Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Staatsoper

Although born in Salzburg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart looms large over Vienna. He lived in at least a dozen addresses in the city and spent his most productive years there. His home in Domgasse (1784-87), where he composed Le nozze di Figaro, is the only Mozart residence still intact in Vienna, now the Mozarthaus museum. Mozart is commemorated by a statue in the Burggarten, just a stone’s throw away from the Staatsoper.

A not-so magic Flute

January saw two new productions of works from 1791, Mozart’s final year. At the Staatsoper, Barbora Horáková directed Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), the Singspiel Mozart composed with actor and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, who created the role of Papageno, the bird-catcher.

Horáková played it less as a fairy tale or pantomime and more of a Gothic horror show. Her haunted house idea held initial promise – cobwebbed staircases, crows, a piano covered in dust – as did the theme of entrapment, Serena Sáenz’s black-winged Queen of the Night entering in a display case.

There was humour too. Georg Zeppenfeld’s Sarastro, a Masonic cult leader, made his entrance on a crescent moon, dressed in the Queen of the Night’s cobalt blue gown, tossing a long wig, and Matthäus Schmidlechner’s coal-stoking Monostatos and his sooty accomplices danced a jig straight out of Mary Poppins. But Horáková ran out of steam in Act 2, failing to hold the threads together convincingly. Papageno hit the bottle and when Tamino and Pamina faced their trials of fire and water, they were saddled with aged puppets of themselves strapped to their backs.

Musically, opening night was a disappointment, abysmally conducted by Bertrand de Billy. The singing was mixed: Slávka Zámečníková sang with limpid tone as a wonderful Pamina and Zeppenfeld was sonorous, but Ludwig Mittelhammer’s small-scaled Papageno never charmed and Julian Prégardien’s Tamino, sung with a fine lyric tenor, suffered tightness to his top notes. During the Queen of the Night’s famous ‘Der Hölle Rache’, Saenz’s timing and intonation went awry after her spitfire coloratura. Not a great evening.

A Mozart-Ullmann mash-up

More profound was KaiserRequiem at the Volksoper, a joint production with the Wiener Staatsballett, where Omer Meir Wellber took Mozart’s Requiem and interwove it with Viktor Ullmann’s opera The Kaiser of Atlantis: a requiem for the dead, written by a composer who died before it could be completed, paired with a work about the abdication of Death itself. Ullmann’s opera was composed in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in 1943. It was banned by the Nazis shortly before Ullmann was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed in the gas chambers.

Choreographer and director Andreas Heise treated the material with sensitivity and respect – possibly too respectful as the production lacked the punch-to-the-stomach impact I had anticipated. Each singer in the hard-working cast, led by Daniel Schmutzhard’s heroic Kaiser Overall, had a dancer double with much mirroring of movement. The Volksoper Chorus was truly outstanding – it was wonderful to hear a proper operatic chorus unleashed on repertory like this and they sang with full-throated conviction in the Dies irae and hissing sibilants in the Rex tremendae.

Papageno Gate near Theater an der Wien

The Battle of the Normas

It’s not often that rival opera companies in the same city schedule a new production of the same opera in the same season. It’s 48 years since there has been a staged production of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma in Vienna. Now there are two.

‘Norma fever’ gripped the city in February as productions by Vasily Barkhatov (for MusikTheater an der Wien) and Cyril Teste (for the Staatsoper) opened within a week of each other. Extra spice was sprinkled with the smaller house (an der Wien) having the starrier cast, led by Asmik Grigorian in the title role, with Freddie De Tommaso and Aigul Akhmetshina.

You can read my full reviews of both elsewhere in this issue [p 42], but the main takeaways were that Barkhatov’s ‘plaster cast-a diva’ production was hands down the more engaging, while the singers in each would arguably have been better off singing in the opposite house.

A pair of neglected Russian operas

Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta premiered at the Staatsoper in 1900 – conducted by Gustav Mahler – and only returned in March this spring in a great new staging by Evgeny Titov [p 44] which looked conventional enough until the final bars when the gut punch I missed in KaiserRequiem landed. It starred Sonya Yoncheva in the title role, a few weeks after I caught her in rip-roaring form in a terrific Tosca revival.

Prokofiev’s comedy Betrothal in a Monastery, based on Sheridan’s The Duenna, is an even rarer catch. The plot draws on classic opera buffa tropes: forced marriage, characters in disguise, a serenading tenor, the women outwitting the men. It was directed at Theater an der Wien by Damiano Michieletto, who had a lot of fun with his subject – a giant animatronic fish, zombie chefs wielding knives and boozy monks in high heels and suspenders – bolstered by a largely Russian cast who milked it with style.

Fish featured large – very large in the case of a slippery creature that haunted a nightmare sequence in which Evgeny Akimov’s splendid Don Jerome ended up with his head forced into its mouth. When its skeleton returned to terrify the wedding guests in the finale, Jerome was unperturbed, merrily tapping out a ditty on a set of tuned glasses.

The ensemble cast was especially strong on the male side, Valery Gilmanov’s booming Mendoza providing a comic foil for Akimov’s Jerome. Elena Maximova sang fruitily as the Duenna, hamming up the scene where Mendoza woos her. Soprano Stacey Alleaume, sunny-toned but a little small-scaled in voice, was nonetheless a charming Louisa. The men of the Arnold Schoenberg Choir camped it up gloriously as the monastery’s decidedly Russian Orthodox priests.

In comedy, timing is everything and Dmitry Matvienko led the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien through the clockwork precision of Prokofiev’s whirring score.

I imagine the majority of the audience were encountering this opera for the first time on stage. It deservedly made a lot of friends.

This featured originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Opera Now – Subscribe today!