In 1791, at the Theater auf der Wieden, in a suburb of Vienna, Mozart gave the first performance of his Singspiel Die Zauberflöte. Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto – he was also the director in his own theatre – aimed to reach a popular audience in their own language. Thanks to the theatrical and dreamlike qualities of the work and to Mozart’s magnificent music it was performed more than a hundred times in a year, and its success has never waned since. To charm audiences of all ages, music lovers and inexperienced public, Mozart and Schikaneder’s plus was addressing spectators in their own language – and not in Italian as in court operas. This is what this new production is proposing, in a version entirely in French, staged by Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubek (remember their beautiful Dido and Aeneas by Purcell) and conducted by Hervé Niquet, with a team of soloists fully invested in their roles of actor-singers, in French, to give more force to Mozart’s masterpiece!!!

Opera in two acts with libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, first performed in Vienna in 1791.

Performed in French with English and French surtitles