Opera as Performance on Screen: Beyond Theatrical Illusion in Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975)

Abstract

Opera generates spaces for experience through a constant process of translation and mediation. The written libretto and the musical score are already intended for a stage performance; each performance is unique thanks to the directors’, stage designers’ and singers’ contribution; and ultimately it is the audience who completes this communicative process. On the other hand, singers, scenography, music, etc., are all sites for signification, media through which characters and fictional realities are produced. In order to reflect on the complexity of the operatic experience, this paper will consider film as primary source to see how cinema has got in on opera via its representation on screen. I will focus on the television adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute by the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, Trollflöjten (1975), to consider how human experience is mediated by opera and operatic experience by film, as well as the issue of presence in these mediatized cultural practices. The magic of film allows Bergman to enhance and disclose the reality of theatrical illusion at once. The heightened attention to the performance brings up the similarities and differences between stage and auditorium, and also between the internal theatrical audience attending the opera and the external cinematic one watching the film. Through a special game of reflections, the latter becomes aware of its status as audience, while at the same time it recognizes its difference in relation to the characters attending the performance on screen. Cinema emerges as a medium that represents, transforms, and discloses the insides of both media.