The Philosopher's Stone (Der Stein der Weisen, 1790)
Press reviews
It's out of this world (preview)
The Independent 27 July 2001
A second Magic Flute? A tenor Queen of the Night? Yet another madcap opera by Emanuel Schikaneder, co-composed by members of the original Magic Flute cast, with a storm, a shipwreck, dwarves, magic birds and astral beings, and Mozart's name writ large upon it?
The Philosopher's Stone (Der Stein der Weisen, or Die Zauberinsel, 1790) is a Singspiel with spoken comic dialogue, jointly attributed to Mozart, Schikaneder, Franz Gerl, Benedikt Schack and Johann Henneberg. The young Sydney-born conductor Alexander Briger will deliver the UK stage premiere this weekend for Bampton Classical Opera in Barry Millington's spirited new translation. It was first heard in this country in a concert performance at last summer's Hampstead and Highgate Festival.
The Stone's links with The Magic Flute (staged in 1791) were numerous. Both operas draw on Wieland's collection of folk tales. Both involved higher and lower-order comic pairs, and confrontational supra-beings. And they starred the same team, with Schikaneder (Papageno) as the comic Lubano; Schack (Tamino) as the benevolent god Astromonte; Gerl (Sarastro) as the malicious Eutifronte; Gerl's wife (Papagena) singing Lubanara; and the original Pamina (Anna Gottlieb) as the heroine, Nadine.
It was the Iowa-based scholar David Buch who drew attention to three Mozart attributions on a Hamburg manuscript. They include a cat duet ("Nun, liebes Weibchen") already known from a Paris source, in which Lubanara is metamorphosed by the evil Eutifronte (to prevent her letting the cat out of the bag): shades of the "gagged" Papageno.
"People tend to think of The Magic Flute as a bizarre one-off piece," explains the director, Jeremy Gray, who with his wife is the moving force behind Bampton's outdoor revivals of rare repertoire ranging from Paisiello (Nina) and Storace (Gli equivoci) to Gazzaniga (a rival Don Giovanni). "In fact, it's possible to trace a whole genre in the popular productions staged by Schikaneder around that time.
"On The Philosopher's Stone there are only three fairly minor mentions of Mozart. If it had been an attempt at forgery, his name would have cropped up more frequently. The copyist has been linked with the Theater auf der Wieden outside Vienna where it was produced; so the attributions are likely to be authentic.
"It's quite a problematic opera to put on: like The Magic Flute, it's preposterous, it's bitty. It has serious characters, noble music and noble themes, but also slapstick humour and fantastic effects: gods who come down from heaven in chariots, scenes under the earth, singing birds, all difficult to pull off [despite Bampton's tangibly magical setting, a rook-filled deanery garden in Oxfordshire]. We're treating it to a great extent as science fiction, so that Astromonte becomes a character from space, and the second act is set on a comet," says Gray.
"Often it's impossible to say exactly who did what," explains the ebullient Briger, who has worked with his fellow Australian Sir Charles Mackerras on several Mozart productions, directs the Bennelong Ensemble and is just back from overseeing Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen at Aix-en-Provence. "Some argue that the part of the Act II finale attributed to Mozart isn't by him at all. Mozart always wrote in a very specific way, with oboes at the top, strings and flute underneath, and often the brass on a separate piece of paper.
"The Genie's command and 'Du schwarzer Teufel' are supposedly by Mozart; neither is overly impressive. But then Lubano launches into 'The wife is a cat' and suddenly he adds octave oboes, then an oboe and horn, then these amazing crescendos in consecutive fifths with the singer – and it's just the greatest orchestration: there's no way it could be by anyone but Mozart. It's too extreme.
"The cat duet (listed in Kochel's catalogue, K625/592A) really is Mozart, it's beautifully orchestrated – the way he uses the wind as Lubanara starts miaowing, or the open strings and horns near the end, as everything starts to double up. My theory is, whenever a cat's mentioned in the opera Mozart, being the wit that he was, thought 'Ah, that looks fun, but the orchestration's not good, I'll make it really interesting.'"
