Mozart - Die Zauberflöte (Aix-en-Provence, 2026)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Die Zauberflöte (Aix-en-Provence, 2026)

Festival d'Aix-en Prevence, 2026

Leonardo García Alarcón, Clément Cogitore, Ying Fang, Mauro Peter, Sabine Devieilhe, Sean Michael Plumb, Brindley Sherratt, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Alix Le Saux, Ashley Dixon, Adriana Bignagni Lesca, Emma Fekete, Rodolphe Briand, Damien Pass, Jonghyun Park, Yvon Moltzen, Jakob Geppert, Cléo Lou Straka, Zoé Höche

ARTE Concert - 21st July 2026

It's amazing - I think so anyway - how a great work of operatic art can be continually refreshed and revitalised hundreds of years after its creation, always having something new to tell us about our own times. That's the measure of great art of course and a great artform. Indeed there are few works in opera as enduring, as complete and unchallengingly brilliant as Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (although I can think of several other Mozart operas alone that fit that description). It's amazing how this can be achieved also with a minimal lightness of musical and directorial touch and without compromising the original mood and intent of the work. With a background in filmmaking, French director Clément Cogitore, sets out his stall for this production at the 2026 Aix-en-Provence Festival with simple grainy old movie footage, placing you in the world this particular Zauberflöte is going to inhabit, work its magic and share all its warmth, wisdom and love for humanity.

It's a historical period, but the implications and the human resonance of the WWII period chosen are not difficult to see applying to the contemporary world situation around us today. The opening footage is of people emerging out of the ruins of Berlin in the aftermath of the Second World War, the characters on the stage extending this out into the theatre and seeming to bring the audience into it, stepping back into time and really feeling like you are there in the midst of it. The focus is on clearing up and rebuilding, particularly from the perspective of the need to provide instruction and guidance to the children who have been left with a destroyed present and an unpromising future.

It's a thoughtful response to Mozart's opera on the part of the director, who by placing it in this setting captures the character emerging from an age of darkness much more effectively than the more typical magical fantasy setting ever manages to achieve. More than just delving deeper, Cogitore also attempts to widen the journey that Tamino and Pamina take to dig their way out of this bleak world by using children to stand in for the tenor and soprano singers as they pass through childhood and adolescence before the singers take over as young adults. There's a minor concern that the production might lose some of the 'magic' of The Magic Flute - and it has to be said that there is certainly less comedy playing in this version - but Die Zauberflöte is an opera of many dimensions, moods and colours and it can be instructive to focus on other aspects.

Cogitore's focus is indeed on the 'instructive' side of the opera. In Act I, Tamino is a child, struggling to survive amid the rubble and ruins; as is Papageno, doing what he can to get by with the meagre opportunities for finding food. The three ladies are dressed like those seen in the historical footage clearing bricks from the ruins, doing what they can to restore order and purpose, educating the children, providing food and providing protection from Tamino's terrifying dreams of snakes, setting the young boy a challenge to bring hope and a sense of purpose. The spoken dialogue is slightly adapted to the post-war situation in this way without changing the tone and intent of the original. It also brings a human element to the work. Not mythical figures, but people who have suffered real hardships and fears.

Further footage underlines the sense of purpose, the three boys a supportive gang of Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns. Pamina meanwhile is in great danger on the streets of New York, encountering or trying to keep out of the clutches of Monostatos as a New York policeman or security guard. Her mother, the Queen of the Night is indeed just a mother who has lost her daughter to the promise of the bright lights of the city, with all the concerns that brings. And of course, with Tamino and Pamina starting out in this way as young children, it brings greater emphasis on the dangers they face as they make a necessary journey to rebuild a new world shaped by a fresh new outlook, not to be subject to the old ways of ancient orders and ancient enmities. Which in this case means a path that is not pre-determined by either the Queen of the Night or Sarastro.

There is a natural shift that takes place in Act II and the director gives the opening dialogue before 'O Isis und Osiris' time to make its point and establish where we are in the next stage in Tamino and Pamina's journey, the young children now adolescents. Reflecting the dress of Monostatos as a New York officer of the peace - a corrupt one - in Act I, we now find ourselves in what looks like a booming post-war Golden Age of Capitalism of the 1940s into the 1950s. Sarastro is the blind president of a large company, taking questions from his 'shareholders' on the suitability of the new junior executive protégé he has in mind to presumably take over the running of the company. Or something along those lines. The 'company' seems to be involved in scientific research of a dubious nature and the outcome of the 'recruitment process' is a little more ambiguous than usual at the conclusion.

