ENO: the fight's not over

Before I go on, please be reassured that none of what follows is meant to overshadow the enormity of the Brussels news which has cast a pall over the day, the week, the month. But struggles great and small are going on everywhere, so I hope it's not too insensitive to ask for your indulgence with this one.

'I can not be otherwise,' Hofmannsthal's Arabella declares to Strauss's music. So it is with Mark Wigglesworth, one of the most honourable people I've met. How could he not hand in his resignation, as he officially did via Albion Media and the ENO Press Office this afternoon, now that our national opera company has been declared fit for purpose for only half the year, with its chorus looking for work elsewhere from March to June?

Despite what Cressida Pollock says in the weasel words (to put it mildly) of a vague, badly phrased manifesto for some reason published uncritically in today's Independent - what was she thinking of, comparing her decision to Sophie's Choice? - no real compromise was made on her part or the Board's. Mark has offered no further comment for the time being - more will come over the next few days - and neither shall I on that subject, other than to note that this may simply be the next stage in a refusal to let bureaucrats gut a thriving company and that I only hope statements of fact will fight all the obfuscation on the other side.

The top picture should say it all from the artistic side. I wanted to go back and see The Magic Flute, the production by Simon McBurney which hadn't ignited first time round but did so at a sublime level with Wigglesworth conducting, Lucy Crowe as Pamina and Allan Clayton as Tamino. I wrote about the first night experience in an earlier post, so let's just say the final afternoon performance had me shedding rather more tears in key spots (the Act One Quintet, several places in the Act One finale, what we'll always know as 'Ach, ich fühl's' and 'Tamino mein'). The whole of the second act finale transported me to that happy deeper place I sometimes touch on in the most successful meditations.

I'm certainly not prone to snapping curtain calls. But as, in thanks for my participation on the Mackerras Fellowship jury, they'd given me tickets dead centre in the Dress Circle and I was ideally placed to catch perhaps the last moment of unalloyed musical idealism at ENO, I did the honours both at the final bow and just after.

For the last words - at least for now - I refer you back to Mark's article for The Guardian on 11 February. He stated his position in no uncertain terms here: 'ENO’s identity as a team defines its past and will be its greatest asset in protecting its future Cutting the core of the company - musicians and technicians alike - would damage it irreparably.' And he ended thus:

English National Opera’s current production is as interesting to the aficionado as it is welcoming to the opera novice. No one would feel they needed to belong to an opera club to enjoy it. It is a showcase for the ground­breaking possibilities of a people’s opera, for the extraordinary qualities of those in our company, and for the magnificent Coliseum itself. It is a celebration of what teamwork can bring, and of the magical power of music to bring us together, remind us that we are human, and enrich our lives for the better.

Now it really is a battle between the Enlightened and the - not. I hope it isn't all over.

UPDATE: The Guardian quotes from a longer resignation letter sent to company members. It clarifies with MW's usual eloquence what he has been maintaining for months. 

In the footsteps of Mackerras

It was hard sitting on the news for so long: the six of us privileged to spend a long but rewarding day adjudicating the final for English National Opera's Mackerras Fellowship, which offers a promising conductor a chance to work in depth with the company for two years, more or less made up our minds at 6pm that evening. Details and approval needed thrashing out by Mark Wigglesworth and the trustees of the Fellowship, but my suggestion that since we couldn't agree between us on two, we should split it, was essentially adopted. Thus the two were chosen, still young by conducting standards - Toby Purser, enterprising founder of the Orion Orchestra,

and Matthew Waldren, whose conducting of Delibes's Lakmé at Opera Holland Park I'd already admired, with only a qualification about pace (photo by Fritz Curzon).

They're no spring chickens, and I suppose we might have hoped for a) younger talent and b) a woman or two, at least in earlier rounds, but you have to choose the best. I also had a soft spot for Christopher Stark, co-ordinator of the Multi-Story Orchestra which gives concerts in a Camberwell car park (I have yet to hear one). He spoke very eloquently and clearly - we could hear every word right at the back, from where we were sitting just behind the brass and alongside the percussion - and showed flashes of brilliance, especially for Tom's first aria in The Rake's Progress, which he's conducted.

