The Magic Flute in the Tampere Opera, the 12th of March, 2022

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera ”The Magic Flute” has never been one of my favourites. I have seen only one interesting production of this opera, and that one I went to see twice. So normally I would not have bothered to go and see this opera in the Tampere Opera – especially since it was sung in Finnish – but when the soloists were Tuomas Katajala, Arttu Kataja and Tuuli Takala, I decided to spend a March Saturday to go and see it in Tampere.   

First of all, I must way that unfortunately Arttu Kataja had fallen ill and his role as Papageno was sung from the side by Ville Rusanen when Johan Krogius acted it on the stage. Rusanen did well, even though somebody singing from the side does have a certain flattening effect on the experience.

”The Magic Flute” tells about a man (Tamino), who falls in love with a woman (Paminaan), whose mother (Queen of the Night) tries to overthrow Sarastro. The young couple face some ordeals, but they get their happily ever after in the end, Queen of the Night loses the battle and the side characters - Papageno and Papagena – are also united. The whole storyline is completely idiotic: it has been interpreted to be connect with Freemasons and directors have made numerous different versions of the opera, which has never made the story itself any better. The characters are purely cliché and the story itself is misogynic.

The director Tuomas Parkkinen has set this version in the 1930’s and in the USA, but the direction itself was bland. I really cannot say that the direction would have added anything positive to the stupid story. Actually, on the contrary: when the story is so silly, it would be wiser to overstate and make it a full-blown fairy tale.

Since the characters were so full of clichés, it was difficult for the performers to make a lot out of them. Tuomas Katajala and Tuuli Takala did decent performances, but even they could not make the persons sparkle. They were both considerably better in the Finnish National Opera’s production of this opera a few years ago, which has been the only interesting version of this opera that I have seen.

The best performance of this production was made by Suvi Väyrynen, who sang the role of the Queen of the Night. She does have the best and best known arias of the opera and Väyrynen created enough ”rage from hell”, so that the audience that had sunk to slight apathy, woke up.