Die Zauberflöte
The Magic Flute
After Così fan tutte and Hänsel und Gretel, I was invited to stage Die Zauberflöte for the open-air festival at the Munot fortress in Schaffhausen. After two pandemic cancellations and further uncertainty due to the war in Ukraine, the production finally premiered in 2022 with similar constraints as I had faced in Mexico.
I reframed the work’s initiatory core: not a Masonic ritual, but a journey toward self-knowledge. To assert presence in the vast, open fortress space—daylight in Act I, night in Act II—I built an artificial, graphic world: two large white cubes on a raised platform, functioning both as abstract architecture and rotating projection surfaces. Costumes, monochrome or vividly colored, were deconstructed versions of everyday clothing, revealing relationships through complementary forms. The second act expanded into a nocturnal visual landscape shaped by video projection, externalizing the fears and trials the characters must confront.
Because many singers struggled with the extensive spoken German, the festival hired actor Bernhard Bettermann. In the dramaturgy I developed, he became not a narrator but the central dramatic catalyst—“Human”—a reflective figure who initiates the entire action, dressed in a costume that literally mirrored his surroundings, he entered through the audience during the overture, delivering Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 and posing direct questions—What am I afraid of? What am I afraid of in myself?—which framed the opera as a contemporary rite of passage.
Throughout the production, he and his companion, the “Young Old Lady,” introduced characters and situations through short spoken texts that exposed their inner conflicts and guided the audience’s perception.
Act I unfolded in a minimalist arrangement between the cubes, with the ensemble shaping scenes with only a few stage objects. In Act II, the cubes became rotating chambers for the initiatory trials, their surfaces filled with projections of collective fears: war, forest fires, environmental destruction. The trials culminated in Tamino and Pamina recognizing that the “snake” they feared and the “flute” that protects them are ultimately the same force—their own inner strength. As the projected images burned away, “Human” closed the initiation with a brief text celebrating the courage of daily living while the final tableau rejected triumphal hierarchy: all characters—Queen, Ladies, Monostatos included—appeared as equally human, covered in Holi-like colors, joining the audience in a large closing circle.
The production achieved strong public resonance and the final performance sold out completely, and the staging was widely received as an inventive, coherent, and emotionally accessible reading of Mozart’s opera under extremely challenging conditions.
