OPERA REVIEW : An Unmagical ‘Flute’ in a Festive San Francisco

Baghdad by the Bay is gripped with Mozart Fever. Or at least wants to be.

Doing its considerable best to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, sophisticated San Francisco is hosting a dizzying summer festival of operas, concerts, lectures, symposia, films and plays involving Salzburg’s greatest gift to Western civilization.

At Davies Hall, the Symphony isn’t content merely to present programs conducted by Roger Norrington plus the usual introductory lectures. For an added, unabashedly gimmicky attraction, the management is sponsoring a half-hour mock trial in which a panel of presumed experts--led by no less a Mozartean than Melvin Belli--ponders whether bad old Salieri really killed poor little Amadeus.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be many stampedes at the festival box offices. On Friday, the San Francisco Opera was selling rush seats to card-carrying seniors and students for a not-too-paltry $20 (the top ticket normally costs $85). One still saw empty seats at curtain time.

Why? Perhaps the sudden Mozart glut offers too much of a good thing. Perhaps San Francisco is unaccustomed to so much strenuous culture during the balmy off-season. Perhaps Mozart isn’t as universally popular as one would think. Perhaps the performances aren’t as good as one could wish.

Perhaps all of the above.

The current revival of “Die Zauberflote” at the War Memorial Opera House does little to justify the bravura brouhaha. Although this is a hand-me-down production that dates to 1978, it is better seen than heard.

If the evening has a hero--beside Mozart--it must be David Hockney. His quasi-symmetrical designs--boldly stylized and brightly colored flats depicting pyramids, palms, pools, temples, mythical symbols and mystical ruins--have been celebrated at Glyndebourne and La Scala, in Dallas and Pittsburgh, at Wolf Trap and the Michigan Opera Theater. San Francisco first appropriated the scenic whimsy in 1987. The cautiously desperate Met borrowed the production scheme last season for a version that will be telecast nationally on PBS next Wednesday.

Hockney’s scene-stealing animals are adorable, even when they compete with the magic music. The stage pictures are charming. The costumes are fanciful. If only the decors could sing.

The San Francisco cast is solid, to be sure. Unfortunately, Mozart demands more than solidity.

Jerry Hadley enacts Prince Tamino with ingratiating, wide-eyed vigor, but his once-suave lyric tenor seems to have been compromised by too much Puccini. As his ingenue Pamina, Ruth Ann Swenson sings with compelling sweetness and purity offset by expressive superficiality. She might have been better cast as the Queen of the Night, whose stratospheric coloratura oaths were dispatched neatly here, if without much menace, by Sally Wolf (an early replacement for the reportedly injured Luciana Serra).

Sarastro, the virtual King of the Light, happened to be portrayed by Wolf’s husband, Kevin Langan. His mellow bass, alas, is neither as dark nor as profound as the difficult role dictates.

Making his American debut as Papageno, the feathered nature-boy, was Michael Kraus, a gangly young baritone who has risen from the German provinces to the modest heights of the Vienna Volksoper. Outfitted with a disarming grin and an echt Viennese accent, he offered a cutesy performance that would be more ingratiating if his vocalism were less nasal, less muffled.

Steven Cole almost managed to make Monostatos, the evil Moor, a serious, sensuous threat. Thomas Stewart brought the dignity and routine of advanced age to the expanded duties of the Speaker. Laura Claycomb was, like all Papagenas, instantly adorable.

The three Ladies--Patricia Racette, Yanyu Guo and Catherine Keen--camped at Mozart’s expense. The three boy sopranos--John Wheeler Rappe, Jeremy Faust and Eric Sparks--piped earnestly.

Gerard Schwarz, an eminent Mozart expert making his local debut, encountered unexpected difficulties in the pit. His often erratic tempos erred on the side of briskness. He sustained only a precarious rapport with the stage and elicited ragged responses from the orchestra. Something obviously was wrong.

Paula Williams, who has inherited John Cox’s staging patterns, stressed broad humor and understated pathos in the process. She also revived the annoying tradition that allows Tamino to simply wave his flute in the air when he enchants the animals of the forest.

This is a minor point, but it is significant. Mozart and his librettist made it clear that miracles result specifically from the musical sound, the “Zauberton.” The instrument, after all, is a magic flute, not a magic wand. It does not play itself.

The supertitles by Christopher Bergen, unlike those seen here in 1987 and in San Diego last year, faithfully reflected the quaint racist and anti-feminist sentiments of the text. They also inspired a lot of laughter, some of it in appropriate places.

Still, one had to wonder about the cultural snobbism at work here. A virtually all-American cast sang and, more crucial, spoke bad German for a virtually all-American audience while simplistic and distracting translations were flashed on a screen above the stage.

Wouldn’t it make better sense to do an opera like this in English?