The Tragic Flute

Baudelaire’s proposition that artistic genius is merely the employment of mature technique to conjure the innocence and wonder of childhood has a lot to answer for. While it may have yielded the occasional masterpiece in the past century and a half, it is responsible for countless lapses in judgement, the most recent of which is Yuval Sharon’s new production of Die Zauberflöte for the Staatsoper, a staging so aggressively dull and so misguidedly assured of its own brilliance that it managed to turn Mozart’s least demanding opera into a chore. Even the music couldn’t help. A handful of decent voices were squandered in an overly mannered, often un-theatrical dash through the score, resulting in that rarest of things: a Mozart evening with remarkably few redeeming qualities.

When the Staatsoper announced their new production last year, it…