The snag with the morning's three competitors was that they didn't really seem to take into account the singers, standing on a platform just to the conductor's left, and slightly behind him. This was the first time any of them had got their hands on the ENO Orchestra, sounding rich and lovely from the start, so it was perhaps understandable that most of the work went on orchestral detail. And I wondered if there had been more liaising with soprano Eleanor Dennis, mezzo Rachael Lloyd, tenor Rupert Charlesworth and baritone Matthew Durkin in the piano sessions the day before, but apparently not.

So it was hardly surprising that, when Waldren got Charlesworth to come and stand right in front of the orchestra, my vivacious fellow-outsider whom I already know and like a lot through a mutual friend, Phillip Thomas, and from our Brunch with Brünnhildes, that great Wagnerian soprano Susan Bullock, exclaimed 'thank you, God!' Sue and I were additions to a panel that already included ENO Head of Music Martin Fitzpatrick, Senior Artistic Advisor John McMurray, Head of Casting Sophie Joyce and of course Mark himself.

Waldren was the only one we witnessed to make true music-theatre with both singers and orchestra; the Dorabella-Guglielmo duet from Cosi really changed and developed as a result. Invidious to say too much about the other conductors, but here's the weirdest thing: the one who baffled us the most was the players' favourite, adduced from a questionnaire they'd been given. And yet from the minute he stood up in front of them, the orchestra suddenly lost all its tonal beauty and sounded a bit like a brass band. It may just be that this was in the dead spot of the day, mid-afternoon, but I remembered John Carewe's comment that the sound of an orchestra adapts to a conductor the minute he or she first raises the baton.

The main point is that, as I've already written in replies to comments on previous posts, I found it one of the most exhilarating if exhausting days of my professional life, and I learnt a huge amount (never noticed, to take one small example, that a harp softens the processional theme of the Mastersingers - two of the competitors drew attention to it). Discussions at lunchtime and afterwards were very lively, and I found the perspective of leader Janice Graham - she who played Leonora's theme in Act Two of The Force of Destiny so seraphically - especially fascinating. I must have been nuts to go on to the first of Dudamel's concerts with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela - by the time I reached the Festival Hall I just wanted to sleep. But there's no kipping through Stravinsky's Petrushka or The Rite of Spring, even in erratic performances.

This is perhaps the right moment to hail a by all accounts fabulous new Music Director for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, 29-year-old Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. I haven't caught Gražinytė-Tyla in action yet but Richard Bratby, who heard a specially scheduled CBSO concert with her in January, is someone whose opinion I trust completely. I asked him if he'd react on the morning of the announcement for The Arts Desk and he did so, beautifully. It's especially felicitous for another potentially great Balt to follow Latvian Andris Nelsons.

Bad times, not artistically but financially, for ENO just got worse with the Board's proposal to cut salaries for the chorus by 25 per cent. As last year's Mastersingers triumph showed most powerfully at a similarly vital time, they are a backbone of the company; I know Richard Jones especially adores them. If morale drops just at the time when Mark Wigglesworth is invigorating, by all accounts, everyone who works there, it could be the beginning of the end. I don't know the figures - I must find out - but bearing in mind something has to give, I wonder whether it shouldn't be in the very large administration. Why are the artists always the first to suffer? If you want to defend the company, you should sign both the petition set up by 'the Spirit of Lilian Baylis' and the one on Equity's site.

As with Mastersingers last year, one in the eye for the ludicrous Arts Council 'punishment' which had just been meted out, along came a first night yesterday of such brilliance that one could only wish to fight the proposed cuts with fiercest might (pictured above, ENO principal flautist Claire Wicks in the first of production photos by Robbie Jack). I hadn't much enjoyed Simon McBurney of Complicite's production of The Magic Flute the first time round; this revival was as different from the ENO premiere as day from night. Much of that must be ascribed to the electrification of Mark Wigglesworth and his players, raised up virtually to stage level as before so that the interaction between singers and orchestra could only be the stronger (and there was no problem at all hearing just about every word).

