Pocket Opera was the brainchild of Donald Pippin. He built up a prodigious collection of opera librettos translated from their original languages (primarily Italian and German) into English. He would then give “pocket” performances of operas whose texts he had translated, usually involving only a few vocal soloists accompanied by Pippin himself at the piano. Since these were highly excerpted, Pippin would “fill in the blanks” with his own narration.
Pippin died here in San Francisco on July 7, 2021, at the ripe old age of 95. However, Pocket Opera endures, now under the artistic direction of Nicolas A. Garcia. During the pandemic, Garcia decided to explore the possibility of bringing film, as well as English texts, to opera performances. The first result to be presented took place yesterday afternoon at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. The title of the performance was “A Pocket Magic Flute.” I regret to say that the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart took more of a beating than I have encountered at past performances. This was probably due, in no small part, to a significant disregard of the libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. Pippin had, of course, written an English translation of that libretto; but Garcia seemed to have other ideas in mind.
“A Pocket Magic Flute” deconstructs the narrative of the original opera and reconstructs it as an elaborately conceived animation with more attention to words than to music. As a result, all of the major roles in the narrative are double cast, sung when there is music and spoken when there is not. Mind you, Schikaneder had written a fair amount of spoken text for Mozart’s performers; but Garcia seems to have decided that the lily needed more paint. Those wondering about my choice of that last word have only to consult William Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined Gold, to paint the lily/ To throw a perfume on the violet/ ... is wasteful, and ridiculous excess.”
The Queen of the Night in the animated film created for “A Pocket Magic Flute” (from the Pocket Opera Web page for this production)
Sadly, a dark cloud of “ridiculous excess” hung over the stage in the Legion of Honor. Indeed, the cloud began to form even before “A Pocket Magic Flute” began. First, Garcia talked about his interest in incorporating animated film at more length than was probably necessary. Then he screened an eight-minute documentary about the project, presumably to fill in any blanks he had missed. Only after that was the result of the film he had conceived given its first screening to a general audience.
There is an old joke too risqué for this site about sitting on the side of the bed describing how great things are going to be. It did not take me long to recognize that, in “A Pocket Magic Flute,” things were not great at all. Indeed, the longer the film progressed, the more inclined I was to squirm in my seat.
Nevertheless, I have learned over the years to come to grips with the fact that “these things happen.” I was reminded of my high school days when Jackie Gleason launched what he thought would be a new variety show. The first program was so bad that, one week later, he used the one-hour broadcast to apologize and explain why things went as bad as they did. Ironically, the ratings shot with this “personal conversation of one;” and Gleason managed to keep going with engaging thoughts from one week to the next.
What was important was that Gleason knew that he had bit off more than he could chew. However, he knew how to recover once he came to grips with the problem. Hopefully, Pocket Opera will come to grips with the problems that plagued “A Pocket Magic Flute.” If they can understand why things turned out the way they did, then, like Gleason, they should be able to recover and maintain audience interest.
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