THE MAGIC FLUTE

The Magic Flute is heard so much, performed so often, talked about and questioned as hardly any other work in the history of opera. What Mozart and his librettist, the multi-talented artist Emanuel Schikaneder, let begin as a heroic story about the rescue of Princess Pamina with the humorous duo of Prince Tamino and bird catcher Papageno, increasingly turns into a journey into the unknown, in which the wise Sarastro and the Queen of the Night struggle as antagonists for good and evil in the world. Director Lydia Steier entrusts the plot to a narrator and has a grandfather read the Magic Flute as a bedtime story to his three grandchildren. But reading aloud, like listening, also means taking one's own story and world of experience into the narrative ..