Trollflöjten
Ingmar Bergman (1975)
BFI screened The Magic Flute as a curtain-raiser to the Ingmar Bergman centenary retrospective that will run during the first three months of 2018. As the audience took their seats – it was nearly a full house albeit in NFT2 – I wondered how many people were primarily aficionados of Bergman or of opera. I was in the first camp to the extent of being keen to see a Bergman film in spite of its being an opera. I can’t defend this philistinism but there’s no point denying it. I’ve seen only two live performances of opera in my life – Britten’s Peter Grimes, when I was twelve years old, and Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West, when I’d just turned thirty. The Peter Grimes was a school trip to the Grand Theatre in Leeds, one Wednesday evening in 1968. I remember a female character, in a scene with Grimes’s boy apprentice, yelling ‘A bruise!’ and that the evening was very long – nothing more. The Puccini, in December 1985, was probably the same venue. All I recall of that one is screens at either side of the stage – intertitles regularly flashed up on them to give the production a vague, spurious silent-movie flavour.
The dual inspiration for Bergman’s film is his love of The Magic Flute, rooted in a production that he saw at the Royal Opera in Stockholm when he (too!) was twelve, and his feelings for the Drottningholm Palace Theatre (also in Stockholm) – one of the few eighteenth-century Baroque theatres in Europe whose original stage machinery is still in use today. Although Bergman’s introductory outdoor shots are of the Drottningholm’s exterior, the place, according to Wikipedia, ‘was considered too fragile to accommodate a film crew. So the stage – complete with wings, curtains, and wind machines – was painstakingly copied and erected in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute’. (The setting was designed also to ‘approximate the conditions of the original 1791 production’ of The Magic Flute in Vienna.) Bergman doesn’t, for the most part, ‘cinematise’ the material. He prefers to place Mozart’s opera within the framework of what he presents as an actual theatrical event.
The first ten minutes or so of the film served to remind me why I lack the patience for opera. During the overture, Bergman’s camera moves among the theatre audience. He observes these faces then, because there’s plenty of overture still to get through, observes a good few of them again, although they don’t express anything different second time around. This chimes with the maddening reiteration that seems essential to opera: in order to accommodate the music, the performer often has to elaborate a mood or repeat behaviour long after you’ve got the point and want them to Move On. There’s another difficulty with Bergman’s intro. Some of the faces he selects are remarkable but their individuality is gradually upstaged by their collective ethnic diversity. Bergman’s message is that anyone can enjoy opera, regardless of age, race or cultural background. This is so obviously the case, in theory, that drawing attention to it in this way – and at length – amounts to a tiresome platitude. Things may be (or have been) different in Sweden but the notorious expense of opera seats at the main London venues suggests this open-to-everyone message is patronisingly phony too[1].
Once Bergman and Sven Nykvist move from the auditorium to the stage, however, The Magic Flute takes off. I liked the film a lot, though I admit there’s a ‘considering it’s opera’ qualifier to saying this. As someone who tends to find most stage acting primitive compared with halfway good screen acting, I can hardly bear to watch the performers in filmed opera (either televised stage productions or made-for-TV versions of opera I’ve occasionally come across). Bergman was evidently well aware of this difficulty and perhaps uniquely well equipped to get round it. He’s on record as saying that:
‘The most important thing for me was that the singers had natural voices, not schooled, but the kind of voice that comes straight from the heart. There are synthetic voices that sound wonderful, but you can’t see from the singers’ faces that they are singing. I want people who sing with their entire being.’
Even that doesn’t guarantee passable acting on camera but Bergman’s experience of using actors’ faces in extreme close-up (and for mask-like effect) serves him well. Josef Köstlinger (Tamino) and Irma Urrila (Pamina) have good looks suitable for their hero and heroine roles; though their faces aren’t notably mobile or eloquent, Bergman makes the most of them. He concentrates especially on one face in the theatre audience – that of a young girl (Helene Friberg), whose reactions to what she sees on the stage develop into a virtual leitmotif. Although the girl’s mixture of wonderment and impassivity is occasionally intriguing, this device is overworked but you do sympathise with her expression at one point, immediately after the happy ending for the story’s light-relief character. The bird-catcher Papageno (Håkan Hagegård) has found his soulmate Papagena (Elisabeth Erikson); the pair anticipate the many offspring they’ll produce. It seems right that the child’s face darkens as Papageno leaves the stage and Tamino and Pamina return to it to resume the trials that will prove their love – not only because this is a return to relatively serious business but also because this is clearly the last we’ll see of Papageno.
My exposure to the form is so limited that it may not mean much to say this but I’ve never seen anyone perform an operatic role as appealingly as Håkan Hagegård does Papageno. He combines fine baritone singing with first-rate characterisation. His humour is unforced. His face has a delightful warmth and animation. As Papageno prepares to make a light-hearted suicide attempt, he trills on his bird-catcher’s whistle, more in hope than expectation that anyone will respond; the emotional registers of these trills are beautifully differentiated. After Hagegård’s, the performance I liked best was Ulrik Cold’s commanding but nuanced Sarastro, the apparently evil high priest who turns out to be a force for enlightenment and progress. The blacked-up face of Ragnar Ulfung as the Moorish villain Monostatos was hard to take – a pity Bergman didn’t record the reactions of the non-white faces in his on-screen audience to this casual racism. It was interesting to discover that the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin)’s famous (gruesome) coloratura is not, as I’d always assumed, an expression of delight in her malicious powers but a disownment of her daughter Pamina.
It may have helped my enjoyment somewhat that The Magic Flute is a singspiel – even though, when it comes to handling dialogue, Håkan Hagegård is in a different class from everyone else. Emanuel Schikaneder’s lavishly preposterous libretto, as well as functioning as an extended plug for Freemasonry, demonstrates that love conquers death but Ingmar Bergman manages to stay pretty true to his trademark morbid preoccupations: the set dressing includes plenty of skulls, at any rate. Touches like this come so much more naturally to Bergman than his uninspired backstage comic touches: during the interval between Acts I and II, we see the Queen of the Night sitting with her feet up, puffing on a cigarette under a ‘no smoking’ notice. I looked at my watch only twice – on the second occasion in alarm because I’d thought time was nearly up but we now seemed set for a pitched battle between the forces of light and darkness. False alarm: the latter were summarily vanquished. All told, the film runs 135 minutes and they pass amazingly quickly (considering …).
21 December 2017
[1] I didn’t even pick up that several of the faces in the audience belong not to ‘ordinary people’ but (again according to Wikipedia) to members of the film-maker’s family and crew – Bergman himself, his wife and son, the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the choreographer Donya Feuer et al.