The production certainly puts a different complexion on the opera's central conflict of enlightenment versus obscurantism, reason versus superstition, peace over aggression, but ends up coming to the same conclusion that a new generation can (or needs to) learn from the conflicts and failings of the previous generation and lead humanity "in joy and peace towards a better world". It's an optimistic view inspired by the Age of Enlightenment that hasn't quite come to fruition: if we have undoubtedly made some progress there have been huge steps backward as well. The projections of the brave new world of the post-war boom USA does reflect the ambiguity of this and make its failings recognisable, although perhaps wisely the production team avoid the rather negative portrayal of the dark skinned Monostatos as a reflection of race issues in the USA.

Under the musical direction of Leonardo García Alarcón - whose background is more in early baroque opera - the overture takes off at full tilt, but thereafter is filled with all the warmth, optimism, character and beauty of the music. I mean, The Magic Flute really is a thing of almost transcendent beauty and if you can get a stage production to reflect that and maybe even find new aspects to highlight, so much the better, but it's no doubt difficult to reconcile all the contrasts and tones. There is less of a comic element here certainly, fewer of Papageno's antics; that character is still there but Cogitore chooses to focus on other human characteristics that are deemed more important to highlight at the present time. What is important is that nothing in the work is taken for granted, as routine or going through motions, but rather honing in on the emotional undercurrents and reflecting on what charges and transforms them into actions.

Sadly, Tamino's nature as a model to aspire to still remains elusive. Cogitore in an interview for the Aix production admits as much and confirms that is the main reason for the choice of showing him starting out as a child and learning from the ways of the world. Mauro Peter's task is complicated somewhat then by having to let young actors act out two-thirds of the opera, and while sounding fine, doesn't succeed in imbuing Tamino with any more personality. The same challenge faced Ying Fang, who was nonetheless a superb Pamina, striving to make a connection with her 'avatar'. Her 'Ach, ich fühl's' demonstrated the richness of her voice and the emotional charge behind it. Papageno was intentionally underplayed by Sean Michael Plumb, but sung well. If that sound like the singing was lacking, it's not the case. Often, not always but often, Tamino and Pamina are rather lacking in character and tend to be overshadowed by the other larger than life figures. Not so here, where I feel the balance better distributed.

By the same token, despite their characters' blaze and bluster neither Königen der Nacht nor Sarastro dominated. Sabine Devieilhe doesn't have the heft of a typical Queen of the Night and is lighter of voice but more than capable for the challenges of the role and the all-important interpretation of character. Sarastro's booming character likewise was suitably adjusted by Brindley Sherratt and the director, depicted as blind (to the future?) rather than authoritarian. I'm not sure it quite reconciles or finds a path between the darkness and the light - Robert Carsen did that best for my money in Paris in 2014 - but then The Magic Flute should always be a reflection of where we lie on that path today and the period chosen here does force us to view the world now on the edge of great change (if not destruction) and consider who we chose to lead us through it.

External links: ARTE Concert, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, La Scène Numérique du Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

Mozart - Idomeneo (Salzburg, 2019)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Idomeneo

Salzburger Festspiele, 2019

Teodor Currentzis, Peter Sellars, Russell Thomas, Paula Murrihy, Ying Fang, Nicole Chevalier, Levy Sekgapane, Issachah Savage, Jonathan Lemalu

Medici streaming - 12 August 2019

After their take on La Clemenza di Tito in the same venue in 2017, there would have been little doubt that the 2019 Salzburg Festival production of Idomeneo would be controversial; the only question being whether it would be Peter Sellars or Teodor Currentzis who would be most wayward in their in interpretation of one of Mozart's most interesting operas. Well, it's a close run thing.

