In the final weeks of the 2022-2023 season of the Metropolitan Opera, the company brought us new productions of two Mozart masterpieces, Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni. The former was directed and choreographed by Simon McBurney; the latter was directed by Ivo van Hove. Both were conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. ^(I) Both were auteurial—that is, determined by direction that not only defines the style of the performance and the integration of its elements, but places the director in the position of co-author, if not primary author, as in the movies. Both were highly skilled in terms of theatrical technique. Yet there was a significant difference between them. The Giovanni is merely another exhibit in the already crowded museum of curiosities that seek “timelessness” in contemporaneity and “universality” in an easy recognizability not of life as we live it, but of life as depicted in our onscreen culture. It makes use of all the devices that pretend to bring work and audience closer but that in reality, step by step, detach the one from the other. It would have seemed audacious fifty years ago, and modernish at twenty-five years’ distance. Now it is just another effort of one recently modish sort. But though it presses on the artform’s boundaries, it can still be called an interpretation of the opera, the dramma giocoso called Don Giovanni, with a coherence of its own if we grant its dubious premises.

The Zauberflöte is something else altogether. It is not an interpretation of the opera, the Singspiel called Die Zauberflöte. It is a mixed-media event in low-comedy entertainment mode, predominantly visual, which purloins Mozart’s score for its musical elements. It excises the work’s spine, installing in its place a series of rapidly sequenced playpen episodes, each of which serves to wipe away the previous one, as with 30-second spot commercials crammed into a programming break. There is no coherence even if we grant the premise, since the premise itself is one of incoherence, of forgetting the preceding 30 seconds for the sake of the present 30 seconds, of jettisoning the old work for the new. This Zauberflöte can be called an opera only in the sense that the descendants of Duchamps’ urinal, any of the readymade objets selected by an artist and submitted for exhibition, can be called art—i. e., if it’s performed in an opera house, it must be an opera. But I don’t accept that definition, and since I am an opera critic, I cannot review this event in the normal way, and will not be describing the production in any detail. If you have not yet heard about its many moves and devices (the projections, the visual artist, the Foley artist, the tramping down the aisles and between the rows of seats, etc., etc.), you can easily learn about them from reviews and promotional pieces. I think it will be more productive to discuss aspects of the work itself while offering some observations on the theatrical and musical gestures the event makes to exploit the work while sidestepping it—including the singing, where that fills in at the margins.