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ABOUT THE MAGIC FLUTE:

Mozart's last opera is an amazing work of layers. It seems all civilization is stacked up in its libretto. Filled with inconsistencies, with themes begun and then abandoned, it is a warehouse of cultural references and quotations. To place some order on this text – to find a unifying principle – proved as unwieldy to me as deciphering the riddle of the Sphinx.

I believe it is important for an audience to enter a theatrical world in a way that is accessible. Once the audience acclimates to that world, the world can grow more foreign and complex until the audience finds itself quite logically in a place where they never before could have conceived of themselves being. But it all seems quite comfortable and natural, because getting there was so painless.

I imagined there was no better metaphor to guide us in this production than the Louvre. In fact, it seemed inevitable. After a nightmare, a young boy climbs out of a bedroom window onto the 21st century Rue de Rivolli then descends through I.M. Pei's 20th century glass pyramid, down into a 19th century museum, which was a 17th century palace, built on top of a medieval castle from the Limbourg Brother's Book of Hours. And within these walls of the Louvre are housed all the mysteries of Western tradition, upon which Emanuel Schikaneder and Mozart drew their opera. The visual metaphor of descent into the Louvre runs parallel with a spiritual descent through Christianity back to pagan sun worship and a psychic descent for the characters into the depths of one's anima and animus, until the opera demands no less than a re-exploration of the entire trajectory of Western belief.

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