Die Zauberflöte

The Magic Flute is a musical fairy-tale full of imagination and suspense – and with a happy end. It is an opera about power struggles and power abuse, about children and their parents, about growing up, about wisdom and perfidy, about how to tell the difference between good and evil, light and shadow and how to take responsibility. And above all, it is a play about love – love for life, for one’s life-companions, for the world, for nature, for food, for storytelling, for learning. No other opera that we know reaches so many different people through its music and this one unites so many different styles and even spoken word for precisely this reason. An incomparable opera with an incomparable popularity. The fabulous cast of characters: a prince, a contentious queen, three ladies, three boys, a dogmatic ruler, a bird catcher, a kidnapped daughter – the whole spectrum of humanity. Individuals with all their emotions, longings and convictions. Two young people, Tamino and Pamina, have to walk through fire and water together in order to finally find each other. And all this held together by a magical instrument that helps to overcome obstacles and dangers.

Not only fans of classical music are familiar with the Queen of the Night’s absurdly eccentric coloraturas, the bird catcher’s song in the manner of a folk song, Tamino’s romantic “image”-aria, Sarastro’s aria of of forgiveness. New voices from the company have grown into Mozart’s vocal fach: Darwin Prakash as the bird catcher Papageno, Markus Suihkonen as Sarastro, Petra Radulović as Papagena. Ketevan Chuntishvili joins the ensemble and sings the role of Pamina and the Greek coloratura soprano Dimitra Kotidou as Queen of the Night scintillates with the most famous high notes of all opera arias.

Frank Hilbrich’s staging is suitable for the whole family and talks about how the search for the truth can lead us to the dark boundaries of death before the rays of the sun illuminate the night – encouraging us to hold on to a childlike openness, bravery and heart.