With a witty story full of magic and catchy tunes that even those who have never seen Mozart’s classic will be familiar with, it’s no wonder that The Magic Flute has a reputation as being the perfect first opera. Ahead of Daisy Evans’s new production as part of Welsh National Opera’s Spring Season, we explore the opera and its use in popular culture.
Whether it’s the Overture played as background music at the mall on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or a music box on an episode of House playing Papageno’s Das klinget so herrlich, The Magic Flute has definitely made its way into the pop culture landscape.
Being one of the most famous arias in opera, it’s no surprise that The Queen of the Night’s aria Der Hölle Rache has featured in many television programmes, films and commercials, such as Amazon Alexa and Volvo. Red Bull also used Papageno’s entrance aria Der Vogelfänger Bin Ich Ja (’I’m a bird catcher’) in one of their ‘Red Bull gives you wings’ adverts, which showed a cat relaxing after devouring a bird that he caught at height.
Mozart was at the centre of a Season 2 episode of Gossip Girl where the main characters attend a performance of the opera and the anonymous voice of Gossip Girl likens their situations to those in The Magic Flute. While breaking down the plot to opera novice Rufus, Eric plays Der Hölle Rache, and becomes excited as ’It reaches a high F… that never happens in opera’.
That same aria was used in the movie Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts to highlight the joy Roberts' character experiences while traveling through Italy and savouring traditional cuisine.
The Voice season 9 contestant Claudillea Holloway shocked the judges and audience with her pop mash-up of The Queen of the Night’s aria in the blind auditions. The classically trained soprano continued to wow audiences with her operatic interpretation on more popular songs and by adding hip-hop and dance beats to arias.
It's not just The Magic Flute's music that has inspired pop culture over the years. Set in the middle-ages, The Smurfs and the Magic Flute tells the story of a court jester who discovers a magic flute that makes the townspeople dance. The 2008 movie The Magic Flute Diaries is a modern story about singers in a production of The Magic Flute whose lives loosely parallel those of the opera's main characters.
The 2022 movie The Magic Flute, starring Welsh actor Iwan Rheon as Papageno, follows a young boy from London as he travels to the Austrian Alps to attend the legendary Mozart boarding school. There, he discovers a centuries-old forgotten passageway into the fantastic world of The Magic Flute.
There are also many books that retell Mozart’s story, such as Eva Ibbotson’s Magic Flutes, a teen romance period novel centred around the Viennese Opera and their performance of The Magic Flute. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Night's Daughter sets the story in an Atlantis-like world with human-animal hybrid creatures and Luisa Perkins's contemporary fantasy novel Summersong uses modern-day New York as the backdrop.
If you are more familiar with the music and the story than you realised, or if it’s reminded you of how sublime and timeless Mozart’s classic is, then come and see it brought to life like never before in our new production of The Magic Flute this Spring, touring to Cardiff, Llandudno, Milton Keynes, Bristol, Birmingham, Southampton and Plymouth between 5 March – 27 May 2023.