The Magic Flute
Yet the casual slurs uttered against women by virtually every male character in The Magic Flute are not easy to ignore. You don’t have to be an industrial-strength feminist to bristle at the constant references to women as vain, chattering twits who tend toward overweening pride and betray their admirers without compunction, or at the Three Ladies (who, after all, open the opera by slaying a dragon to save the hero) singing “Men are strong, but we are weak.” Then there’s the institutional sexism: the motto at the Temple of Wisdom is “Guard against the wiles of woman: that is the first duty of the brotherhood.” And tokenism: the princess Pamina is evidently the only case extant of “a woman who is not afraid of night and death [who] is worthy and will be initiated.”
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The opera’s racism is less pervasive but still troubling. The Moorish slave Monostatos sings that black men are ugly and that white is beautiful, and references are made to the blackness of his heart as well as his skin; his villainy is clearly tied to his melanin. When he and the Three Ladies and the Queen of the Night team up to take on the white male establishment they’re cast into perdition. Librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the intensely common-man role of Papageno for himself, was reflecting the views of his time, though he no doubt intended to render them in a comic way.
The Magic Flute has always seemed like an obvious choice for COT, which built its early reputation on intimate, well-acted productions of Mozart’s operas, and it’s a little surprising to realize that the company managed to go more than 20 years without essaying it. For the most part, this production (the opening of the second season with COT’s artistic team of Ratner and Rapchak) was pleasurable, though it had some major weaknesses, including several poor casting decisions.
As the Queen of the Night, Susan Wallin displayed a chirpy voice better suited to Blondchen than a villainess; it was prone to sharping and erratic in the money notes on top. David Huneryager’s baritone was dry and pinched in the upper register, and his characterization of Papageno was on the colorless side. Individually the Three Ladies (Elizabeth Miller, Lesley Goodman, Susan Nicely) were fine singers, but they were mismatched in an ensemble where the blend is important. The chorus was impressive, singing sonorously, although they were noticeably off the beat in some of their offstage singing. And the Papageno clan could have used a few more kids.