It's a truism that pace is everything in Mozart, but I hadn't really taken that on board until I heard Jonathan Cohen conducting a Glyndebourne on Tour Marriage of Figaro that just zinged; you thought, especially in the first two acts, 'how on earth does Mozart keep it up?'

Here you could only feel the cumulative effect at an incandescent lick, which is probably why I found myself weeping with sheer pleasure just into the Act One Quintet. But there was plenty of space for Tamino's and Pamina's great arias to breathe. And I doubt if I''ll ever see a better, and certainly never a more sympathetic, pair than Allan Clayton and Lucy Crowe.

Clayton (pictured above with the Three Ladies, Eleanor Dennis, Catherine Young and Rachael Lloyd, and also of course above that with Sarastro's brotherhood) has a flawless technique and a fearless sense of engagement; what joy to hear a real tenor in the role after all those choral-scholar ombre pallide.

I wept again at lovely Lucy's 'Ach, ich fühl's' and almost sobbed out loud at 'Tamino mein' - as one should. The buzz in the house at the end was palpable. I won't go into further detail - my colleague Alexandra Coghlan has said it all on The Arts Desk - except to give a special accolade to the Three Boys (Jayden Tejuoso, Fabian Tindale Greene and Louis Lodder), perfectly together with the orchestra throughout,

and to say that the production which had left me cold first time round now seemed near-perfect; I laughed a lot. So, a huge triumph again for ENO. And Wigglesworth has now proved his versatility with Shostakovich, Verdi and Mozart in the first half of the season.

Within these sacred halls

The title is the first line of Sarastro's simple but sublime aria of consolation to Pamina, who's just been terrorised by a hellbent mama, in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. William Mann paraphrases the sentiments very beautifully in his The Operas of Mozart: 'We do not know revenge in this holy place. If someone falls, he is raised up by love and friendship to better things. Traitors cannot survive when all people love one another and treachery is forgiven. Anybody who does not appreciate this is unworthy to be a human being'.

Mann adds: 'this two-stanza strophic song is essentially the creed of Sarastro's Temple and of the Freemasonry which Mozart and Schikaneder [his librettist, manager of Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden where The Magic Flute opened in 1791 and the first Papageno] embraced'. Mozart is on the far right, it seems fairly clear, of the below painting of the Viennese lodge Zur neugekrönte Hoffnung, 'Of new-crowned hope'.' It is, I hope,' Mann adds, 'the basic creed of everybody, no matter what ethical faith they subscribe to.' And therein lies the noble essence of what Freemasonry originally was, and what it still purports to be: 'a craft, a personal vocation of benevolent moral growth, whose principles are conveyed through imagery connected to building'.

Those words are from Tim Dedopulos's The Secret World of the Freemasons, an excellent if uncritical introduction, though misleadingly titled; there are no secrets other than the password or gesture used to identify members of one lodge to another,l and since Mozart's time the rituals have all been divulged in print. I found sentences like that useful in trying to understand the fundamental benigness of a movement which is neither a cult nor a religion in itself. What a pity Freemasonry has become a byword for nepotism and ganging-up within interconnected professional movements like the police and the law when - Dedopulos again - 'the society's oaths and obligations specifically forbid members from using the organisation in this way'. There is, alas, plenty of evidence to prove that they do.

One thing's for sure - the lodges in this country, each with its independent rules and rituals, have made every effort in recent years to open their doors to the public; we saw an early example on a King's Lynn Architecture Open Day some years ago. Freemasons' Hall in London offers free guided tours of surprising frequency throughout the week. My Opera in Focus class at the City Lit was obliged to take the building up on this offer as we've been studying Zauberflöte for the past six weeks - and our classroom in Keeley Street backs on to the grand edifice. Indeed, in the early days of the move to our new quarters, eggs were thrown from the Freemasons' Hall onto the windows of a very active music class. Truth, not myth.

