Merry Mozart at the Met
New York subway’s ‘A’ Train conductor was brim-full of Christmas spirit. “YOU ….. are ridin’ the ‘A’ train, the oldest rail cars on the system, and ah’m goin’ to make your journey festive – Hey! Would the schmuck riding his bike into the train get off. You’ll get jammed in the door – by singin’ my very favourite carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas. ‘Cept, I can only remember the first eight verses. After the maids a milkin’ I kinda lose interest.”
All London Underground custodians can ever intone is a robotic “Mind the Gap”. Boring. Manhattan pumps Broadway above and below ground. So, from 175th Street station to Columbus Circle, my stop for The Lincoln Center – our Pavarotti manqué du jour blasted out one long drawn-out verse per station. “Fi….ve Go-old Ring….s.”
Even the stony-faced kids with glazed eyes, ripped jeans, threatening hoodies and thumping earbuds had the decency to smirk. If my A train divo ever wanders into the Met and picks up Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria, the whole subway network risks grinding to a halt.
New York Metropolitan Opera’s Christmas (OK, “Holiday” for woke readers) English language production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, produced and costumed by Julie Taymor, is a wonder of sparkling, be-jewelled craftsmanship.
Often dismissed by opera buffs as lightweight “kids” stuff, especially in redacted versions, Flute is anything but. Premiered only six weeks before the composer died, the music is a compendium of everything Mozart had to offer. The composer packed his life and talent into this last, major work.
The plot is probably familiar, even to casual operagoers, so on to the heart of the matter. But for those coming upon the work afresh, a full synopsis can be found here.
And the heart of that matter is the famous show-stopping Queen of the Night aria, Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, commonly abbreviated Der Hölle Rache. This is the writ-large signature moment of Die Zauberflöte.
Selected for its vocal pyrotechnics, NASA included the aria – the only aria – on a golden disc strapped to its Voyager I space probe in 1977. It was meant to be part of a “We come in peace for all mankind” narrative sort of thing. What was NASA smoking?
Imagine. You are a multi-eyed slime-bug on an exoplanet – let’s call it Zog – orbiting Alpha Centauri and this piece of space debris falls unexpectedly into your backyard. You send junior bug off to the local Best Buy to find a record player. “Damn, it’s a 45RPM EP, not a 33RPM LP. Do these stupid earthlings think we’re behind the curve?”
Spin the disc and you hear some earth woman with her pants on fire giving you the finger. “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”. Hardly rubbing noses as a sign of peace. Her corsets are bursting with rage. Not even multiplex alien eardrums can cope with the bouncing sound. H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds in reverse.
Slime-bug grandpa reminds the family that the only thing coming close was that Nuremberg Rally speech by the froth maniac, Hitler, picked up on a crystal set back in 1937. (Ed. Remember, Alpha Centauri is four light-years from Earth.) That didn’t end well. This golden thingy must mean war!
The aliens have got the point, because Der Hölle Rache is nothing less than a declaration of all-out aural battle, not a limited special vocal operation, by a queen whose husband has betrayed her. The late king has left his lands and temple to a pointy hat guy, Sarastro, a ruler of reason, a freemason. Not to her. Worse still, their daughter Pamina has now been removed from mum’s custody by Sarastro for safekeeping.
Die Zauberflöte was dangerous politics in its day. Mozart’s one in the eye for Austrian Empress, Maria Theresa who had safely died in 1780, eleven years before Die Zauberflöte premiered in the Theater auf der Wieden, Austria. She had tried to ban the Free Masons. Mozart was one of their number. There is also more than a hint of misogyny in the characterisation of a queen/empress who cannot emote without losing her reason.
The aria is sublime. In the original meaning of the word. Beautiful, but haughty. American soprano, Kathryn Lewek, who sings The Queen of the Night in this New York production, describes the experience as “throwing musical darts with your eyes closed.” The American soprano, with more than three hundred Der Hölle Rache performances on her global charge sheet is widely acknowledged as the best exponent of the aria in the world.
The risk is that with the wrong voice and attitude, the music can sound like a happy, bouncy bugle call. No fear. Lewek laces every jumping interval with acid. She convincingly switches from her opening role of a good mum rescuing her daughter from a tyrant to a deranged schemer handing Pamina a knife to murder Sarastro. Lewek sums it up neatly, “OK, toots, you go get the land back”.
Mozart wrote this “rage” aria in an entirely novel way. The accepted form was in a minor key with a simply menacing narrative. Think Donna Elvira’s Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata aria in Don Giovanni.
Der Hölle Rache is set free by Mozart from all convention. It starts its journey normally, in a minor key, but quickly the words are subsumed by these seemingly impossible staccato intervals. Penetrating sound, no enunciation. Lost for words. All reason and control gone.
Lewek describes how she needs to jump into it. She finds the fiendish aria – effortless as her performances always seem – bloody difficult. “It starts with an orchestral tremolo. I like the conductor to dive in on the previous closing words, ‘kein wort’. A bit like hang gliding. I have to leap, not run.”
If anyone listening to Lewek at that Saturday matinee performance did not end up with the hairs standing on the back of their necks and a sense of having been completely overwhelmed, I advise joining the lads with the golden NASA disc on Zog.
This performance was no less than a pinnacle of human achievement. Nothing like this aria has been attempted by any composer before or since. And we are privileged that Lewek is around to execute it.
Setting the opera was producer, Julie Taymor, also the costume designer. This abridged version was created for the Met in 2006 and performed in Sydney in 2012. Taymor has had a hugely successful Broadway career. Her bathroom cabinet is stuffed with Tonys.
Perhaps the best known is her The Lion King. The sparkling visuals, enhanced by masterful puppetry, also designed by Taymor and collaborator Michael Curry, entrance Flute veterans and newbie children in the audience alike.
A truly scary dragon, diaphanous dancing bears, sky-high pink flamingos are just for starters. In the scene where Papageno, the birdcatcher, and Tamino, the hero prince charged with rescuing Pamina, are at last provided with nourishment, flying sausages, chicken drumsticks, cheeses, ice creams and cakes dance, temptingly out of reach, above a groaning table.
When The Queen of the Night first appears, she is framed by fluttering, shimmering wings, each manipulated by an unseen puppeteer, against a black background. The effect is spectacular.
Papageno, Rolando Villazón, a Mexican tenor, was a brilliant comic actor and foil to Prince Tamino, Piotr Buszewski. The Polish tenor – a rising star – who premiered at the Met earlier this year in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, preserved his boyish optimism through every fiery trial.
Pamina, Illinois soprano Janai Brugger, has appeared at the Met regularly since 2012, and has sung the role at Covent Garden, London. She was up for the brutal confrontations with her evil mother, which added vim to the narrative. No patsy. A heavyweight Sarastro came courtesy of English bass Brindley Sherratt, also a Covent Garden veteran.
The Met has a full-length version of Die Zauberflöte in production, courtesy of Simon McBurney, a co-production with English National Opera. In New York last season Lewek again took on the role of The Queen of the Night. McBurney is more avant garde. Papageno peeing in a bucket was a rude joke too far.
So, for Christmas fare it this Taymor production that hits the spot. With any luck it will return next year and, as Duke Ellington would have encouraged, I will again ‘Take the “A” Train.’ What was I doing at 175th Street? That will have to wait until 2024.
Happy Christmas!
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life