You know what they say: "The sequel is always worse than the original, except for The Godfather, Gremlins, and The Addams Family. And maybe Star Trek, though that's a special case for obvious reasons. Also, this rule really only applies to movies. It definitely doesn't apply to videogames, which is probably the medium that gets the second-most sequels. Does it apply to opera? Again, not really; Il barbieri may be a prequel, depending on how you count, but it was by a different composer in a different period, so it's a different kind of thing. Doesn't really apply to the Ring cycle either, which was all written together. ARE there any operatic sequels per se? Well, it might apply, depending on the circumstances. Hard to say."
That's right: they say that whole, long thing. Once they've started, you will never get them to stop. You might as well just walk away. Anyway: what's this all about, dammit? Well, I think this is the first operatic sequel I've seen, and certainly the only one made more or less for the same reasons that most film sequels are--ie, to capitalize on the original's success and make BIG BUX. Not to bury the lede--I mean, you could probably guess, but--this is the EXCITING SEQUEL to Die Zauberflöte. It retains the same librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, as the original, so it's doesn't feel like a TOTAL bootleg, but if anybody enjoyed the original because of the greatness of the libretto, I would look at them funny, SO.
This really, really does feel like a superfluous Hollywood sequel: more of the same with no real justification and to very little effect. So: guess what? Tamino and Pamina are all ready to get married, but GUESS WHAT? The Queen of the Night is BACK! You thought she was gone for good? MORE FOOL YOU. She wants to capture her daughter to get her to marry some dude in her army! Sarastro has to muster his troops to stop them! Tamino and Pamina need to be tested again, for no reason! The extent of Papageno's faithfulness to Papagena is tested (also, we meet his parents and siblings). And oh no, Pamina has been captured! Will she be saved? Will everything end pretty much like the first one? Yup.
Seriously this libretto is a hot mess. Stuff happens for no apparent reason with little drama and unclear character motivations. Also--it must be said--while the misogyny is more or less relegated to the background this time, it more than makes up for that with racism. Hurray! So Monostatos may be black in the original, but it's not a thing that's hammered very hard, and it's easy for any production to downplay it to the point where it's not visible at all. NOT SO HERE. The libretto very specifically calls attention to his blackness, and there's a subplot where he's trying to dress as a...Papageno-person (I'm pretty sure he was just meant to be a guy dressed as a bird in the original, but here they all seem to be actually human-bird hybrids) to get Papagena, but it's ludicrous because he's black and all the Papagenoids want to kill him for having given them trouble before, and this is already REALLY damn queasy-making, but then how about the part where he wriggles out of it by bribing Papageno by promising to get a black woman for him? Yup, no shit. Of course, in addition to everything else, this doesn't do much for Papageno's character. Nothing ultimately comes of this (we see the black woman in question very briefly--there's a thankless role--but she never speaks or does anything). Did I mention that Monostatos and the other slave are in blackface? As it probably would have been in the original, but STILL. I mean, if you're going to produce this opera at all, there's no good solution here. the only available production is from Salzburg; I expect one produced in the US would have just had him played by a regular white dude, brazening through the discordance with the libretto. But it would be problematic in any event. You might say "this shouldn't be produced at all, given the problems," but you can see why there would be interest in it. I think the way they do it here is the best of a bad lot of options: at least it emphasizes the artificiality of the whole thing.
(I'd like to note that around this same time, Salieri wrote a non-racist opera with a sympathetic interracial couple--go Sal!)
It's a shame, really, because the music here is actually terrific. It does not need the benefit of having low expectations due to Mozart comparisons! It stands on its own beautifully. As you would figure, there are references to Mozart aplenty (Papageno gets a lot of glockenspiel riffs; the Queen of the Night a lot of high notes in imitation of her famous aria), but it also stands very well on its own. Winter (the "von" appears to be an affectation à la Balzac) was a prolific composer and very popular in his time, but he sure has fallen out of the public consciousness. His wikipedia page is barely more than a stub and doesn't even include a complete list of his operas. Go figure. I'd love to see more of his work, but that seems highly unlikely at this time.
The performance that exists is very colorful. The only complaint I have with it is that Michael Schade is WILDLY miscast as Tamino--the character is underdeveloped, sure, and never more so than here, but while I feel like a jerk saying it, he is WAY too fat and old for the part. He looks like a substitute math teacher. Still, since it seems unlikely that this will be ever recorded again, ya gotta just roll with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment