Yesterday, we went to see the 2025 production of “The Magic Flute” at the Seattle Opera. This was a relatively new production that was originally created in 2012 by Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade for Komische Oper in Berlin.
Featuring seamless interaction between onstage performers and animated visuals, this production is a “wonderful show” that is “great for opera lovers, newbies and the whole family” (Los Angeles Times). Inspired by silent movies, Barrie Kosky’s colorful and energetic production comes to Seattle after receiving standing ovations at opera houses around the world.
https://www.seattleopera.org/performances-events/the-magic-flute-2025/
The Seattle Times called it “The Hamilton of opera stagings.” Here is a trailer:
I can see that this was a technically challenging feat to pull off. The projections had to be spot on, the performers had to be exactly in the right place.
Unfortunately, this staging didn’t work for me at all. In fact, it was the worst opera performance I have seen in over 15 seasons of watching opera at the Houston Grand Opera and the Seattle Opera.
Probably the worst part for me were the “silent movie intertitles,” when the opera switched from Mozart’s beautiful orchestral music to cheap and off-tune sounding harpsichord music. We understood that they were trying to imitate the written explanations between scenes in silent films, but these were jarring interruption in the music. And even in the silent film days, grand theater performances and opening nights would have full orchestras. It was the cheap, sad theaters away from Hollywood that had the single harpsichord or out-of-tune pocket piano to provide the music.
This production interrupted Mozart’s beautiful score with cheap theater music… not because linking it to silent film somehow required it, but to make a stereotypical joke. Wrong priorities for people who I assume love music.
The combination between silent film and opera also feels very questionable. Sure, both silent film and opera are melodramatic, over-the-top. But the ways performers emote in both are just so incompatible. In “Sunset Blvd.,” Norma Desmond says “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces.” In silent film, performers emoted with their faces. In opera, you emote with the music and with the singer’s voices. Having opera singers be silent in those misguided silent film intertitles felt like such a strange waste of talent. Interrupting the music and the moment to make the “silent movie joke,” again and again, just killed the feelings the music is supposed to inspire in opera listeners. It was a record scratch, just as a gag.
My next problem was just how two-dimensional and therefore limited the principal performers had to be because of the staging. They had a few doors that could open, and the performers were essentially pinned to the wall, like dead butterflies. They hardly moved, they hardly interacted with each other. Frequently, the principals were projected over. With the Queen of the Night, I couldn’t even tell if there actually was a live singer inside. Sadly, having the live singers didn’t add anything. The Seattle Opera could have recorded the whole thing once and projected everything, like a movie in a movie theater.
Having great acting and elaborate staging isn’t absolutely necessary, because in the end, it is more about the music than about the acting — as we have seen just recently with the fantastic “in concert” staging of “Les Troyens” at the Seattle Opera — but as described above, the musical side was atrocious, ripped apart into dozens of small chunks by the silent movie intertitle joke.
I am fine with minimal stagings. But this wasn’t it. It was minimal on the side of the performers, but at the same time maximally and unnecessarily busy on the projection side. Everything was always moving, filled with distracting jokes, repetitive and busy. It is simply criminal when the visual side is so stimulating that it overwhelms the Queen of the Night’s “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” aria, which is so iconic that one should do everything possible to let it stand by itself.
That the focus was on the wrong part was never clearer than in the “Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht, es siegte die Stärke” finale, when — almost for the first time — a larger group of performers gathered, yet they were black and white, projected over with fake “old movie dust” and film imperfections, while on bright red background an animation of musical notes zoomed around.
Then there were disconnects between the imagery and the story. Why was Sarastro represented so robotic and cold? Doesn’t he represent the sun? Sure, the Queen of the Night was a big spider, but she seemed more organic and less creepy to me than mechanical-analytical Sarastro. What was the meaning of the creepy eyes and the silent, top-hatted men that were surrounding Pamina… when they were supposed to re-assure her of Tamino’s love?
Maybe there was a little bit too much creative license given to the animator. At least too much for me to understand. And that would have been okay, had I been able to close my eyes and just enjoy the music. But I couldn’t, because of the silent movie intertitle joke.
Many audience members seemed to love this production. There was a lot of laughter. But to me, the focus was wrong. This was a production for the ADHD generation of TikTok consumers — one that might as well be consumed as a movie, in a movie theater, and not with live performers.
I am concerned if this is the direction the Seattle Opera will take. A staging like this one devalues the amazing skills of the singers and distracts from the beauty of the music.