We had an excellent guide, even if he fended off some of our more detailed questions. I didn't get much back from asking about the application of the rule of three, which is so important throughout the opera and which dominates the hierarchy of the path to enlightenment, another aspect of Freemasonry which I find rather offputting (the hierarchy, not the enlightenment). Our guide, to my surprise, positively encouraged photos, so they punctuate this entry.

The present building, inside and out, is a monumental tribute to Art Deco, if such a paradox is possible. It was built between 1927 and 1933 to the designs of H. V. Ashley and F. Winton Ashley as headquarters for the United Grand Lodge, itself formed in 1717 (two other lodges previously stood on the site, depicted above). Starting at the superbly laid out, very substantial library and museum, which we were able to browse at our leisure after the tour, we passed through a portrait gallery of notable Grand Masters, including Edward VII looking very splendid in his regalia, and the current incumbent, the Duke of Kent (after whom, it seems, no royals will take up the gauntlet). George IV's especially large masonic throne dominates the room.

Thence down a long processional corridor famous for its use in that engrossing if hokumy BBC series Spooks (the outside of the building will be especially familiar to fans) and recently hired out for the Muppets (!). Its panels are fashioned from a now-extinct mahogany.

Two vestibules to the Grand Temple include a splendid symmetrical set of creation windows.

God is known here as the Great Architect - hence the compasses - to unite all religions; the only qualification for aspiring to join the brotherhood (or sisterhood if you apply to the handful of female or mixed lodges in the UK) is belief in a higher power. Freemasonry is by no means incompatible with any religious practice, merely a moral and practical-living adjunct to it. Lodges around the world use as their Volume of Sacred Law that of whichever happens to be the prevailing religion - so, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas and so on. At the end of the vestibules is the war memorial by Walter Gilbert, a bronze casket with gold figures, shaped like a barque representing the ultimate journey, more fine stained glass work commemorating the fallen of the Great War.

Massive bronze doors, again designed by Gilbert, open at the touch of a finger. The knocker makes an awe-inspiring sound and could summon masons from any part of the vast building. Gilbert's symbology here is essential to Freemasonry's central allegory of Solomon's temple-building in Jerusalem, a triumph of teamwork between Jews and Phoenicians (none of this in Mozart; and nothing of the Isis-Osiris analogies in the Hall, that I saw, at any rate; though Osiris's death and rebirth are analogous to the ritual of master mason Hiram Abiff in the biblical borrowing). I took this detail from the hall side of the doors, because it marries the wartime preoccupations of Kenneth Branagh's filmed Flute - more anon - with the symbol of silence (hands to lips), sacrifice and (not depicted) wisdom (man holding serpent), prudence, work, loyalty and hope.

I've  been inside the Grand Temple before, for a performance of The Gondoliers featuring our now holy friend Father Andrew Hammond as Don Alhambra del Bolero (inquisitionally prophetic?). I don't think I spent much time then taking in the deco mosaics around the starry ceiling. At the east end above the three master chairs Ionic columns - the two columns of Solomon's temple are always crucial - flank Jacob's Ladder, the symbols of Faith, Hope and Love. Solomon stands on the left, King Hiram of Phoenicia, the temple builder, to the right. For some reason I didn't catch this one, but here are the chairs.

There's a fine organ above them on the north apse wall.

At the west end, the most Flute-y design has Doric columns, Euclid, his 47th problem - the symbol carried by an ex Lodge Master - and Pythagoras. The moon above is surrounded with the wisdom-embodying serpent again (wonder why Tamino has to slay one at the start of the opera).

To the south, Corinthian columns are flanked by an alarmingly Phaeton-like Elijah heading heavenwards in his chariot; above are the all-seeing eye and the five-sided star (many masonic symbols are pentacles, sometimes interlaced triangles).

To the north are composite columns and within them a bit of more mundane heraldry: the arms of the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn. St George and the Dragon are on either side. Celestial and earthly globes surmount the pillars; beneath them are two blocks of stone, unfashioned and fashioned to represent the stages of aspiring to Freemasonry.

