DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE

Through myriad states of rapture and mystery, a couple makes its way from darkness to light, bearing a new ideal for human society. Mozart’s favourite work, whose popular success he was able to witness until his dying hours, is a miraculous aesthetic and spiritual achievement: its complex simplicity, with its unique diversity of tones and languages, makes it a universal masterpiece in its own right, somewhere between fairy-tale entertainment and noble initiation. But any bright utopia invariably has a dark side when it assumes concrete form in the West of yesterday or today; when a certain vision of the perfect community enters history. Digging into the sensitive archives of our collective memory, Clément Cogitore invites us to follow the bildungsroman of young children as they grow up in a world of fragile beauty and uncertain truth. For the first time at the Festival, Leonardo García-Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea are taking on a work by its flagship composer, performed by a cast that is every bit as magical as the occasion requires.