Mozart of Mary

Mary Zimmerman on bringing new life to Mozart’s final opera

On WHY The Matchbox Magic Flute

I think asking how or why I got the idea to adapt [Mozart’s] The Magic Flute is sometimes the wrong question. It’s like asking why you chose to fall in love with someone — it wasn’t a choice. The Magic Flute is a piece I’ve always loved. It has everything: dragons, adventure, villains, and an astonishing range of beautiful music (from extremely high arias to low, quartets, quintets, and trios). There are spoken scenes; it’s funny, and it signals that humor early on with the three ladies. They were funny hundreds of years ago, and they’re still funny today. Most of the work I’ve done has an epic quality to it and The Matchbox Magic Flute is no exception. There’s travel, danger, and adventure.

On Adaptation

What keeps The Matchbox Magic Flute still The Magic Flute is Mozart’s music. Although the instrumentation is radically reduced, there are big cuts, and the style of singing is more music-hall than opera, the tunes are the same: The melodies and harmonies are intact, and that’s the heart of it. You can’t abandon that. What’s new, is how I’ve lightened the tone of the libretto and taken out some of the heavier quasi-religious elements. I hope that through restructuring the second act and clarifying parts of the libretto, the story makes more sense. The way you adapt a text inevitably reflects your own tastes. In this case, I’ve removed the emphasis on the fraternal order. In the original, there’s a lot about not listening to women and bonding with men as the highest calling. That said, I think the misogyny in Mozart’s The Magic Flute is often overstated. The flute itself, the symbol of music and enchantment, with its power to create harmony and peace, is crafted by the Queen of the Night — supposedly the villain of the story. She made the flute at midnight, with only the moon for company — and that’s why we have music. So, there’s a balance to this darker portrayal of women that often gets overlooked.

On the intersection of Theatre and Opera

A key difference between opera and other forms, in terms of genre or structure, is that in opera, the music is the text. It’s both the text and the subtext. The lyrics make thought explicit, but the true voice, the dominating intelligence, is the music. When you’re directing a play, the main task — when working with actors — is negotiating how each line is delivered: the pitch, pace, volume, accent, and rhythm. We don’t reduce the process to such blunt terms, but that is how meaning is created. How a line is said — its rhythm, speed, and all those dynamics — are what shape the performance. In opera, all of those dynamics are pre-determined by the score. You can’t adjust the pitch, rhythm, or meter because they’re all fixed in the music. So, in the rehearsal room, the work is different. Your job as a director isn’t to shape the delivery in the same way you would in a play.

This is a theatrical adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a hybrid, so I wanted to find the ways to bring the two worlds together. The Matchbox Magic Flute is so much about the theatre — it constantly quotes the theatre, not just in its archetypal story, but in its painted scenery, red velvet curtains, fake box seats, the shell footlights, trompe-l'œil painting. It is old-timey, I hope, in the best way. We use periaktoi for quick rotating scenic elements — an ancient Greek theatrical device. There’s an openness in how the actors double in roles, which you never see in opera. Yet, we have little chandeliers which rise at the top of the show, which is a nod to the chandeliers at The Met that rise as the lights dim. At the very beginning of the show, our Spirit strikes a cane on the floor three times, which is an old French tradition of calling the audience to attention (it was originally a signal to the rigging crew backstage). The production is full of these ancient theatre traditions, and its very artificiality is part of the spectacle.

On the “Matchbox” of The Matchbox Magic Flute

I wanted to take something grand and compress it into something small while preserving as much detail, richness, and specificity as possible. I wanted it to feel as if you’re in a small 1700s theatre. I was inspired by the little private theatres you sometimes find in chateaux and palaces in Europe. They are extravagantly decorated, but only seat a few dozen people, with room for a tiny orchestra. They’re like toy theatres, but real performances would take place in them. I wanted to create that sense of overabundance — something grand but accessible — something that gives the audience a huge experience for the price of a theatre ticket. An opera scholar I deeply admire saw an early preview and told me, ‘I’m quite sure this is what it felt like when it first premiered’ and that made me very happy.

There’s a story about Bellini, who wrote the opera Norma. When it was a big hit, it moved to a larger theatre, and he wrote to a friend, starting his letter with ‘Fiasco! Fiasco! the theatre is too large — 600 seats!’ That’s so telling, considering that most opera houses today seat in the thousands. That enlarged scale demands a particular kind of singer and excludes many of the kinds of voices that Mozart originally worked with. There are many beautiful voices out there that will never sing opera simply because they don’t have the size for those massive spaces. Opera didn’t start out as the huge production it’s become. Back then, it was the popular music of its time, which is hard to convince people of today.

On returning to Berkeley Rep

When we were first rehearsing the show, putting it together, I was in a state of near constant ecstasy, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I would drive home but keep driving past my house for an hour, up along the lake, even during tech rehearsals. I was just so high from the craftiness and cunning of the artists around me, steeped in this theatricality, and from the music, which never left my head for a second. I find that as we prepare to come to Berkeley — my theatrical home away from home — that excitement is rising in me again. And the tunes are haunting me.