The Magic Flute archive review: Ingmar Bergman does Mozart with gusto

Music has always been close to Ingmar Bergman’s heart. To Joy (1949) took its title from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and featured Victor Sjöström as a distinguished conductor – a calling, incidentally, that attracted Bergman himself. Then there have been significant snatches of Bach in movies like Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence and Cries and Whispers.

So his production of The Magic Flute, made for Swedish TV and screened at Cannes in May, is perhaps not so startling a departure as one might assume. (After all, Hour of the Wolf was richly laden with references to Mozart’s opera.) The fact that it was made for TV suggests not merely the straitened circumstances of the commercial cinema in Sweden, but primarily Bergman’s conviction that only through TV can he now reach a wide audience at a single stroke. He has indeed since shot another serial in four parts, Face to Face, for both theatrical and small screen release.

The budget for The Magic Flute was some £260,000, seemingly immense by Swedish standards but regarded by Sveriges Radio as an appropriate project with which to celebrate its 50 years of broadcasting. Bergman spent a year on the production, selecting a predominantly Scandinavian cast of singers from over a hundred candidates. “The most important factor for me,” he claimed, “was that the singers should have natural voices. You can find artificially cultivated voices that sound marvellous, but you can never really believe that a human personality is doing the singing. Records have accustomed us to a kind of absolute perfection – but beauty cannot be perfect without also being vibrant and alive.”

Far from attempting to open out the opera, Bergman has been at pains to recreate the atmosphere of the 1791 production at the Theater auf der Weiden in Vienna (even the dragon that pursues Tamino upstage is a delightful creature of felt and bunting). The Drottningholm Palace Theatre proved too fragile to accommodate a TV crew, so the stage was carefully reconstructed in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute, under the direction of Henny Noremark.

While the Mozart purist may take issue with Bergman’s conception of The Magic Flute, no one can deny the technical perfection with which the film has been mounted. The score was sung, played, and recorded by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Eric Ericson, and then replayed in segments in the film studio until Bergman was satisfied with both lip-synchronisation and performances. Everyone sings (in Swedish, of course) with gusto.

Håkan Hagegård as Papageno

When does an opera become a film? Certainly in Act Two, when the Queen of the Night, her face transformed into a mask of fury by waxen make-up and a livid green filter, harangues Pamina in Der Holle Rache. And certainly in the climactic sequence when Monostatos and his minions advance threateningly towards the camera. In spite of such frissons, and for all the inevitable skulls that mock the hapless Papageno in the House of Trials, this is a witty, rumbustious Flute, played and sung at fast tempo throughout.

During the film, Bergman cuts back occasionally to the seraphic features of a small girl in his ‘audience’, dwelling on her pleasure as if nudging us into recognition of the opera’s ‘childish magic and exalted mystery’. It’s somehow a superfluous, sentimental gesture, uncharacteristic of Bergman. As Papageno and Papagena frolic with their children in the final shot, one is left in no doubt as to the meaning of the opera in Bergman’s eyes.

Like his own best films, it embodies a quest, and Sarastro, so often a grave and sombre figure, is seen by Bergman as the paternal source of that exalted love sought in their different ways by Tamino and Papageno. It is as though Bergman’s own predilection for chilly metaphysics had been tempered by Mozart’s sense of wonder. Bergman has said that he may well proceed to film other operas, with Don Giovanni next on the list. Aficionados should note that Swedish Radio has issued an attractive boxed set of the recording, containing a booklet with Bergman’s comments on the libretto.