Gray adds: "It's not as if Mozart played around with the whole opera, but there are just moments where his voice comes through. In a couple of duets for Lubano and Lubanara (dead ringers for Papageno and Papagena) there's a child-like fun which makes for delightful theatre. And in Act I, four maidens vie, just like the three women at the beginning of The Magic Flute. Both overtures are stronger than the conventional 18th-century overture, and the choruses are extensive and often very fine."
Briger says: "The second chorus during Astromonte's aria is out of this world; one almost feels that's by Mozart. Nadir's part is incredibly demanding – I mean, what tenor encompasses a coloratura top D? His aria has a beautiful introduction with strings, and then trumpets and tymps seem to come out of nowhere. And the end of Act II sounds almost Wagnerian!
"Astromonte himself sounds so like the Queen of the Night that many think his role was intended for Mozart's sister-in-law, Josepha Hofer, who was on maternity leave. The beginning is typical Mozart, paired clarinets against flutes and bassoons. It's as if Mozart was trying it out – we know he liked to play around with Schack's music, they were close friends – and said 'Hey, that doesn't look very good, why don't you put this in?' and it's literally perfect for four bars."
Gray says: "There's an interesting twist when Astromonte makes off with Nadine: everyone is horrified, and the demon manipulates things to imply that Astromonte is not as benign as people believed. Finally he is proved to be good, and the father of Nadir. He pardons his brother and all ends predictably and happily.
"Despite varying quality and colour I do think it's remarkable the way the opera actually holds together. There's a real sense of shape and many genuine delights. It would be fascinating to know how the whole thing was managed; the master figure must have been Schikaneder, who was obviously trying to lure an audience and create a big financial success – as indeed it was." Gray, a modern-day Schikaneder who runs Bampton on a shoestring, deserves a similar satisfaction himself.
Roderic Dunnett
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If you thought the Magic Flute had a weird plot, you should see its
daddy...
The Times 31 July 2001
If you thought The Magic Flute had a weird plot, you should see its daddy. The Philosopher’s Stone, which was given its UK-staged premiere by Bampton Classical Opera amid the golden stone of a Cotswold village at the weekend, as a collaboration between the Flute’s librettist Emanuel Schikaneder and a number of drinking chums, including Mozart. It is tempting to hear a special genius in Mozart’s three little duets but, in truth, beyond a certain sophistication of scoring, they do not advertise themselves.
The ‘story’ of The Philosopher’s Stone comes from the same sources as the Flute, concerns a power-struggle between two estranged brothers, who also happen to be demi-gods, and the complicated effect this has on the Arcadian flower-children who live under their influence: in other words, the kind of jolly nonsense familiar from all supernatural fairytales. Jeremy Gray’s uncomplicated staging brought all this bang up to date with, er, a Maharishi-type guru, Star Trek togs and a Delek performing a stately march.
Thomas Guthrie’s proto-Papageno, Lubano, carried the evening, a natural hangdog comic whose marital problems with his determindly coquettish wife (Gillian Keith) glue the show together. Mark Saberton’s Eutifronte (the naughty brother), bad to the bone in biker gear, was excellently hissable. The show lacked the joyous ensemble of last year’s Comedy of Errors, but the principals were all in good form and the hammy chorus didn’t hurt too badly.
The music chugs along with nods to every style of the period – a spot of Sturm und Drang, some rather unfair Queen of the Night-style coloratura for the tenors – with the occasional genuine highlight: Nadine’s caressing minuet, A Woman Who has Felt Love’s Dart; Lubano’s downbeat little song, To Trust a Girl Would Not be Wise, accompanied by neat woodwind; the Mozart duet Now my sweet darling, artlessly affecting, the orchestra batting motifs about like seals juggling beachballs.
A bitty drama comes together musically and dramatically in a few ensemble scenes, and the extended Act I finale is cleverly paced, with the melting moments and sudden cloudings-over of real opera.
Alexander Briger’s Bennelong Ensemble is a huge improvement on last year’s scratch orchestra, with some lovely horn and oboe work.
