Die Zauberflöte by Mozart, Ab (2022/2022), Unter der Regie von Suzanne Andrade, Barrie Kosky, Dirigat Piotr Staniszewski, Teatr Wielki - Opera Narodowa, Warschau, Polen

The Queen of the Night aria has departed the Solar System a long time ago and is travelling further in space alongside a few other musical gems in search for intelligent life. Those charged with selecting the tracks for the Voyager Golden Record faced a huge responsibility: if, indeed, there is an alien civilisation somewhere in the Universe that could potentially be hostile to the human race, it was best to introduce ourselves with ‘music [that] hath charms to soothe a savage breast’. And there is not a living soul on Earth who would not agree that these few minutes of coloratura fireworks are worth saving the human kind for. In the internationally popular Komische Oper’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute which we have been lucky enough to have in Warsaw for a few seasons now, the aria is performed by a giant lady spider dancing over a wriggling Tamino. The staging is the work of Barrie Kosky and the ‘1927’ duo made of performance art, theatre and film wizards who first conquered the Edinburgh Fringe and then ‘brought down the system’ at a few respected opera houses around the world. This dazzlingly hallucinatory show featuring actors playing in a live animation is a tribute to silent film. The director calls it ‘a silent movie by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’ inspired – one might add – by 18th-century chalcography, Yellow Submarine, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and superhero comics, to name just a few obvious references. It is an amazing show, an operatic joyride.