Weekend Edition January 13-15, 2012
Architect, Big-Picture Thinker and Painter, and Fantasist
Misogyny in a Sublime Setting
Berlin
Friedrich Schinkel (1741–1841) was more than the architect who shaped 19th-century
Berlin. He was also a talented and indefatigable draftsman, as well a
painter with a taste for Gothic fantasy and classical temples being
assembled by naked youths pushing around huge blocks of marble.
Schinkel’s range as a designer and architect was immense, extending
from the massive Ionian temple that is the Old Museum in the center of
Berlin to the Iron Cross medal. Among his most grandiose architectural
schemes were those for a palace on the Acropolis in Athens and for the
completion of the Cologne Cathedral, which was in a pitiably state when
he visited it in 1816. It would be an understatement to claim that the
Ancient world held a fascination for the Schinkel. It was more like an
obsession.
Among Schinkel’s finest and most accessible achievements are his designs, also from 1816, for a production of Mozart’s Magic Flute.
The sets display Schinkel’s unmatched command of architectural detail
and his uncanny ability to create the illusion of vast and varied
buildings and landscapes. There are dark caves and cliffs, as in the
opening scene of the opera, which finds the hero Tamino pursued by
dragons and then discovered by the birdcatcher and his subsequent
sidekick Papageno.
But even more dazzling to the eye are the temples where Sarastro and
his Priests conduct their sacred rites. Massive Egyptian columns with
complex flutings and even more elaborate capitals dazzle the eye not
only with their exactitude, but also in the way they almost magically
expand theatrical space and draw the eye into an impossibly expansive
world.
Dark grottoes and interiors alternate with palm-strewn gardens and
open air temples below skies whose green-blue shadings evoke the
Mediterranean light of late afternoon. Long views of a great river,
presumably the Nile, are foregrounded by reeds, with the blue water
sweeping broadly clockwise around an outcropping crowned by a temple
complex, carefully imagined and executed, but also luminous, even
whimsical, in its recreation of an ancient Egyptian without a single
ruin in sight. The mastery of theatrical perspective and illusion is
delightful not only for its detail and imagination, but also for its
contrasts of tonality and dimension: the hues constantly change and as
does the alternating sense of spaciousness and confinement.
If I had to choose between Schinkel’s masterpiece of opera design and
his diverse monuments and museums, I’d go for the former. At the opera
Schinkel could exercise all his talents—architect, big-picture thinker
and painter, and fantasist unfettered by cost, topography, and weather.
The placement of this Magic Flute in an idyllic Egypt—with a
few gothic German interiors thrown for mock terror— has to do not only
with Schinkel’s aesthetic fascination with the Ancient world, but also
with the likelihood that the he, like Mozart, was Mason. Schinkel’s
Egyptianism is attuned to the Masonic themes presented in the opera, at
times even too pitch-perfectly.
Since 1994 a production based directly on Schinkel’s design has been
in the repertoire of the Staatsoper Berlin. The company that premiered
this very production back in its famous opera house in 1816, has brought
the Schinkel sets to the Schiller Theater, its provisional home while
its permanent venue in the center of Berlin is being renovated. Last
Sunday was the final day on which this Magic Flute could be
seen this season. There was a matinee for families, at somewhat reduced
prices, and then an evening performance by which time the kids would be
in their beds rather than squirming in their seats during the nearly
three hour event.
I dragged my own gang to the afternoon show and there in the plaza in
front of the theater were mothers straightening the ties and hair bows
of their little opera-goers. We were hoping that a couple of these
diminutive connoisseurs would sit in front of us to allow for better
views of the stage across in the hardly raked orchestra seats of the
theater, built in the early 1950s after the original building was
destroyed in World War II. Sadly, we had had a quartet of large German
coiffures in front of us. Whenever I go to the opera, I think of
Adorno’s incomparable “Natural History of the Theater,” but especially
so last Sunday:
“Like an Odysseus sailing over a sea of human heads, and like him, anonymous, [the eye] can embark on the daring voyage to the stage. But first, it must escape from the prison of a Calypso in the shape of a fat woman whose hair-do blocks his escape from the cave. It twists and turns past Scylla and Charybdis, who lean towards each other and then spring apart, crushing everything between them. It skirts the Isle of Sirens in the shape of a girl’s soft neck at the noonday of her fair hair. The Phaeacian with the bald head in the front row is no longer a threat. Ecstatic with joy, Odysseus’ gaze lands on the knees of the coloratura soubrette, as if they were the shores of Ithaca.”
