The Magic of Two Masters

INGMAR BERGMAN HAS left the New Wave and its tormented pessimism far behind. His light-hearted, sunny, extraordinarily intelligent film version of Mozart's The Magic Flute proves that the judicious egotism of one master can actually enhance the genius of another. Bergman has gotten both practical and romantic all of a sudden; having perceived all the traditional problems of staged opera, he has pretty much solved them all, making room for his own rose-tinted theatrics. To make the story move more smoothly he shuffled several scenes out of their original order, omitted a few, altered the plot a little, and added some lines to the dialogue. To make the characters more vivid and sympathetic, he put together a young, good-looking cast, all of whom sing and act surprisingly well, and who actually look like the characters they play. He achieved an intimacy rarely possible in staged drama by filming his singers mostly in close-up and bathing them in warm, golden lights that make everybody look very healthy. The language problem is solved in the simplest way: the opera is sung in Swedish, but we can read from the subtitles. It's a rare functional approach. With complete respect and evident love for the Mozart-Schikaneder score, Bergman added dazzling stage sets, high Renaissance costumes and editorial wit, and elicited a daring bawdiness from the text that warms the heart. The result is a brilliantly illustrated, sensuous and noble fairy-tale.

Like most operas, The Magic Flute has its cultists, opera purists have harrumphed at Bergman's "popularization" of the original libretto. But he's done the rest of us a service--to the uninitiated The Magic Flute's message can be hard to fathom, seeming alternately simpleminded and ponderously abstract. The opera is an allegorical celebration of the ideals of the Masonic brotherhood, a secret, illegal society to which Mozart belonged, and the elaborate rituals that take up over half the opera are closely modeled on the initiation rites of the Order. Eighteenth century audiences would have instantly recognized the political allusions couched in the story: the feud between the Queen of the Night and the High Priest over possession of the Queen's daughter Pamina symbolised Empress Maria Theresa's religious warfare against democratic Freemasonry, while the people of Austria (Pamina) were putatively caught in the crossfire. The opera describes a spiritual journey from darkness to light; it ends with the initiation of Pamina and her prince, Tamino into the Temple of Isis as they embrace the Masonic ideals of moral purity, equality, and enlightenment. It does not make the most riveting of stories.

Bergman took up the challenge here, too. He has cooked up a few plot devices in an effort to give the tale some grit and human motivation, and comes dangerously close to melodrama. About halfway through the film we learn that Sarastro, High Priest of the Temple, was once the Queen of the Night's consort, is actually Pamina's father, and has snatched her from her mother's clutches out of paternal concern for her own good. According to the original text this is all wrong. The High Priest is traditionally a somewhat remote cult figure; here he has become a gentle, tender-eyed parent--the sort of man Liv Ullman should have been married to in Scenes From a Marriage. Although this change makes the scenes between him and Pamina affectionate and even moving, the fight over Pamina now seems to be the result of a broken home, and the pure moral struggle between the forces of darkness and light is befuddled by a self-interested debate over custody of the child.

The characters are superbly drawn. Lit from front and back simultaneously so that his hair glows around him like a halo, Sarastro is presented as a wise, paternal New Testament God. The Queen is very female and very nasty, the kind of role Bette Davis made unforgettable. Her malevolent, teeth-gnashing character is a product of the Mason's profound anti-female bias (as Sarastro explains the abduction to Pamina: "You need a man to guide you."). Prince Tamino, the initiate-to-be, has both ineffable simplicity and moral sturdiness. A trusting character, he's not terribly bright. He understands nothing of the immortal intrigues going on above his head, and proves his virtue by doing everything he's told. Rather than being clever, he is supposed to be pure in heart; today one would call him a sap. Pamina is a first irritatingly childlike--dressed in over-feminine gowns and ribbons, she cries a lot and isn't good for much of anything. But she grows from child to woman in a believably gradual manner, and her strength is clear from the way she leads Tamino through the last Trial. He, on the other hand, keeps his eyes shut and plays the flute.

Bergman's wandering camera makes any stage-audience formality vanish. He roves freely onstage with close-ups of the singers and pans of the set, follows them backstage and finds Papageno asleep, late for his cue, and darts into the audience to record the listeners' rapt faces. Sven Nykvist's extraordinary lighting and framing pours new layers of fantasy onto the story--hands appear out of nowhere, portraits come alive, and airy scenes like Renaissance paintings dissolve into somber, feverish settings lit by stark, bluish fires. The film keeps the quality of a live performance because it's set in an eighteenth-century opera house rather than in a studio. The performance conditions of Mozart's day are faithfully reproduced, down to the wing-and-shutter sets and even the wheel-and-pulley flying contraptions which allowed gods and cherubs to float onstage.

PAPAGENO the bird-catcher was clearly Bergman's favorite character, and his comic part has been so embellished that he could almost be taken for the drama's protagonist. His innocent lust for talk, food, sex, and a wife get him into all kinds of trouble; all he really wants is a woman, and he often gazes warmly into the audience, begging someone out there to be his mate and threatening suicide when no one complies. As Taminos's companion he is given a chance to endure the Trials, but he has neither the courage nor the reticence to keep his mouth shut and persevere--Tamino's technique of closing his eyes worked much better. When Papageno learns he will not be allowed to enter the Order, he merely shrugs his shoulders and says that instead of wisdom he'd much prefer a glass a wine. He does get his Papagena; they are the picture of bourgeois happiness as they twitter and kiss and plan a large family.

Papageno's fate has often been taken as proof of Mozart's aristocratic bias. Tamino, after all, is initiated and Papageno is not. But Mozart was not a nobleman, and his comedies often satirize aristocratic pretension. It is more likely that Mozart meant to celebrate the common man's virtues as well as the prince's, to suggest that a certain kind of lofty nobleness of character is not for everyone. Bergman took this view so much to heart that he ended the film with his own vision: Papageno and Papagena embracing in a circle of lively, tow-headed kids.

Bergman is obviously infatuated with the opera; he hasn't been so playful since he made Smiles of a Summer Night. His animals look as though they were stolen from a children's nursery. The dragon in the first act struts on breathing fire and smoke, minces aggressively across the stage like Milton Berle in the wrong costume, and rolls his eyes soulfully as he is speared by the Queen's three ladies. Later, Tamino and his flute charm a whole stageful of forest creatures who look like plush Walt Disney cartoons. Bergman interpolates respectful self-assertions wherever he can, small tugs on the sleeve to remind us that while we're appreciating Mozart we should be noticing him, too. During the overture he weaves shots of his audience into a vast mosaic of human faces (cutting to the beat of the music), and he returns obsessively to a belond angelic little girl who by some odd coincidence looks a lot like Liv Ullman and a touch like Bergman himself. Between acts his camera wanders around backstage, where Sarastro reads the score to Wagner's Parsifal, the Queen of the Night drags grimly on a cigarette, a court page reads comic books, and the two lovers play checkers in a coy parody of The Seventh Seal.

There is no trace of the oppressive, gaunt quality of Bergman's earlier films. The Magic Flute is a work of such magic and belief that Bergman's agonized mysticism seems to have found a total release in the expression of another artist's orderly, God-filled universe. The film is sensitive, joyful, full of serious wit. One hates to say it, but classical opera is rarely so sexy or so much fun as this.