Roland Emmerich's Magic Flute Apocalypse

If there is an opera that is not in crisis, then it is the amusing and mystical machine spectacle by Messrs Emanuel Schikaneder and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which premiered a few months before his death at the Theater an der Wien. A play with dragons and funny characters, strange freemasons, evil mothers and enigmatic father figures, high ideals, magic and fun and deep meaning.

Actually an impossible piece. Unplayable in its contradictions. But nothing can bring a music theater into the black more easily than a permanent performance of the "Magic Flute" on its stage for about a lockdown period.

The fact that Roland Emmerich, the apocalypse king of big screen cinema, has always liked “The Magic Flute” naturally honors him and Mozart. And it's not really surprising. He was "simply flattened," he says, when he sat across from her for the first time. He was there fifteen or sixteen. It was "magical".

But the story, says Emmerich, was less of a reason for being flattened. But on the "brilliant" music. You have to agree with Emmerich, of course, that he was absolutely right. Which, when it came to bringing the enlightening masquerade to the screen for a third time after Ingmar Bergman and Kenneth Branagh, led to a second story alongside the power struggle between light and dark, the Queen of the Night and the High Priest Sarastro with which all Harry Potter generations are to be won over to Mozart, to the "Magic Flute" and to opera in general.

However, the disaster begins with the title. “The Magic Flute” is the name of what Emmerich co-produced, wrote Andrew Lowery and Jason Young and directed by Florian Sigl, after all a scholarship holder at the Richard Strauss Conservatory and a student of Sergiu Celibidache. "The Magic Flute" is also on the posters in Salzburg, where the film is set, when it's not dealing with the "Magic Flute" storyline in a Masonic fantasy with a lot of barren areas.

Tim Walker, so the story goes, ended up in the Salzach. To the Mozart boarding school (which doesn't exist like that). Where the great singers are trained. On his deathbed he had to promise his father, who was a fabulous singer and himself a Mozart boarding school student, that he would go there. And that he brings a book back to the library, exactly where father stole it, and at exactly the right time. The book is the piano reduction of the "Magic Flute". Tim's father's favorite opera.

On the train to Salzburg, which looks like the pre-Alps variant of the Hogwarts Express, Tim falls in love with Sophie. It will come as it must after two looks, but it will take forever. In the boarding school, not only the usual boarding school bullying mob and the elimination singing for the occupation of a – surprise! - "Magic Flute" performance, but also the strict institute director Dr. Longbow played by F. Murray Abraham, who in turn was the supposed Mozart murderer Salieri in Milos Forman's "Amadeus", which is very funny.

Tim's book serves as a kind of portkey, in Harry Potter terms. Put back on the shelf, it opens the library to the Magic Flute world like the closet opened to Narnia. And Tim is transported to the realm of Sarastro and the Queen of the Night after three ridiculous blue digital balls rising from the piano reduction and replacing the three boys of the "Magic Flute" in the "Magic Flute".

We have now told it in such detail because up to this point no one has sung, and none of Emmerich's – actually Mozart's – “brilliant” music has been heard. There was a bit of the overture. And that was - quite brilliantly played by the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, who seemed to be well informed in terms of performance history, sparkling and sparkling - was really great.

Maybe now would be the moment to leave the cinema. To go home very quickly, to hear Fritz Wunderlich as Tamino, for example. If you can't find the exit, it will be terrible from now on - with one exception. Visually and musically.

Barely arrived in the realm of the Magic Flute, Tamino alias Tim not only forgot the complete story of his father's favorite opera. Aesthetically, he finds himself in a world that hasn't exactly been missed since the Barbarella B movies of the 1970s.

For decades there has not been a worse programmed snake than the one Tamino is fleeing from. There haven't been sci-fi matrons in more pathetic outfits in decades than the three ladies of Magical Flute.

And then yes - curse of the opera film - must be sung. If possible from those who can be seen there. But there are actually only two who can really sing. Rolando Villazón is the one who is a tenor, quite famous, fictional father of a Mozart boarding school inmate. Sabine Devieilhe is the other. She's the queen of the night. Sing them and play them.

It's not only irritating that you don't hear what you see, because the "Magic Flute" actors all sing in English and their German voices are dubbed into quite frightening German. They do not get beyond the average level of YouTubers singing in the shower. Even if you're a reasonably hardened operagoer, your ears drop when you hear the three ladies. Or the Papageno. Or the at least not black-faced Monostatos.

Every lion actor in the Hamburg musical theater manages his program more smoothly. It sounds angular, wooden. Nothing is right, not in height and not in depth. You want to take away their microphones. Or stuff cotton balls in your ears.

Apart from the orchestra, there is only one reason to go to the cinema, musically. To hear Sabine Devieilhe. She sings herself and us head and neck. The fact that she is dubbed in a similarly stupid way as the rest of the cast is something we only mention in passing.

And so one wonders who this magical music junk shop is supposed to be good for. Any elementary school student with a reasonably intact music education knows the story of a better vocal ensemble. Every grown-up opera-goer would have their toenails splitting at the sight of the vocal result. Whoever takes their children and grandchildren to the cinema has a hell of a lot to explain.