Search Results

Bergman’s Magic Flute (1975) is one of the highlights of opera-film. It represents a splendid example of Bergman’s mastery of image and film technique, and a memorable interpretation of Mozart’s late opera. Except for chapters by Jeongwon Joe (1998) and Jeremy Tambling (1987), it has been underrepresented in research on opera-film. There is much more to be said, especially with respect to sound. Not only are Flute’s sound practices critical to the film, but its emphasis on vococentrism is unusual for an opera-film and also connects Flute to Bergman’s cinema as a whole. Many elements in the soundscape contribute to Bergman’s highly personal interpretation. One is the dry environment in the passages of spoken dialogue, recorded live and its contrast with the warmer environment in the musical numbers, which were prerecorded. The spoken sections impart a sense of intimacy and interiority, qualities found in other Bergman films, such as Persona, The Seventh Seal, and The Hour of the Wolf. Ambient noise occurs in some places, its use linked to certain moods and situations. Variations in the resonance of the vocal music add another element to the mix. This chapter focuses on three places in Flute. The second tableau, numbers 1-5, uses sound to delineate the juxtaposition of theater and cinema and establish a link between dry speech and interioirity. In the scene of Tamino’s crisis at “O ew’ge Nacht,” an expanded array of effects, including the acousmêtre and reverberation in addition to dryness, limn Tamino’s psyche and underscore a key moment of the opera. And at Pamina’s parental crisis in the first half of Act II, silence as well as sound plays an integral role. The striking sound design of Bergman and his team is crucial to the film’s aesthetic style, in which “less is more,” and its reputation as a landmark of opera-film.

This chapter discusses The Magic Flute, a work that probes modernity's democratic, communitarian aspirations. The subject of The Magic Flute is the revolution in values that occurred when the old regime, in which power was in the hands of the old, was replaced by a new order, in which the young were able to make their own autonomous choices. It is about the passing of mercy and the arrival of autonomy, and is also the work in which modern instrumental music acquires its own foundation myth. The abstract, autonomous subject of modern politics, no longer a mere “prince” but a universal “man,” finds his own medium in the new, abstract, autonomous art. Beethoven later took up the fundamental structure of this myth in a number of works, Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony among them.

This chapter criticizes Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden's translation of the opera The Rake's Progress, Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. It suggests that Auden's translation of the opera has given the lie to his earlier pronouncements that the verses which the librettist writes are not addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer and that in opera the orchestra is addressed to the singers not to the audience. It contends that The Rake's Progress has overcome the label of being merely an exercise in imitation because its music, especially music wedded to words, offered a chance for something different.

This chapter assesses the encounter between a youth opera group and Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Singing opera gave the young women in this group a sense of control and embodied confidence, negating the body image issues that several of them described. Against this, the strongly gendered institutional and cultural context of classical music, including the musical-dramatic text of The Magic Flute itself, undermined this experience thanks to the ideology of ‘fidelity’ to origins and authenticity that is normative in classical music culture. This inhibited the radical potential of the bodily empowerment that the young women experienced through limiting the possibilities for re-imagining the musical text, thus also limiting any possibilities for changing the practices that bring the text to life.

What purports to be the review of a Conservatoire concert—one that featured excerpts from Mozart’s Magic Flute—begins with a comic satire of audience misbehavior, mirrored by the players, who are having an off day. Berlioz briefly discusses the Haydn symphony on the program, and Beethoven’s Fourth, contrasting the two; but his review is mainly a pretext for denouncing the Parisian tradition, anathema to Berlioz, of adapting foreign works to the supposedly refined taste of the French. With scathing irony, he flays the mangling of Mozart’s Magic Flute by a arranger (Lachnith) whom he purposely leaves nameless but who as a German, he says, should be ashamed. Berlioz is in high gear as crusader, his satire unfolding in waves of indignation as he warms to his subject. A portion of this tirade will end up in his Memoirs.

This chapter shows the extent to which the self-confidence that culminated in The Magic Flute was undermined as the Revolution failed to achieve its democratic goals, arguing that the traditional image of Beethoven as the tone poet of the heroic Revolutionary and Napoleonic history, while not false, is one-sided. The Beethovenian abstraction out of time is the obverse of the Beethovenian heroic quest and its temporal teleology. Similarly to Rousseau's writing, Beethoven's composition is torn between the ideal of engagement in the historical social world and the wish to disengage from it, to escape into the private refuge beyond or within. In Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the ideal of engagement in the historical social world of an emancipating autonomous humanity is nostalgically commemorated as an infinitely postponed utopia, thus transcending in a complex way the simple opposition of cyclical and linear time.

The shift in the fundamental attitudes toward musical time did not occur suddenly within the few decades separating the two composers Bach and Mozart. Rather, both shifts extended over several centuries. This chapter offers an interpretation of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, a work that captures conflicting attitudes toward an early stage of emerging modernity. L'Orfeo was a vote of confidence for musical modernity. However, it was a half-hearted sort of confidence, affirming the values of modern harmony only as a consolation prize for the early modern subject defeated in his quest for autonomy. Almost two centuries had to pass for modern self-confidence to grow sufficiently to allow us to imagine a successful quest for autonomy, an Orpheus who triumphs in life, as in Mozart's The Magic Flute, rather than in death.

Berlioz’s first official article for the Journal des débats follows the order of the program in reviewing the first Conservatoire Orchestra concert of the season, thus conveying the typically varied and uneven nature of these programs. This one features the “Credo” from Beethoven’s Missa solemnis (sparking a tirade against rapid fugues on “Amen”) a violin solo by Mayseder, and a sacred choral piece (“Laus spirituali”), besides the three works Berlioz considers the heart of the concert: a lyric scene for voice and orchestra by the still largely unknown Schubert, Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, and the overture to Mozart’s Magic Flute. The article begins with a retrospective of the founding of the great Conservatoire orchestra, of musical conditions in Paris before its existence, and of the early obstacles to appreciation of Beethoven in France.