UCI ‘Flute’ to Take On Dreamlike Cast : Opera: Mozart’s story has been appropriated and retranslated by Robert Cohen, chairman of the UC Irvine drama department, for a new production.

Legend has it that as Mozart lay dying, he would follow the score of “The Magic Flute” as it played nightly in Emanuel Schikaneder’s Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Mozart was supposed to have laughed and wept as he turned the pages to coincide with the events of the performances.

This story has been appropriated and recast by Robert Cohen, chairman of the UC Irvine drama department, for a new production of “The Magic Flute” that opens Thursday at the Fine Arts Village Theatre.

“I see the play as Mozart’s dream, as he is nearing his last days and knows that they are his last days,” Cohen said recently.

“I wrote a Prologue out of a letter that Mozart wrote to his father. The way the opera begins, Mozart makes a brief appearance late in the Overture to his own opera. . . . He has a few words with the theater producer and the orchestra. Those words are Mozart’s own, about his incipient death. . . . He is attempting to make light of it, before going into the orchestra to conduct.

“I don’t mean to suggest the opera will be staged in that fashion,” Cohen added. “We’re not writing in lines, like, ‘Hey, this is a dream.’ There are already lines (like that) there. (The hero) Tamino says, ‘I feel like I’m dreaming.’ We’re allowing the play to take on a dreamlike landscape, as Mozart himself did.”

Cohen said his idea is a working concept rather than a rewrite of the piece.

“I steer away from the idea of a radical revision or even a commentary on it at all. I don’t think I am (doing that) at all,” he said. “ Concept from my point of view is a mental organizational system that helps put a few disparate ideas into alignment. I’m not rewriting the play to make it into a dream. We’re doing it very much as written. This is a translation, not an adaptation; it’s quite literal, except for a prologue.”

Cohen said the concept “clarified” problems for him such as the number of trials Tamino and the heroine Pamina undergo. “Exactly what is Tamino being asked to do through the Trial of Silence and also the Trial of Solitude?” he asked.

“Or why does the (villainous) Queen of the Night tell Tamino and (the bird-catcher) Papageno that the three boys will lead them, but they turn out to be Sarastro’s agents? We might think things like that are mistakes, that Mozart and (his librettist) Schikaneder weren’t thinking. But it makes sense to us as a dream-based landscape.

“Or what is the chorus? Are they angels, (or) simply congregation members of a Masonic lodge? It’s a challenge. They have to be identified. . . . I think (identifications) can be made artistically.”

“We’re trying to get, as much as possible, the traditional values of the opera: Very romantic, a mixture of styles, it has wonderful humor, romance, deep tragedy. It’s even got some satire in it. We’re not trying to recast it stylistically. But the production is very original in being very freshly conceived, in terms of the scenic elements, the nature of the chorus.”

In the UCI production--a joint project between the departments of drama, music and dance--the opera begins with visual “quotations” of 18th-Century staging, then becomes “more and more visually surrealistic,” Cohen said.

“In the final moments, one detects, I hope, the resonance of Mozart in the guise of Tamino. At the end, one must think of Mozart. We have a couple of ways, I hope, that the audience will be reminded of Mozart subtly in the character of Tamino.”

The opera will be sung in a new translation by Cohen and his wife, Lorna Cohen, who is also a playwright. It took the two about six weeks, working “pretty much, 9 to 5,” to complete the project, he said.

“One reason for translating it was simply to learn it,” Cohen said. “I read so many translations, enjoyed it well enough, but I thought, ‘How I could get a handle on it?’ The translation started as an exercise.”

To deflect criticism, he admits that he knows only “about 1,000 words of German.”

“I decided that I would say (that) first,” he said. “But the text turns out to be fairly easy German, given the fact that an opera libretto doesn’t have a lot of words in it. About a third of it is cognates. The rest you look up.

“The translation of the sense of the text is the easier job of translation. Far harder is finding the right phrasings, rhythms, and singable vowels. Even today, we made a change to anger from evil . We’re continually modifying the translation.”

“I am familiar with other translations, and I have had an outside adviser assure me that ours is very faithful to the text, perhaps more than most.”

But his ambitions for the new version are lofty.

“Let me make it clear, my goal was to have the best translation in the history of ‘The Magic Flute,’ ” he said. “I hope this becomes the standard translation. I’m waiting for the show to open to see how it comes across. If they say it’s dreary, I’ll drop (the idea) in my tracks.”

Cohen was one of the faculty members who founded the UCI drama department in 1965, and he has been elected chairman repeatedly over the last 20 years.

But he never before directed an entire opera, although he worked as an assistant to Jan Popper, who was well-known locally for his UCLA Opera Workshop productions, and also Lotfi Mansouri, general director of the San Francisco Opera, back in the ‘60s at Berkeley.

“I don’t find (working with singers) very different” from working with actors, Cohen said. “I work in a very specific way, which I have to describe as ‘interactional.’

“It’s a very specific technique. . . . Take the Queen of the Night’s second aria. If you look at the cadenzas, they are quite astonishing, and dammed hard to sing. But they (often) come across as a kind of decorative singing. So you have to ask the question, ‘What is she doing this for? What is the purpose, the meaning of the words?’--as if she were choosing those notes herself.

“She is trying to drive Pamina crazy so that she will kill Sarastro. I’m working with a singer who is very wonderfully trained musically but not trained particularly as a dramatic singer for this role. . . . It made the singing so much more credible for the singer herself.”

“ ‘Magic Flute’ is a very mixed bag musically,” he added. “There are so many different styles. It makes it wonderful for me, my first full opera, to have such a various musical text to work with. . . .

“The problem I had with ‘The Magic Flute’ is not to let it get too ponderous or too silly. We’re trying to make sense out of the second act, trying to make it meaningful, when coming to wisdom and light, that’s what its about. In a word, this is a play about Mozart’s escalation into the after-light.

“He believed absolutely in the sacrament of marriage, which is a very declasse thought today. But Papageno doesn’t want a mistress, he wants a wife. Pamina and Papageno sing, ‘Man and wife . . . wisdom, justice, light, enlightenment and conjugal marriage, that’s what this opera stands for. It’s easy to make fun of it. I don’t.”

Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” will be sung in a new translation by Robert Cohen and Lorna Cohen at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, at the Fine Arts Village Theatre at UC Irvine. The production also will be given Nov. 14 to 18. The cast includes 50 UCI students and five guest singers in principal roles. Tickets: $12 general admis s ion, weekdays and matinee; $15, weekend. Information: (714) 856-6616 or 856-5000.