My plan to listen to the essential works of Mozart and Beethoven has already gotten sidetracked -- but that was always the larger plan anyway: to find what resonated with me and then get sidetracked by it! More than a month after making myself a list of 22 pieces to listen to, 11 from each composer, I have listened to a grand total of one Beethoven symphony, two Mozart concertos -- and (over and over and over again!) The Magic Flute.
It was rough going in the beginning. I had to overcome a general aversion to video, complete unfamiliarity with the idiom of opera, and a libretto that doesn't make a lick of sense even if you speak the language, which I don't really. (In addition to the original German, I've also read it in English, French, and Spanish translations. It doesn't help much.) After listening to the whole thing once through, I slept on it, and it all came together for me during a night full of vivid dreams, in which I heard every aria in the opera (or a lot of them, anyway) being sung simultaneously and yet was somehow able to give them all my full attention. I felt as if a whole new planet had swum into my ken, and I awoke feeling as if I had experienced the real opera, of which all earthly performances were but feeble approximations. Knowing what they are feeble approximations of has made all the difference to the listening experience, and I've just been listening to it again and again ever since that night. YouTube has a seemingly endless supply of different performances, and I can't imagine it'll be long before I've listened to them all (excluding, of course, the few that are deliberate acts of musical vandalism).
Whether or not I'll ever get back to my original to-listen lists remains to be seen. For now, having discovered this one piece has been more than enough to make the whole project worthwhile.
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3 comments:
Magic Flute is probably my favourite piece of music ever. It is a combination of the sublime and the natural which is unique in my experience.
The Ingmar Bergman film is my favourite interpretation (although it isn't the best sung).
It does make sense, of course, at a deep level. It was pretty well explained by Robert Donington using Jungian concepts in a section of his book, Wagner's Ring and its Symbols - I suspect Bergson may have come across that before making his movie.
"It does make sense, of course, at a deep level."
I'll take that as a challenge, Bruce! I suppose it makes sense on a vague allegorical level, but I find it very difficult to understand the plot in the basic sense of understanding what motivates the various characters to do what they do. I'll give it some more attention and see if I can figure it out.
The general theme of a Masonic-style initiation culminating in marriage certainly reminded me of the Mormon temple.
I finally got around to watching Bergman's version -- in Swedish! I'd never heard of anyone performing an opera in translation before, but it works. (The subtitles were in English verse which in some cases was obviously very different from the Swedish, particularly in "Mann und Weib.")
I agree that it's a very good interpretation. Making Sarastro Pamina's father was a clever twist that makes sense of a lot of things. I also enjoyed a lot of the little touches, like the longsuffering priest who has been assigned to "deal with" Papageno's initiation.
The movie format has a lot of advantages over theater -- most notably, that during the spoken bits the actors can speak in normal voices, or even whisper, instead of having to declaim everything.
Incidentally, you mentioned that this version "isn't the best sung." Which performances, in your opinion, are the best sung?
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