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Could it be magic?

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Jonathan Dove is a new opera in a long, magical tradition. JULIAN GRANT conjures up its family tree

…seen composers turn to folklore for their subject matter. A piece that took Europe by storm in the 1820’s was Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Sharpshooter). A tale of magic bullets and demons, it became a German national symbol in the post-Napoleonic era and exercised its own magic on Richard Wagner. In Russia too, operas based on fairy-tales abounded, some based on retellings by figures such as Pushkin, Gogol and Ostrovsky, others on older sagas: Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla, Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki, and a whole series by Rimsky-Korsakov – including The Snow Maiden, Sadko, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and The Golden Cockerel. Tsar Saltan, in a colourful storybook production by the contemporary director Harry Kupfer, has become a hit in Germany. The story combines elements of Cinderella and The Winter’s Tale, while the score features The Flight of the Bumblebee.

For his operatic debut, Stravinsky was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. Le Rossignol (The Nightingale) Stravinsky’s operatic debut, is a concise forty-minute work with balletic elements. Another Andersen story is best known to our kids through Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The water-sprite who falls fatally in love with a mortal man surfaces throughout folklore, in the form of Undine or Nixe (Germany), Ondine (France), or Rusalka (Slavic countries). An unfinished dramatic poem by Alexander Pushkin inspired Rusalka (1856) by Alexander Dargomizhsky (the bass Chaliapin famously recorded a scene from it), while the German play Undine, by Friedrich Heinrich de la Motte Fouqué, was the source material for a number of scores: the ballet Giselle and operas by E.T.A Hoffmann (better known as a fantasy writer than as a composer), Lortzing, Offenbach and Dvořák. Dvořák called his version Rusalka and its soaring ‘Song to the Moon’ has become an operatic greatest hit. In the 1920s, the watery theme was taken up by the Italian composer Respighi, best known for his brilliant orchestral tone poems. His La campana sommersa (The Sunken Bell) surfaces only very rarely, weighed down by obtuse symbols.

Magic opera was not born in the Romantic era. In the 18th century, many operas – most famously by Handel, Gluck and Haydn – contain sorceresses such as Armida and Alcina. The stories are inspired by epics from the era of the Crusades and the 15th century. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, published in the late 16th century, was a direct source for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, transformed into an opera by Benjamin Britten in 1960.

Happily ever after?

The most famous magic opera of all is undoubtedly Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte – The Magic Flute. It has even been made into a movie – twice. Ingmar Bergman’s version is now regarded as a classic in its own right, while Kenneth Branagh’s, released last year, excited some controversy. It unites elements of Enlightenment fable, Masonic ritual, Egyptian mythology and much else in a…

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