The museum has thousands of precious artefacts including attractive 18th and 19th century pottery covered in masonic symbols, masters' thrones, representations of Solomon's temple and reams of banners. This one's interesting in showing the merger of Antients and Moderns; I'm curious that one of them has the symbols of the Evangelists.

I didn't photograph in the museum other than to ask special permission just to snap this 18th century floorcloth as our Sophie is, of course, one of the world's leading specialists in the pre-lino art, and this must be one of the earlier specimens.

We come to the end of our City Lit Flute journey on Monday, after a glorious time floating even more than I can remember on the miraculous cloud of Mozart's incessant inspiration. How wonderful it has been to revisit the great recordings - Marriner with Kiri and Araiza, Mackerras, Beecham, the second Solti which I have now come to love especially for Ruth Ziesak's Pamina - and to watch scenes from three different productions on DVD: Glyndebourne 1978 for Hockney's designs, the core Bergman film which remains for me the best of all cinematic opera and a wary step towards Kenneth Branagh's 2006 fantasy.

It turned out to be highly imaginative, not always tallying with the musical vision - surely the opening scenes on the battlefield are too grim for the initial lightness of touch - but always full of bright ideas and respect for the full score. Joseph Kaiser is such a handsome and vocally excellent Tamino; apparently Branagh discovered him singing the First Armed Man when he went to see René Pape in an American production. Here's Kaiser as Tamino with the Papageno of  Benjamin Jay Davis on the left.

While Davis doesn't make a huge impression and Amy Carson's Pamina is utterly wet and weedy - not at all the trial-leader heroine Mozart and Schikaneder made her become - Pape is a total star. You just have to not mind the thickly accented English (the work is sung in Stephen Fry's not wholly successful translation and his adaptation of very limited dialogue). This is as good a Sarastro as we'll ever hear or see, matching even mighty Kurt Moll for evenness throughout the range, and youthful-natural to boot. The orchestral playing - European Chamber Orchestra under a pragmatic James Conlon - is superb. The still is of Pape with Thomas Randle's against-the-grain Monostatos - and no, the master doesn't have the servant bastinadoed but simply demotes him.

As I hinted above, Branagh's fantasy recreation of a trenches/field hospital scenario may well have taken its cue from the Freemasons' Hall memorial. It mostly works, especially for the trials of fire and water. But again Bergman is unsurpassably moving in this sequence*. The only image of that I could find is on the Criterion DVD cover which I used when I was discussing the 'making of...' film - though amazingly the whole movie is up in quite a good print on YouTube here.

The difference between the two film styles - and it's great that they are so different - is that Bergman, as a theatre director, always values the close-up on the human face, while Branagh succumbs to more recent filmic restlessness by swamping his characters with landscapes, action and the occasional bit of large-scale CGI. But if that brings in a new audience, great. And it's about to open in America, where apparently it hasn't ever been on general release. I'm so glad I didn't write it off unseen. To conclude where we began, here's the great Pape in our lead aria auf Deutsch at the Metropolitan Opera in 1996.

*Having just wound up the opera today (18/1), before looking forward to offshoots in Goethe, Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Die Frau ohne Schatten and Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, I found myself choked with tears from the last Bergman sequence (we ran the best of all Papageno-Papagena courtships and the proper final scenes together, though Bergman turns the Act 2 finale upside down with some pretty strange reordering). For me, it's still the most bewitching and happy opera film ever made.

Bergman filming Trollflöjten

That’s The Magic Flute in Swedish as the greatest of filmmakers (pictured on the left in the above photo) saw it, for me the best opera movie ever. Fellow Bergman buff David Thompson had kindly put together for me a few bits and pieces I’d never seen, and the other evening we got round to watching the Swedish one-hour documentary on the making of Trollflöjten with French subtitles. Would you believe the film itself still hasn’t been issued on DVD in the UK, despite talk last year; I treasure all the more my Criterion copy, and I was pleased to pick up the soundtrack in an Oxfam shop - the libretto is interlaced with further Bergman commentary.


