Antony Walker talks with the Opera Lady about the Magic Flute

Last month I was able to catch Pittsburgh Opera’s new music director, Antony Walker, during preparations for Rossini’s Otello at Washington Concert Opera. As artistic director for WCO and Pinchgut Opera in Australia, Walker has been able to present some uncommon works, many of them with period instrument ensembles.

OL: You’ve just recorded Mozart’s Requiem in “authentic” period style. How will you get our orchestra to produce a Mozartean sound since they’re not playing on period instruments?

AW: We’re looking for a clear, transparent sound. In conservatories, string players are taught a big Russian technique by their mostly Eastern European teachers. It’s fantastic for Tchaikovsky, but not for Mozart. Vibrato is a huge issue—we need to play with as little vibrato as possible. In the Classical period, vibrato was still considered ornamentation, not a basic component of the sound.

Bow picture: Baroque, Classical, and modern violin bows. Note that only the modern bow curves inward, allowing players to dig deeply into the strings.

When we’re playing Mozart and earlier, we need to be aware of the rises and falls in each line. In Mozart there lots of small articulations. That’s difficult sometimes with an orchestra that’s accustomed to playing long Romantic lines with a big sweep. And I’ll ask the string players to use less bow and relax more into the strings. The single most important difference (apart from 18th century gut vs. modern metal strings) was the bow. The modern bow is much longer and heavier than the Classical bow. Today it’s easier to play louder, but it’s harder to play delicate soft passages. We’ll also be going after a slightly veiled string sound—more like the sound of the old gut strings.

OL: How can you achieve this in your brief rehearsal period?

AW: We’ll make sure string parts are bowed in a way that reflects Classical style, and put in more articulations when necessary so I don’t have to stop and explain. There are so many staccatos [short, sharp sounds] in this music, especially in the comedy. Mozart delineated two different kinds, but modern orchestral parts make them all look the same. We’ll fix that.

OL: And what about our cast?

AW:  We’re going to have a particular freshness in the voices because it’s been cast as Mozart intended. The oldest person in Mozart’s cast was probably Schikaneder in his 40s. Everyone else was much younger: the Sarastro was only 24, and the Pamina only 17! Even the Queen of the Night was about 30 years old—Mozart’s sister-in-law. Not the one he proposed to—the other one!

It makes me think of a scene in the movie Amadeus after Frau Weber manipulated Mozart into marrying Constanze. The mother is shrieking about something, and then the scene morphs into the Queen of the Night’s “Rage” aria. Art imitates life.

AW: Yes—in this piece, the very high, fast dramatic ornamentation is equated with hysteria; the low, slow, and simple is equated with wisdom. It’s no accident that the character that is supposed to portray the least trustworthy person in the piece—the Queen— has the most elaborate and ornamented music to sing. On the other hand, Sarastro’s two arias are so simple.

OL: That brings us to the question of ornamentation in the vocal line. Do you think it’s appropriate for this piece?

AW: There’s only small scope for it, really. At this point in time we know that singers did ornament, but we’re between the tremendously elaborate Baroque and Rossinian styles. Magic Flute is not an opera seria, so you don’t have da capo arias where you’re expected to repeat with ornaments. It’s more simple, more direct. The naive quality of the 17-year-old who played Pamina doesn’t need ornamentation. She should be straightforward and free of artifice—like Tamino. A couple of Mozart’s original singers weren’t terribly proficient—they had nice, natural voices, but they weren’t trained in the sense that we recognize now. Our Monostatos, for example, has a much better voice than the original.

OL: Tell me about Monostatos. In the original version he’s a Moor. Other than the fad for Turkish music sweeping Vienna at that time, what do you think he represents?

AW: The Turks had been knocking very strongly on the door of Western Europe as an exotic influence and a real threat to European way of life, so by using Turkish music, Mozart’s tapping into the anxiety of European society—just as we have those stereotypes today. The audience would know even before Monostatos opened his mouth that he wasn’t a character to be trusted.

Monostatos: The Moor Monostatos with Papageno and Pamina, 1793.

OL: And yet he’s a comic character, too, and his aria is so open and joyful.

AW: I feel that every character in this piece is flawed, and that the moral is that man and woman can unite into a truly beautiful union that can overcome the flaws of the individual.

For me, the Queen is not an evil character—she’s somewhat misguided. And Sarastro isn’t perfect because he sees erroneously that all women have defects that can only be corrected by men. The difficulty is that when we’re led to believe that Sarastro is completely wise, those misogynist statements are so jarring. He’s on the road to Enlightenment, but he’s not there yet. He’s rather like George Washington: someone who can speak so sincerely and powerfully about a union of people, and still to his dying days kept slaves.

OL: Why do you think this opera has such a powerful hold on us after so many years?

AW: The Magic Flute is such a wonderful piece because of the mixture of the serious and the comic. People of Mozart’s time delighted in it—it resonated with audiences from the very beginning. In this opera we see not only the courage of Mozart’s Masonic convictions, but the wonderful, complete nature of his domestic life. Mozart adored Constanze. He started every letter with endearments like ‘My dearest, most wonderful wife.’ His deep, heartfelt sympathy and understanding of the human condition comes out in every number of the score. That’s truly what makes this opera so special.

—Beth “Opera Lady” Parker

Click here for “Bad Vibrations,”an article by Roger Norrington about the rise of vibrato in the 20th century http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,904398,00.html

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