Bampton is good clean fun, and this is a work which tells us a lot about Mozart and the Flute. We’ll be seeing plenty more of it.
Robert Thicknesse
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Tweeting swallows, passing ducks
The Independent 1 August 2001
Tweeting swallows, passing ducks, an unscripted chanticleer – pure music-hall, you might think – resolutely failed to faze Bampton Classical Opera's British- premiere production of The Philosopher's Stone. Credited to "Mozart and others" (Mozart supplied the catty bits), and dating from a year before The Magic Flute, The Philosopher's Stone, strong on chorus though thinner on ensembles, enjoyed a similar Viennese popularity. Its plot, by Schikaneder, is less high-minded but comparably zany, and Barry Millington's tongue-in-cheek translation – apt, funny and sensitive to the vocal line – enters slap-bang into the spirit of the original.
So, too, does Jeremy Gray's production. Gray, who both directs (with Gillian Pitt) and designs, has built up both a composite team and his own intelligent directorial style, informed by a wry sense of humour. You never know what trompe l'oeil will impinge next: outrageous colours, Escher-esque structures, bizarre trappings. Gray can pull off importing a silver bird, a spaceman, a Dalek, neo-Copernican paraphernalia (the subtitle could have been Die Silberinsel), because he sustains each visual leitmotif (Lubano has a silver bottle; even the villain is a silver-black villain).
The scarlet-orange-yellow garb of the ubiquitous space-worshipping chorus gets recycled as a fringe to each principal's costume, in the heavenward trajectory of votive balloons, and in the lighting coup at the close of Act I that signposts the static, brassy, ghoulish male chorus of Act II, "Astromonte dies" (shades of Trinculo-Caliban). Nothing – even the make-up – feels haphazard: everything fits.
At last, Bampton has resolved its musical side. The woodwind (richly counterpointed for Astromonte's entry) is better than ever; the horn obbligati, top- notch; the Bennelong Ensemble strings vigorous, if less punchy than a period band – although the violas (for Nadir) gave a good imitation.
I found myself grass-tapping to Alexander Briger's Mozartian pacings: the spirited hunting vignette (the chorus, including male and female quartets, was terrific); Lubano's strophic "To trust a girl would not be wise" (more glorious translation jingles); and surpassing all, the fabulously paced Act II overture, and prolonged Act I finale. The true hero was Mozart's colleague, the 21-year-old newly fledged theatre composer Johann Henneberg, soon to be conductor of The Magic Flute, who delivered the lion's share of the music: a stunning talent.
The cast did well, with reservations: the odd exit prompted unnecessary musical pauses. Neither Sadik (Nicholas Merryweather) nor the central Sarastro figure, Astromonte (Ben Hulett), whose space-suited arrival climaxes Act I, calculated their moves (or identities) adequately.
Gillian Keith's well-sung Lubanara over-egged the feline. Nadir (Mark Wilde) is a tenor of real calibre ("Can I be dreaming?" is pure Tamino), but slightly fudged – like Hulett's Astromonte – his fearsome Queen of the Night-style coloratura.
Amanda Pitt, ever-restrained, made an appealing Nadine. Mark Saberton, a wide-ranging baritone of marked potential in the Pizarro-Scarpia mould, made a strong if pantomimically villainous Eutifronte. The Devil doesn't get the best tunes; Rachel Bickerton's Genie had some of them.
None seemed much of an actor-improviser apart from Thomas Guthrie, whose janitor-Lubano, laced with quirky gesture and sidling nuance, produced convincingly good singing in aria and duet alike.
Roderic Dunnett
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Joy, nimbleness and irony in Bampton’s Mozart rarity
The Oxford Times 3 August 2001
The Philosopher’s Stone, which received its first English staged performance at Bampton last weekend, directed by Jeremy Gray, leads you a merry dance if you try to track the plot too closely, or divert yourself in spotting he bits that Mozart wrote. One of a succession of often co-operatively-written, 'fairy-tale' Singspiele which Schikaneder put on at his Theatre auf der Wieden after 1789 ( The Magic Flute was soon to follow), it gestures affectionately towards the Plautine comic usages, and makes its tangle of complexities a running joke.
