I went to see The Magic Flute at the Met last week and dozed through the sleepy parts of it, woke up for the Queen of the Night aria, and again when the Papageno dashed into the audience carrying a stepladder. This almost never happens in opera. My beloved explained it to me during intermission: “It means he is looking for something higher.” “Oh, right,” I said. But several times during Act One he dropped the ladder, which made a great clatter and you could feel the audience awaken, which is a good thing.
Papageno was played by a Dutch baritone, Thomas Oliemans, and he doesn’t have a big voice but he was having a big time clowning around onstage with the ladder for a prop. He’s a fine actor and quite agile for an opera singer, unlike singers of yesteryear who embraced the “Park and Bark” style, and I was fully awake for his big moment. He did something I’ve never seen before on an opera stage and don’t expect to see again.
This is Mozart’s great final opera, written shortly before his death, his homage to Masonic ideals of enlightenment and civility, but here was Papageno lining up a dozen beer bottles on stage and playing a tune on them with sticks of celery. One bottle sounded flat so he pretended to drink from it and thereby raised the pitch. And then another bottle sounded sharp, so he stood, back to the audience, very still, his hands in front of him, and the audience got the joke instantly: Papageno was urinating into the bottle to lower the pitch. (Not really, it’s only acting, but on the other hand, how do we know for sure?) He zipped up, and tapped it and the tone was lower, and the audience fell apart, especially the ones with male pronouns.
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