Had Mozart not succumbed to a streptococcal infection in 1791, the year might have been remembered as his annus mirabilis. In less than a year, the composer produced a remarkable sequence of works: two concertos – one for clarinet, the other for piano – the motet Ave verum corpus in D major, and two operas. Both of the operas are firmly embedded in the modern repertoire, but it is not the opera seria La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) that was immediately and permanently embraced by audiences, but its near-contemporary, the singspiel Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

First performed at Vienna’s Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in September 1791, in a production conducted by Mozart himself and with its librettist – the actor, impresario, and theatre owner Emanuel Schikaneder – playing Papageno, Die Zauberflöte was an unqualified success. Having won over Viennese audiences, Mozart’s ebullient score and Schikaneder’s fairy-tale-like plot dazzled German and thereafter European opera houses, a popular embrace that remains bear-like to this day. It is, by some accounts, the third most frequently performed opera in the world.

The narrative commences mid-action with Prince Tamino (Nicholas Jones) being pursued through an unfamiliar landscape by a monstrous serpent. Having been rescued by three ladies (Helena Dix, Catriona Barr, and Fiona McArdle) in the service of the Queen of the Night (Danielle Bavli), Tamino becomes besotted with the Queen’s daughter, Pamina (Sofia Troncoso). When the prince learns that Pamina has been captured by the purportedly tyrannical Sarastro (Teddy Tahu Rhodes), he vows to liberate her with the aid of two enchanted instruments: a set of magical bells and a flute of unique power. Our hero is joined on his quest by a fool of sorts, the uncouth bird-catcher Papageno (David Greco), who reluctantly accompanies Tamino as he attempts three tests which will, if successfully negotiated, lead to his initiation into Sarastro’s brotherhood and, ultimately, Pamina’s rescue.        

In the more than two hundred years since it première, much interpretive licence has been taken with Die Zauberflöte. Barry Kosky’s landmark 2012 production, seen by Australian audiences by way of the 2019 Perth and Adelaide Festivals, drew on silent film and German expressionism, boldly interlacing animation and live video with its on-stage performers. Other versions have been located in contemporary South Africa, and still more in nebulous, quasi-mythical realms. Opera Australia’s 2014 production, from which this production borrows Michael Gow’s vernacular adaptation of Schikaneder’s Egypt-set libretto, glanced back at Indiana Jones rather than Dr Caligari.

In this production, a collaboration between State Opera South Australia, Opera Hong Kong, and Beijing Music Festival, director Shuang Zou transposes the action to a contemporary subway station – allegedly Hong Kong, although it could be any major city: Tokyo, Beijing, Paris. Liminal and uncanny, the subway seems at face value a fitting analogue for the shadowy woods and underworlds of myth, a place of transition and transformation. In this imagining, Tamino and Pamina are cast as corporate types in suits and mackintoshes; Papageno, a food delivery driver; the three ladies, somewhat obscurely, air hostesses. The opera’s famous overture soundtracks a scene typical of Zou’s approach, dissimilarly dressed commuters jostling for space while trains zip back and forth in Marco Devetak’s luridly cartoonish video design. 

The Magic Flute (photograph by Andrew Beveridge)

Yet the attempt to assert the opera’s relevancy, by thrusting it into a strangely non-specific ‘now’, merely assures its redundancy. The overwhelming impression is of an averagely conceived Rock Eisteddfod routine, a grab bag of unintegrated half-ideas with no function except to titillate. If the aesthetic is the point, then it is a poorly made one. Devetak’s animation is uninspired, even amateurish at times, bludgeoningly literal where it is not simply inapt. Dan Potra’s design, employing a gratuitous revolve which rises at an angle, nods to Mozart’s fascination with Freemasonry – the black and white checkered floor and grand columns characteristic of the secret society’s lodges – but signifies either nothing or, at best, nothing more than the thing itself. Is the adornment of costumes with LED lights (also Potra) really a gesture towards the Enlightenment ideals held by the composer who, of course, appears throughout as a Stratocaster-playing busker in ripped jeans and sunglasses? Surely not, but what else explains it? Almost nothing in this production makes sense except when viewed as banally as this.           

More’s the pity because what this production lacks in conceptual intelligibility it makes up for in vocal firepower. Especially good is Troncoso – replaced on opening night due to illness but only encumbered by the odd costuming of punky tartan skirt and leather jacket thereafter – whose heartbroken aria ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ (‘Ah, I can feel it’) is a masterclass in clarity, control, and feeling. Jones, no stranger to the role, having performed it in Opera Australia’s 2014 production, is a fine Tamino, and Teddy Tahu Rhodes a redoubtable Sarastro. Greco, despite being burdened with too many gags which simply do not land, is an engaging Papageno, and Queen of the Night Bavli dispatches her famous aria (Der Hölle Rache) with consummate skill, drawing deserved applause for her brilliantly executed high F notes. Only Mark Oates as Monostatos – a role historically portrayed as a ‘Moor’ by a white actor and embodying racist stereotypes – feels underpowered, his pantomime-like turn as the opera’s cloak-swirling villain unconvincing. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of State Opera Artistic Director Dane Lam, gives an uneven but spirited account of Mozart’s score, and the State Opera Chorus provide assured support.

Die Zauberflöte, perhaps both the most absurd and the most sublime of Mozart’s operas, makes exacting demands on its interpreters. I had hoped that, with its ostensibly adventurous contemporary and cross-cultural staging, this production might have engaged more fruitfully with the opera’s rich layers of allegory. It does not require a great leap of the imagination to wonder how the work’s still-provocative meditation on Enlightenment ideals – emerging as they did in Mozart’s day in tension with the waning authority of absolutist monarchies – could be interestingly held up against the growing authoritarianism and irrationality of our own time. But that would have required an entirely different interpretation to the one Zou and her collaborators have produced – a garish confection with much to sing but nothing much to say. 

The Magic Flute (State Opera South Australia) was shown from August 28 to September 6. Performance attended: 30 August 2025.