Damon Albarn has unveiled details of his new electro-opera ‘The Magic Flute II: La Malédiction’, which premieres at the Théâtre du Lido in Paris on 27th March.
The opera is based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1807 work ‘The Magic Flute Part II’, a sequel to Mozart’s original 1791 opera that was never set to music.
“The idea of me writing an 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,” Albarn explains. “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.”
Producer Jean-Luc Choplin, who previously collaborated with Albarn on ‘Monkey: Journey To The West’, describes how the project came to fruition: “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.”
Choplin adds: “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.”
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