I used to like to go on half-joking rants about how Damon Albarn likes to busy himself with anything but new Blur music, but two years ago The Ballad Of Darren came along to silence me. Now that those reunion festivities seem finished for good, Albarn is back to his usual eclectic itinerary. He's working on another opera.
Albarn has previously composed the operas Dr. Dee and Monkey: Journey To The West, and around the time that Blur album dropped two summers ago, he was talking about adding a third opera to his catalog. "I got offered this amazing opportunity to set Goethe’s Magic Flute Part Two to music and song," he said at the time. "I’m kind of teaching myself Goethe, which is not as great a task as it would have been if I hadn’t done a lot of study about, you know, other Renaissance men like Dr. John Dee. I’ve got a lot of the bases because I had to go a long way back to even vaguely understand what that was about. So, I did a lot of that 10 years ago."
Now it's coming to pass. The Magic Flute II: La Malédiction, billed as "an electro opera," will have its premiere March 27-30 at Théâtre du Lido in Paris. Albarn shared this statement about it:
The idea of me writingan opera and for it to be a continuation of The Magic Flute sounds ridiculous, it was and is, not only was I grappling with the genius of Mozart but I had Goethe to contend with too !! I suppose I took a relatively reductionist approach to the question, how the fuck do I do this ? The answer came from a surprising source but one no less brilliant, Kraftwerk.
Here's more on the project from Jean-Luc Choplin:
Reading Benoît Chantre’s book on Friedrich Hölderlin, Le Clocher de Tübingen, I discovered that during an evening in Tübingen attended by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe, the latter said he was writing a sequel to Mozart’s famous ‘Singspiel’, The Magic Flute. This triggered my curiosity and I set off in search of Goethe’s script and sketches.
I soon became convinced that there was an opportunity to develop the opera that Goethe had dreamed of. Namely:
– A fairy tale about the initiation of a couple against the backdrop of a Masonic fable and the fascination of the time with ancient Egypt.
– The spirit of Martin Wieland’s fairy tales, Dschinnistan, and Jean Terrasson’s apprenticeship novel Séthos.
– Faust II for the end of the script.
I asked Damon Albarn, the British musician and composer with whom I had already collaborated on the opera Monkey: Journey to the West and wonder.land at the Théâtre du Châtelet, to write the music for this sequel to the prequel Die Zauberflüte.
I asked Jeremy Sams, a British playwright, librettist and composer, to write the libretto for this opera in faithful accordance with Goethe’s notes. I suggested to Damon and Jeremy that we start by presenting a semi-staged concert version before developing a stage version at a later date.
As Hölderlin and Goethe prophesied, and paraphrasing Benoît Chantre, this electro opera speaks to us of a possible ‘European night’, and at a time when glaciers are melting and cities are ablaze, this new fable is a good way to think about our world and draw a moral lesson of courage and optimism from it.
Watch a trailer for the opera below.