As for coloratura, in Schinkel’s Magic Flute the vessel for
its delivery descends in the first act from above, unobstructed by even
the most vertical of hairdos. The most famous image from
the production is the Queen of the Night’s arrival from the rafters on a
sliver of moon. She descends against the dome of night, veiled and
fulminating behind a scrim pierced by the stars cascading geometrically
above and behind her. The electric stars used nowadays are harsh and
brittle, a look that serves a useful dramatic purpose. But they seem
dissonant with the lighting design as whole, which achieves its effects
with all due modernity, yet one cleverly cloaked so that the balance and
inherent contrast of the images is not distorted. Refusing to be
outshone, Iride Martinez sang the part with anger and accuracy, hovering
with menace in front of her starry night.
The Queen’s two showpiece arias, divided between the two acts, are
literal high points of the opera, not only because of her heavenly perch
but for the stratospheric super-high Fs called for in both arias—just
about the highest pitch in the operatic repertoire. These vocal
pyrotechnics light up the night sky even more than the bright stars
themselves.
In the Magic Flute the irrationality of women is cast as the
enemy of reason, predictably embodied by men, with the exception of the
Moorish slave Monostatos and the sensualist nature-boy Papageno, who
wants nothing more than wine and woman, and has little time for the pomp
and trials to which the high-minded prince Tamino soon becomes
dedicated. Tamino’s beloved, Pamina—good daughter of the bad Queen and
the all-too-benevolent ruler, Sarastro—is hardly less irrational than
her mother, immediately contemplating suicide, for example, when Tamino,
obeying his vow of silence, refuses to speak to her when in the midst
of his trial to be admitted to the Brotherhood of enlightened priests.
The stiffly un-fun side of Enlightenment was represented most rigidly
in this production by Tamino, played by Stephan Rügamer. He was dressed
as an early 19th-century dandy, with the frock-coat and
finely-wrought sideburns of Schinkel himself: it was as if the great
architect was surveying his own work and singing its praises. Rügamer
sang well, the purity of his tenor matching the apparent steadfastness
of his on-stage moral character. He even had moments that approached
amorous rapture in his love aria, “Dies Bildniss” serenading the
portrait of his Pamina—this picture having caused him to fall in love
with her. Never was the idea of woman more succinctly objectified. As an
actor Rügamer was as unbending as Giza limestone, and was duly punished
by kids and parents alike with a less than lukewarm reception at the
curtain calls.
The priests with their headgear of waggling phallic fronds and their
calls for truth and wisdom were equally as unconvincing; their
beer-bellies screamed Oktoberfest rather than hymning Valley of Kings’
asceticism and devotion. Sarastro, sung powerfully by the Russian basso profundo Alexander
Vinogradov, was pious and good, his but the message lacks the verve and
vitality of his estranged wife with her threats and thunderbolts. The
pair’s bogus burying of the hatchet for the union of Tamino and Pamino
at the close of the opera is downright silly.
The Magic Opera, like so many other operas, is deeply misogynistic, and I could well imagine an antidote entitled The More Magical Flute in
which Pamino actually does use the dagger given to her by the Queen of
the Night to kill her father. If only Mozart could be called back from
the dead.
The best male performance came first in the form of Gyula Orendt’s
Papageno—lively of voice and action, and representing well my own
impatience with the holy rites, except when when they are accompanied by
that masterpiece of antique counterpoint presented in the orchestra
beneath the Lutheran hymn sung in unison by the two-armored men. Bad
guy, and whipping boy Monostatos sparkled sadistically in the trio of
Act I, scene two (“Du feines Täubchen) dragging around the imprisoned
Pamina. Monostatos was sung by the Moroccan, Abdellah Lasri, here done
up in period-true, but politically incorrect blackface: a Moor playing a
“Moor.” It made me imagine Michael Jackson dipping into the lampblack
to take on the part.
What Schinkel’s production helps show us through its Gothic grottos
and fabulous architectural ensembles, as intricate and buoyant as
Mozart’s musical ones, is that on the path towards Enlightenment, the
dark, wayward characters— cloaked by night or masked by blackface—are
the always the most fun.
DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Bach’s Feet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com
