Squeals of delight filled the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon as the chandeliers rose before the final dress rehearsal of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Even an audience of schoolchildren could appreciate this crowd-pleasing Met ritual.
For the next 90 minutes, the children — nearly 2,100 of them, brought from public, private and charter schools across New York City and its suburbs as part of the Met’s “Access Opera” curriculum — sat transfixed (well, some did) as they were introduced to opera through what the Met hopes has become a gateway holiday staple. They leaned forward as they watched the skittering puppets and dancing birds, and singing children floating across the top of the stage, that animate this otherworldly tale of royal courtship and good and evil.
“The Magic Flute” that returned to the Met last week is a far cry from the 2.5-hour, German-language work that Mozart wrote in 1791. It is an abridged version of an already abridged version — Julie Taymor’s 2004 English-language production — and the latest bid by the Met to spiff up and trim down the opera to accommodate the attention spans of what it envisions as its next-generation audience.
“The Met sees it as a starter opera,” said Davor Golub, who is the teaching artist for the Met’s Access Opera program. “It’s aimed at young people. It’s 90 minutes.”
Taymor, the director of the long-running, child-friendly Broadway hit “The Lion King,” fills the “Magic Flute” stage with swirling, colorful imagery, and she chopped the original running time nearly in half, including by cutting the intermission. This year, the Met trimmed another 14 minutes from the production, which now runs just under 90 minutes, down from about 100 minutes.
The shortened running time isn’t the only effort to increase the opera’s appeal. The biggest applause of the afternoon came when Papageno, the scene-stealing bird catcher, began his one-two-three count as he threatens to hang himself if his love interest Papagena does not appear — and managed to slip in a “6-7.” This Generation Alpha reference is very much in keeping with the Met’s interest in cultivating future fans for an art form that is worried about graying audiences. If there were any doubts about whether this young audience was paying attention, the screams of laughter put them to rest.
“The Magic Flute,” for all the delight of Mozart’s music, can be a little convoluted and, yes, long. Even this doubly abridged version was not abridged enough for every listener. “I liked the music but not the singing,” said Mi Lin, 10, a fifth grader from P.S. 131 in Brooklyn. “They were singing for like seven hours, and I was starving.”
Yet for the most part, the opera seemed to have captured its audience.
“It was pretty, it was magical,” said Sarayah Mohammed, 10, a classmate of Mi who described herself as an aspiring professional singer. “If you’re a fan of singing like me, you will like this show.”
The success of this “Magic Flute” is as much a financial imperative as an artistic one: The Met — like many performing arts organizations — is facing the twin challenges of declining revenues and aging audiences. The high cost of tickets and the image of opera as exclusive, as outdated as that might be, has made it harder for the Met to draw the younger audience critical to its future.
“The Magic Flute” is intended not only to fill seats, but also to draw that younger demographic. It is the Met’s counter to “The Nutcracker,” which brings big crowds every holiday season to New York City Ballet, the Met’s neighbor at Lincoln Center. Peter Gelb, the opera’s general manager, said the company had considered a rotation of child-friendly operas during December — like Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” a Met holiday staple for years — before settling on “The Magic Flute.”
“We decided to stick with the one that is most popular,” he said. Over the past 10 years, “The Magic Flute” has averaged approximately 85 percent paid attendance, the Met said.
This is hardly the first time an opera company has tinkered with “The Magic Flute.” Garth Bardsley, who in 2019 directed a “Magic Flute” set in 1960s America, at New York University, said that “opera companies and theater companies alike must be as imaginative and inventive as possible” to attract new audiences and revenue streams.
Yet Bardsley argued that “The Magic Flute,” with “its magic bells, magic flute, birdman and birdwoman,” was already accessible, and that changes should be done with care.
“Why would you want to make it shorter?” he said adding: “It is foolish to believe that young people do not have the ability to sit for periods of time engaging with art. We should challenge, transport and excite audiences.”
With its cuts and translation into English, the original Taymor production was a significant reworking of the opera. The trims this time were more surgical. Gelb said that the Met thought “it could use a little more streamlining: anything we can do to make it better.”
One stanza was trimmed from Papageno’s opening aria, some dialogue has been cut from the search for the missing prince, and the famous “Queen of the Night” aria is not quite as long as Mozart envisioned it.
“The kids don’t have to worry about the Masonic search for knowledge,” Gelb said. “They can grab on to the basic elements of the story — light and darkness, the romance.”
Jessica Chuquianga, 10, said that “The Magic Flute” was her first time at the Met. “I like how they can sing really high with the vocals, and how they acted, and how they danced,” she said. “I like how much detail they put into the costumes.”
Yet if this young audience is any indication, the Met has challenges ahead. Some of Jessica’s classmates said that as much as they also enjoyed the show — not to mention the whole ritual of walking into a grand opera house at Lincoln Center, taking their seats in the dress circle — they could not see returning anytime soon.
“I’d love to,” said Juana Guinea, another fifth grader from P.S. 131. “But I don’t think I would be able to. If I told my parents they would say it’s too expensive.”
Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering cultural, government and political stories in New York and California.
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