The penultimate premiere of the Brno National Opera’s 2021/22 season promises to be another unique contribution to the company’s repertoire. Mozart’s The Magic Flute is on the program, with theatre director Miroslav Krobot taking over the direction, for an unconventional and all the more interesting journey to another planet. Photo credit: NdB Opera.
Brno, April 5 (BD) – The new version of “The Magic Flute” will be the first opera production directed by the actor and director Miroslav Krobot, previously director of the Dejvice Theatre. It was here that he first encountered Mozart’s most popular opera, staging an adaptation of it with his Dejvice company to great acclaim in 2003.
“The Magic Flute is about hope, which, especially today, is quite necessary,” said Krobot. “But I would see it, even without these momentary crises, as a basic simple relationship between two people, about love and a certain hope that can solve a lot of things. Making the opera compelling and interesting is the hardest thing about The Magic Flute. To not be just a fairy tale cliché. Meeting opera is a great challenge for me, and I approach it with respect and humility. We want to take inspiration from the diversity of Mozart’s music and the comedic potential of the libretto and stage a visually and musically appealing production.”
With the help of a magical flute, the talkative bird Papageno and three mischievous little Genii, Tamino searches for the beautiful Pamina, who has been kidnapped from her mother, the Queen of the Night, by the powerful Sarastro. So begins Mozart’s opera, but this version of the story has its origins many years earlier on the spaceship Seven Suns of the Rings, which, due to a malfunction, ended up in an unplanned orbit around an unknown planet. The crew beamed down to the surface to spend a number of years trying to regain control of the ship. As the years passed, the rift between the crew members grew, culminating in the death of the captain. Against expectations, he handed over his powers not to the first mate with the poetic nickname Queen of the Night, but to the second mate, Sarastro. Both camps continued their futile attempts to regain control of the spacecraft, but that task can only be accomplished by a new generation.
“Andrej Ďurik and I were looking for a visual form,” added Krobot. “The fairy tale is a bit too first-rate for us. And fantasy is a genre that is very popular today and actually usually has a good ending too. That’s why we chose it as a solution. Andrej Ďurík and I were both visually entertained by those old Star Trek movies from the sixties and seventies, which are nowadays basically fairy tales and in a way actually touching.”
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”538″ gal_title=”Preview magic flute”]The Magic Flute is based on the tradition of the singspiel, which alternates singing with spoken word, and is full of philosophy and symbolic references, but also humour and above all the charming music of Mozart. The premiere will take place on Wednesday, 13 April 2022 at 7pm at the Janáček Theatre. Photo credit: NdB Opera.
