Sexist, racist, ageist: Singapore Lyric Opera updates Mozart’s The Magic Flute

SINGAPORE – British opera director Harry Fehr loves Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although he admits he was not desperate to direct the composer’s final opera The Magic Flute (1791) when invited by Singapore Lyric Opera (SLO) artistic director Nancy Yuen.

“The ageism is slight. The racism is explicit, but quite easily removed. But the misogyny is ingrained throughout the piece,” the 46-year-old tells The Straits Times over Zoom from Goodman Arts Centre.

“And I’m going to simply say it – (The Magic Flute’s librettist) Emanuel Schikaneder was not Shakespeare and he wasn’t Ibsen. The dramaturgy of this piece is quite dodgy, particularly in Act II, and it’s hard to work out exactly what’s going on.”

Despite these problems, Fehr – who relishes the tonal variety of Mozart’s music – has taken up the challenge and rewritten much of the dialogue in the opera so that it speaks to contemporary audiences.

“One has to be honest. If Mozart had not written the music to this piece, it would not be performed today. It is the music that Mozart wrote which elevates this piece to the realms of profundity. It is a profound experience to hear this.”

SLO’s The Magic Flute, which plays at the Victoria Theatre on Dec 19 and 20, is sold out. The quick sales were boosted by the SG Culture Pass, which accounted for 46 per cent of sales.

In The Magic Flute, Singaporean soprano Joyce Lee Tung is the Queen of the Night and takes on the famously virtuosic aria Der Holle Rache. The cosmopolitan cast includes Peruvian tenor Oscar Ruben Alarcon Ore as the noble prince hero Tamino and Renata Hann Sungwon, a soprano from South Korea who plays Tamino’s love interest Pamina.

In Fehr’s version, Tamino’s birdcatcher companion Papageno’s (Edward Kim Kyungduk) love interest is no longer initially the old woman Papagena (Kezia Robson), whose age is used as a comic device, but a young woman who has something different about her.

The role of Monostatos (Kee Chun Kiat) – historically performed in racist blackface make-up until the 20th century – will be rewritten.

Sarastro (Benedikt Berndonner) and his order of sexist priests will be given a makeover as well. All these changes, Fehr hopes, will not detract from how the original story is one about young people on a journey of self-discovery, love, friendship, reconciliation and hope.

Minimalism will reign supreme in the set design for the show, which has a high six-figure budget.

Says Fehr, who has directed operas internationally: “Times are hard in the arts sector and costs have risen exponentially in the last few years, so all companies are feeling the squeeze. I always feel this – don’t try and create something beyond your means. It’s better to do something simple that looks really good than trying to do something lavish which just looks like it’s being done on the cheap.”

Fehr has always been interested in the tension between opera’s artifice and highly detailed naturalistic sets, but adds that declining budgets have pushed him to explore different kinds of staging.

A recent stripped-back staging of Carmen at the Royal Academy of Music in London gave him the confidence to embrace minimalism for The Magic Flute.

Referencing the historic Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna where The Magic Flute premiered, Fehr says: “The Magic Flute was created for a theatre only slightly bigger than the Victoria Theatre. It was a suburban theatre, not a court theatre and so was also not lavishly funded.”

SLO comes full circle with this production of the first opera the company presented as the Lyric Theatre in 1991. Yuen says that semi-staged operas have been popular with SLO’s audiences and that she plans to attract new audiences by exploring contemporary approaches to opera, in addition to traditional ones, and attracting people to full-length operas through performances of famous opera arias or duets.

While Fehr knows there might be members of the company and chorus involved in the production 35 years ago, he makes it a point not to read or hear about other people’s productions before his own is solidified in rehearsal.

In a preview of the 1991 Balinese-inspired production of The Magic Flute, British director Tom Hawkes told ST the opera has often been criticised as anti-women, but said with a grin: “Certain lines in the text are rather inflammatory. But, controversy is no bad thing – art thrives on that.”

Fehr, who hopes to give new life to The Magic Flute in an age where discussions about identity are more prominent, says: “Misogyny is an essential part of the piece, but it doesn’t destroy the piece. It’s basically making sure that our audiences understand that the misogynistic attitudes of some of the characters are not being condoned by the production.

“The production is judging the misogyny badly in the same way that our audience will be.”