The Magic Flute (Swedish: Trollflöjten) is Ingmar Bergman's 1975 film version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte.
He first saw The Magic Flute at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm when he was 12 and hoped then to recreate it in his marionette theatre at home; he could not do so because he could not afford the cost of a recording.
[6] Also while still a child, he serendipitously discovered the Baroque theater that served as the inspiration for his much-later production: As a boy I loved to roam around.
In my imagination I have always seen The Magic Flute living inside that old theater, in that keenly acoustical wooden box, with its slanted stage floor, its backdrops and wings.
[6] The origin of his filmed version was in the 1960s, when Magnus Enhörning, head of the Swedish Radio, asked him for possible projects and he replied "I want to do The Magic Flute for television".
[6] The German-language libretto of The Magic Flute was the work of Mozart's collaborator Emanuel Schikaneder, who was also theatre manager and sang Papageno at the first performances in 1791.
However, Bergman altered the libretto in a number of respects: Sarastro is Pamina's father,[8] trios in act 2 are omitted, and "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen"[9] is sung by Papageno just before he sees Papagena.
[12] Evidon suggests that the characters of Frid and Petra in Bergman's 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, and Johan and Alma in his Hour of the Wolf (1968) pre-figure his conception of Papageno and Papagena, and Tamino and Pamina respectively in The Magic Flute.
So the stage – complete with wings, curtains, and wind machines – was painstakingly copied and erected in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute".
[16] This recording provided a carefully sung version with balanced audio, to which the singers later synchronized their mimed singing during filming.
To me it was also absolutely essential that the play be performed by young actors, naturally close to dizzy, emotional shifts between joy and sorrow, between thinking and feeling.
Another way in which Bergman reminds the viewer that the film is a theatrical event is to display openly the mechanical stagecraft of the 18th century theater.
Birgit Nordin has her makeup adjusted, preparing for her later appearance under grotesquely colored lighting as she sings her second act aria "Der Hölle Rache".
Suddenly, to be ready for his cue, he jumps up out of his bed and rushes to the wings where he plays the appropriate notes on his pipe, is then helped into his birdcage by a stagehand (dressed as one of the bats Tamino encounters later on in act 1), and thus succeeds in making his entrance in the nick of time.
Pamina and Tamino (Irma Urrila and Josef Köstlinger) are seen during intermission quietly playing chess in the dressing room, perhaps reflecting the chastity of their relationship as characters in the opera.
In its televised premiere on New Year's Day 1975, it reached a third of the population of Sweden,[29] and in theatrical release it created "pandemonium at box offices around the world" (Pauline Kael)[30] and delighted many critics.
Bergman must have reached a new, serene assurance to have tackled this sensuous, luxuriant opera that has bewildered so many stage directors, and to have brought it off so unaffectedly.
The theatrical release made profits sufficient to blunt earlier criticism that Swedish Radio had devoted too much of its funds to a single large project.
The film was reviewed from a musical perspective by Richard Evidon, who paid Bergman the compliment of praising the film as a realization of Mozart's own vision: "Only Ingmar Bergman could have made this Magic Flute; but part of his achievement is in letting us forget the director's hand as we watch and are drawn closer to Mozart's sublime work.
"[10] Following re-mastering by the Swedish Film Institute, a blu-ray edition was published by the BFI in 2018; the Opera reviewer noted the "pin-sharp visuals and dynamic sound, highlighting the spatial care with which Bergman matches music to word and image".