Mozart's operas are so rich in music and multifaceted in their content and themes that they are eminently amenable to deeper exploration, reinterpretation and modern revision; nothing about them has dated. As an early opera seria however, with a baroque libretto written for André Campra, Idomeneo does certainly still have one foot in a bygone age, yet it is already progressive in terms of Mozart's reworking, reinvention and humanistic outlook. Filtered through the young Mozart's sensibility and remarkable talent, all those conventional laments, jealousies, cruel twists of fate and extreme human sentiments feel vivid, alive and real.

It's so powerful an advance on the mannerisms of the past that it demands an equally imaginative, modern and humanistic interpretation in stage performance. Perhaps not everyone wants it to go as far as Dieter Dorn’s at the Munich Bayerische Staatoper or Damiano Michieletto in Vienna, or indeed as Sellas and Currentzis not unexpectedly take it here, but it's hard to argue that they don't bring a sincere response to the musical and dramatic content of Idomeneo, striving to find a way to highlight the richness of its themes and development of its characters.

Initially however, you are definitely thrown a little off-balance by the oddness of the set developed for the very specific demands of the Salzburg Felsenreitschule. Not a single object on the stage is related to the actual Crete settings of the opera, nor are they naturalistic or in most cases even identifiable. The stage on the floor of the Riding School theatre has clear plastic tubes that rise up as columns with coloured lights, the stage littered elsewhere with misshapen plastic containers, tubes and inflatable blob like creatures - perhaps a different kind of monster that is disgorged by the sea in this age of environmental disaster. The costumes of the Greeks and their Trojan prisoners is militaristic, but the coloured camouflage outfits look more like pyjamas.

As unusual as the set looks, the unfamiliar sound, pacing and rhythms that Teodor Currentzis brings out in the period instrument interpretation of the opera with the Freiburger Barockorchester can be even more unsettling as it sounds very different here from any recording you might be more familiar with. The intention is clearly to push the range of expression that Mozart employs for this opera, marking it out as very different from the baroque works that precede it, exploiting and emphasising the dynamic that Mozart employs for this unique and brilliant work.

At times you get the impression that the intention is also to do everything possible to break away from Mozart as comfortable and easy-listening, perhaps over-emphasising and deliberately pushing against the familiar. It's slow when you expect it to be faster, fast when you expect it to be slower, aggressive when you would expect merely forceful, but it never seems to work against the intent of the work. It hints rather that all might not be as it appears on the surface of the moral, political and romantic dilemmas of each of the characters whose lives have been thrown into turmoil under the curse of Neptune; absolutes and certainties - being saved from the dead, feeling secure in love, family loyalties - are all indeed turned on their head.

What Currentzis and Sellars do however is force you to reconsider the work in new terms, not rest on the certainty of familiarity, but be challenged afresh by every scene, every aria and recitative, every single note, trying to hear what is really being expressed in the melody, the tempo and the instrumentation - the fortepiano notably playing a larger role here than in any version of this work I've heard before.

If you can put up with Peter Sellars's more annoying mannerisms - the choreographic ritualised steps and semaphore arm signals (which are at least better than park and bark performances) - his direction of the internal nature and conflict of the characters is interesting. It's almost what you would expect to find in The Magic Flute: characters out of balance, seeking to find an emotional equilibrium as well as find an accord with the forces of nature and their place in the world, seeking wisdom, seeking answers, seeking peace and willing to endure suffering and trials for it. It does show that Idomeneo is practically a prototype for Die Zauberflöte (With Electra a furious Queen of the Night and Neptune a lesson-giving Sarastro), and in that respect the treatment is thoroughly Mozartian.

Not that some sections of the Salzburg would notice. When it comes down to who upsets them most, the director traditionally gets it in the neck and Currentzis's eccentricities and indulgences are overlooked. In truth, neither are entirely successful and it comes across as a little over-laboured, over-intellectualised, existing in some theatrical vacuum that doesn't entirely connect with Mozart's Idomeneo on a relatable and instinctive human level. It's a fascinating account nonetheless of a magnificent, deeply beautiful work, one that is emphasised by some fine committed singing performances, notably from a sweetly lyrical Ying Fang as Ilya and a fiery Nicole Chevalier as Elektra (almost stealing the show at the finale), but all of the performances impress, including Paula Murrihy as an intensely sincere Idamante and Russell Thomas as a warm and troubled Idomeneo.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele