Artists on Stage
Marc Chagall,
Mozart’s Magic Flute
published in the April 2003 edition of the BBC Music Magazine
If the first image that springs to mind thinking of the work of long-lived Russian artist Marc Chagall, it is of allegorical and magical figures from folklore, musicians and lovers, animals and strangers, young and old, all in a community shimmering with celebration. What an ideal vision for the celebration of light and music at the heart of Mozart’s Magic Flute! But the next image that springs to mind with Chagall is of figures floating in a narrative space free from the mundanity of gravity; and the last thing you can imagine on stage, let alone on the vast boards of the New York Metropolitan, is singers floating free from gravity...
No matter how vividly coloured, humane and touching Chagall’s work is, that discrepancy, a common trap for ‘flat-art’ artists moving into the live 3-d of theatre, seems to have been central to the problem that audiences faced with his Magic Flute, a gala highlight of the 1967 Met season. Their wives having been school chums, Chagall and Met intendant Rudolf Bing had known each other a long while and it was natural for Bing to follow though the commission for the great murals in the newly opened Lincoln Center with a request for an opera. The grand and gorgeous murals — "The Sources of Music" and "The Triumph of Music" — already celebrated the power of music, at least one of the crucial themes of Mozart’s seemingly still puzzling Singspiel.
The scale of the production was prodigious, though librettist Schikaneder’s stage direction Verwandlung — transformation — appears a dozen times in the score. Chagall designed no fewer than 13 big curtains, 26 tabs (the framing curtains down either side of the stage action) as well as 121 costumes, all, as Herbert Weinstock wrote in Opera, "in the most flambuoyant and blindingly colourful manner". The technicians’ task of moving from Chagall’s sketches to the actual vast drops was masterfully executed. Making little effort to occupy the stage volume, Chagall sought to frame the action with backdrops, often suggesting a second proscenium, a stage within a stage. Clearly Chagall wished to honour Mozart & Schikaneder and, ironically in view of the critical reception — the New York Times called the event the "biggest one-man show in town" — to let Mozart sing for himself. But Weinstock’s conclusion was that, "so grandly irrelevant with reference to either Mozart or Schikaneder is all this burst of Chagall symbolism that the production by Günther Rennert is its slave."
The first performance on 19th February was a gala performance, the gift of Mrs John D. Rockefeller Jnr, and the musical focus was on Hermann Prey as Pagageno and Lucia Popp as the Queen of the Night, making her house début — as was elderly Josef Krips in the pit, with what another writer, Martin Mayer, lamented as a "woeful technique". One cannot help wondering if the production was ill-matched, with Chagall’s sets needing nimbleness and a light touch but receiving something altogether stodgy from the pit. Of the later revival that autumn Harold Rosenthal said, "Josef Rosenstock conducted as if the work had been Parsifal." But he also says that the sets "stress Papageno’s world and underplay the Queen of the Night’s", as if that were not exactly in tune with Chagall’s humble creed and Mozart’s sympathies. Mayer was happy: finding in Rennert’s direction a "matter-of-fact sleight of hand", he considered that to liberate Chagall’s sense of fantasy to make its own effect.
Chagall expressed the following outlook on it all: "I paint demons, grotesque little animals, all sorts of unreal creatures I have invented. They are symbols, masks to conceal the sordid faces of the world, delmimiting and shutting out what is evil. I focus on gladness and joy. I use my art as eyeglasses through which I can see only what is good and beautiful and true. I offer my art as spectacles to others, so they also can see my vision of the world, the joy of living. Mozart did the same thing."
The overall impression is one of a sumptuosity of imagination that backfired, where sight smothered sound. But this was an expression not of betrayal but of generosity and love, relish and uplift, passion and fascination, before an era in which the work could find itself set in a petrol station.