to correspondances. Fantasy of course!

At the end of the day, the production kind of stole the show and the music could have almost been forgotten, which I didn't mind a bit.