Bronwyn Law-Viljoen speaks to William Kentridge about The Magic Flute, opera and politics
How did you imagine The Magic Flute, which is a singspiel with spoken and sung parts, would fill the large cosmos that your stage becomes? How would the spoken and sung parts occupy, as it were, this space?
There have been productions in which all the dialogue has been removed and others in which the dialogue is cut and replaced by a narrator, who makes the narrative links from one piece of music to the next. Neither of these is satisfactory. But including the full dialogue, which is an hour-and-a-half of 18th-century Viennese in-jokes, is also not possible.
All solutions to how one manages the spoken dialogue are imperfect. We’ve followed the route taken by most productions, which is that there is a story and the story is important and, without it, the music becomes nothing more than a series of nice tunes.
A drama is unfolding and you need the spoken parts to lead you through it. The dialogue is truncated but, for the story to make sense, it is vital to understand, for instance, the origin of the rage of the Queen of the Night, to understand that she is not just pure evil, that her rage has a basis in the actions of her husband.
After struggling for weeks in rehearsal, we reduced the spoken parts to the crucial lines and, in doing so, created gaps in the logic. But that was a choice we made. One soon realises that in every production there are things one aims for and things one actually attains.
The visual and emotional impact on the audience of the empty space on the stage is governed by a number of things, not least of which is where one is seated in the theatre. It is certainly more profound when one sees the staged production on film. Then the stage seems vast, as though the characters are enacting their roles in a giant cosmos.
That’s because of the difference between the human eye and the camera lens. A camera lens has a fixed focus so, if you want to capture the whole stage in a single shot on camera, you choose a wide-angled lens. Otherwise, you do a close-up and lose the context.
But the human eye does both: you have a wide angle, but you also see in extreme close-up. So, on film, if there are two people on stage you are aware of a big empty stage, which one can make seem less cavernous through lighting.
Do you think that music is able to clarify the indeterminacy that seems to be part of the plot of the opera?
Yes, from the music one takes many cues about what is being meant, even what is being said. For example, in the dialogue you have a series of easy 18th-century misogynistic statements about women: never trust women, always listen to the men.
So in the dialogue you have an argument or a statement, but the music countermands this argument because the women have the much more intelligent music: Pamina’s arias are more interesting music than Sarastro’s, and his are musically simpler than those sung by the Queen of the Night. So the power and the agency in the music belie what is straightforward in the dialogue.
These tensions that run throughout the opera — its contradictions and awkwardness — are there for a number of reasons. There is the inevitable awkwardness of an opera that had to be written in a few weeks, that had to use the props and singers that were available to Mozart — in an opera, in other words, that was cobbled together from found objects, found singers, found props, found stories.
But what is interesting is how productive those awkward elements are. I am not suggesting that they are deliberately, consciously crafted as awkwardness, but in retrospect it is those elements that sustain our interest in the plot and characters, that have sustained our interest in the opera for 200 years.
People have argued that it is a brilliant libretto because it is contains all of these ambiguities, but others have said that Mozart is inconsistent, that he changes his mind halfway through and can’t decide whether Sarastro is good or bad. It is not implausible to say he is both; the libretto reflects our understanding of the world. Many things that are contingent, or that arise out of impure origins, still attain coherence. The Magic Flute is a very good example of this.
Many observers remark that The Magic Flute takes you out of the political realm in which much of your other work has been made. Clearly your interpretation of the opera invests it with some kind of political content, but that is certainly not its raison d’être?
No. If you think of the opera production as part of an ongoing meditation on Plato and the Enlightenment, then certainly it has political content. But the production has evolved, changing with each new performance in a different city or country.
In reference to Sarastro, for example, the interpretation of him has become much cruder, much more direct. There are sections where I didn’t really know what to do with him, particularly in the second aria, but it is now, after all this time with the production, much clearer, more coherent, much stronger than it was in the original production, and it has taken Tel Aviv, Naples, New York to get it right finally.
If we were starting from scratch with the opera production in South Africa, I suspect I would do things differently, or I would give more emphasis to things that have started to appear now in the later productions. Certainly there is another way of doing the opera entirely that I could imagine.
But do we create politics in hindsight and to what extent does one allow form to lead the way in the working out of a project such as this? You have, in fact, returned to your production to give it political content, or to tease out what is already political in the opera. But in addition to this, when you set an opera written in the late 18th century in the late 19th century to incorporate into it references to photography and film, you are opening a passage between The Magic Flute and Black Box.
Obviously photography is deeply embedded in colonial practices of the late 19th century; indeed, the image of the hunt is only one of many filmic representations of the colonial endeavour in Africa. And Black Box seems in part to be about the complicity of image-making — of photography in particular — in representations of the colonial project, in Western representations of Africa.
Did you begin to perceive that while you were working on the opera? At what point did you see photography serving as the central metaphor? Did you choose the late-19th century setting because you knew that you would want access to that set of references and their meanings?
I never thought of the opera as being about Edwardian or colonial photography, but I did want to draw on that era’s style of posing for photography as one of the styles of movement and action on the stage.
Black Box is certainly about photography in the sense that the stage is even more the inside of a camera than in The Magic Flute: in the images of irises opening and shutting, of photographs being taken and in the use of archival footage — in one sequence there is a flashing of archival photographs.
But Black Box is not really a meditation on what it is to take a photograph. Rather, it is about the artificial construction of an image — which is what we do when we look through a camera lens — as a metaphor for what we do when we look through our own lives. We understand the artificial nature of looking through a camera, but we don’t understand the unnatural activity of looking when we are just looking, how when we look it is not simply a matter of the world coming in to us, but it is us constructing the natural world as we understand it.
Kentridge on watching Kentridge
Opera is an impure form. It interrupts listening to pure music with the demand that language must be heard, both joined to and separately from the music. Even more, we are asked to look — to add the different logic of visual comprehension to that of the auditory and reflective senses. Even at its most reduced and minimalist form, it is an overload.
In this production (as in all), we ask you to listen to the orchestra, the singers, the spoken text, to watch the singers, to read the surtitles above the stage and also to watch the projections behind and around all of this. It is clear that this is too much. The best advice I can give is to let your eyes and ears follow as they will, and accept that a part of the production will be missed. This acceptance is better than an anxiety about not taking everything in. — William Kentridge
This interview with William Kentridge is an edited version of the text appearing in the catalogue Flute, published by David Krut Publishing and available at bookshops