How to treat an opera like this, awash with make-believe, in ways to charm away our modern taste for blunt reality? Answer: ensure your singing, acting and orchestral strengths are faultlessly in place, and then have as much joy as you can. It works. The squirting Roman-candle shower that signalled finis to the first part of the work, and shed its lustre on the twilit garden of the Bampton Deanery last week, was emblem of the champagne-flavoured chutzpah of a very funny, pacey show.
But 'fun', perhaps, is not the mot juste here. A kindly irony pervades this piece. All personae are, in some way, in the frame of only from the clownish situations that the plot inspires. Astromonte (Benjamin Hulett) is 'a beneficent god' but his descent dressed as an astronaut, his NASA gear in place, pokes ridicule at everyone, not least himself. And there, among the characters, a to-and-fro of clashing values moderates our loyalties; if Nadir and Nadine (Marke Wilde, Amanda Pitt) seem a shade too solemn in their mutual love, the roguish conduct of their mirror images, Lubano and Lubanara (Thomas Guthrie, Gillian Keith) accounts for it.
On stage, the spread of singing expertise, all young, but all extremely watertight, meshed with the gilded swiftness of events, the choral moves, the witty aptness of the chinking rhymes by Barry Millington. Gillian Keith, embracing her first operatic part with quality and vocal zest, also acted fearlessly; her portrait of the ruthless flirt, condemned by Eutifronte’s spell to sing 'just like a cat', (and how endearingly) was done with every sign of spontaneity.
Yet picking out your leading players here is fairly odious. Mark Saberton, arrayed in evil biker’s kit as Burtifronte, deployed a fine-grained bass. The high jinks Thoms Guthrie brought to sharpen up his role, were matched, likewise, by keen-edged tenor nimbleness. And finally Amanda Pitt, her haunting mezzo right in tune, on two occasions stole the show. No-one, though, displaced the general focus and momentum of events. It was an enterprise shared equally by all – and by the watchers too.
Derek Jole
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...a vivacious performance
Opera, November 2001
The Philosopher 's Stone isn't actually by Mozart: much of it is the work of his young colleague Johann Baptist Henneberg, aged 2I, who rehearsed Die Zauberflöte and took over the conducting from Mozart after the first two performances. But it bears Mozart's imprimatur: at least three passages are known to be by him; and (to judge by some natty touches) he may well have tinkered with the orchestration elsewhere. Yet this Wieland-based tale has enough of the Flute - magic creatures, a philosopher-king, a pair of higher and lower order lovers, a gagged 'cat' duet, concealed paternity and a botched murder plot - to reveal something of the quality of this spirited collaborative genre which Schikaneder had just begun galvanizing at the Theater auf der Wieden.
It was premièred on 11 September 1790, and key members of the Zauberflöte cast composed bits and/or sang in it. It was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for Mozart's masterpiece the following year. The first recent stage production was in Augsburg; its first UK (concert) performance was at last year's Hampstead and Highgate Festival.
Jeremy Gray's outdoor productions for Bampton Classical Opera grow sharper year by year. Here, with co-director Thomas Guthrie, who also sang a mellifluous Lubano (the baritone Papageno role), plus a forceful chorus, a new young orchestra (the capable British-Australian Bennelong Ensemble) plus lively props and space-age stage effects, Gray served up a vivacious performance. Two rising young tenors, Mark Wilde and Benjamin Hulett, made a good stab at the demanding coloratura roles of Nadir and Astromonte. As the villainous brother, Eutifronte, Mark Saberton (another strong baritone) had the right pantomimic frightfulness. Second-half lighting lent additional colour, and the Australian-born conductor, Alexander Briger, inspired some pithy period-manner playing. Once again Bampton has shown how imaginative repertoire can be married with audience-friendliness and fun. Barry Millington's entertaining translation served the piece well.
Roderic Dunnett
