MEDIATHEK

“There is nothing new under the Sun,” proclaimed the author of Ecclesiastes several thousand years ago. And indeed, great works of art, touching upon questions of Good and Evil, Love and Hate, Destiny and the restorative power of Art, have all borrowed from the works of earlier generations, re-casting the past with the aid of chutzpah and glitter to rock new audiences with a sense of discovery.

In Opera Spanga’s concept, Pamina is the daughter of an old illicit liaison between a politician and an escort. Sarastro has risen to become a powerful politician. Cast off by her lover, The Queen of the Night (Queenie) has become the Madam of an A-list bordello. The Queen, along with her top two hookers and her house drug pusher, Papageno, seduce Tamino into blackmailing Sarastro and his dirty-handed chief of staff, Monostatos. Sarastro, however, has plans to continue his power into the next generation, and grooms Tamino to succeed him. But this being the 21st century, Pamina is not going to let her gender get in the way of her becoming the next President.

 It is an underworld story of queens who live in the night; of men who quest for endless power; of couples—like Sarastro and the Queen—who turn memory of a momentary love into an eternal hatred; of a girl’s coming of age and a boy who is trained to love through the pornography of the image and, when finally confronted with breathing flesh, can’t deal with the real thing.

For hundreds of years, the pretty tones of Tamino’s magic flute and Papageno’s silvery glockenspiel have sugar-coated the misogyny and racism within that libretto. Opera Spanga reads that libretto as a dirty story of a group of men and especially women, far more unsympathetic than they have hit her to appeared in other productions of The Magic Flute. Van Eijk, certainly, has never worked on an opera with such a cadre of unsympathetic heroines, not even in her stage and film versions of Don Giovanni (Donna Giovanna). Her intention is not to manufacture a patently politically incorrect interpretation, but to mine the nuggets of radioactive racism and misogyny. With that in mind, Opera Spanga’s staged The Electric Flute like a film script, with the sudden cuts and changes of Points of View, the strong character of the musical soundtrack, that make cinema so gripping and original.