A RITE OF PASSAGE
Mozart’s most popular opera returns to the Bastille at the end of 2024, in Robert Carsen‘s timeless production. The Canadian director offers a stripped-down vision, conceived as a rite of passage and a meditation on life and death.
After a series of Tchaikovsky concerts in 2021, Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv will conduct her first opera production at the Opéra de Paris. Music director of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna since 2022, she was assistant conductor to Kirill Petrenko at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and was the first woman to conduct the Bayreuth Festival orchestra (in The Flying Dutchman in 2021).
Pavol Breslik, who was Tamino at the premiere of this production in 2014, will be back on stage, as he was in 2017, while German soprano Nikola Hillebrand, as Pamina, will be singing for the first time at the Paris Opera. They will be joined by Mikhail Timoshenko as Papageno, Jean Teitgen as Sarastro and Aleksandra Olczyk as the Queen of the Night.
In 1791, disappointed by the fickle Viennese who preferred other composers, particularly Italian ones, Mozart accepted a proposal from his friend Emanuel Schikaneder, the director of the Theater auf der Wieden, to write an opera in German for the less bourgeois suburban audiences. Die Zauberflöte was an instant success, and has been ever since. A singspiel interweaving gaiety and depth, Mozart’s opera is the fruit of the Enlightenment as much as a children’s story, an allegory on the nature of Man as much as a reflection of the composer’s membership of the Freemasons. Robert Carsen upturns the libretto’s Manicheanism by seeing Sarastro and the Queen of the Night as allies who guide the young Tamino and Pamina along the path of virtue. An interpretation embodied in an elegant, uncluttered production in which love and wisdom triumph in the end.