What comes across in these loosely-filmed ‘backstage’ scenes – as in the similar documentary on Fanny and Alexander – is the approach of a passionate enthusiast as well as a skilled practitioner getting right in there, with lots of laughter and freewheeling speeches, plenty of affectionate laying-on of hands (we see the director walking rather comically with the Sarastro, Ulrik Cold, and chivvying a dubious Josef Köstlinger in Tamino’s crucial later trials). It all reinforces the film’s greatest quality – that these are real people delivering their homilies and their humanity to us at very close quarters: chamber-cinema opera, in short. And that’s clearly part of the quality Bergman wanted to reproduce; one of the many magical moments is when he gets Tamino and Pamina at their first actual meeting to stare into each other’s eyes very much face to face, nearly touching but just not quite, at least not until she grasps him when Sarastro punishes Monostatos.

The other magic comes from the way the stage action moves from the truly pretty to the scarily metaphysical, but with a weather eye on all the backstage business Bergman loves to conjure in films from Sawdust and Tinsel to Fanny and Alexander and After the Rehearsal. It’s telling both that we see him examining this watercolour showing the cast preparing for a Weimar performance in 1794 under Goethe’s leadership, and that it graces the cover of the recording booklet. I didn’t find its representation anywhere else.


The documentary jumps between the sound recording, where Bergman seems to have delivered his rhapsodic observations on Mozart unselfconsciously to all and sundry


and the filming. The heart of the film, stitched together from both, is when Bergman tells the assembled company in the recording studio that the trials of fire and water remind him of Leverkühn’s meeting with the devil in Mann’s Doktor Faustus. He freely paraphrases what the devil actually says of hell – that it’s two vast rooms, one hot enough to melt granite, the other unbearably cold, between which the inhabitants rush frenziedly.


So we have the souls crying out in silent agony as they roast, and writhing at the bottom of the ocean, while all the while the flute weaves its solemn magic in total contradiction of all that visual frenzy.

Curiously the one moment that had the greatest significance of all for Bergman doesn’t figure in the documentary, though he deals with some of its points in general. This is Tamino’s questioning, after his disorienting encounter with the Speaker, whether the darkness will ever end, when the light will come, and the two answers. You may not agree with everything Bergman says here in the commentary accompanying the libretto, but you can see how deeply it affected him:

For me this is the most agitating music there is. These twelve measures involve two questions at the outermost limits of life - and two answers. When Mozart wrote this music, he was very ill, and he felt the touch of death [make of that what you will]. In a moment of despair and courage, he shouts his question: 'O dark night, when will you disappear? When will I find light in darkness?'

And then comes the answer from the chorus, clear and ambivalent: 'Soon, soon or never more'. Mozart, fatally ill, asks his questions in darkness and from this darkness he answers himself - or does he get an answer? I have never felt so close to the deepest secret of spiritual intuition as just here, at this moment.

And then the other question: 'Does Pamina still live?' The music translates the little question of the text into a big and eternal question: Does Love live? Is Love real? The answer comes quivering and hopeful: 'Pa-mi-na still lives!' Love exists. Love is real in the world of man.

It can't save the protagonist of Bergman's most frightening film, Hour of the Wolf. Here, some years before he filmed The Magic Flute, Bergman puts his own sentiments into the mouth of one of his creepiest characters. The puppet-theatre scene occurs at 5'36 into this 'dining with vampires' sequence.

Liv-ing on Fårö

Finally put up my official thoughts about Prospero Bergman's enchanted island as one of the Arts Desk's Sunday 'letters from...'. Still, there's much more to add. Reassuring the Triestophiles among you that I haven't given up on the Winckelmann or James Joyce entries I promised, I'd better stagger the Fårö afterthoughts too. Note that for once I've bothered with the accents: it really is important to see that it might be pronounced 'Four-er'.

Liv Ullmann came across as a warm and spontaneous human being, crying with a kind of bittersweet happiness about the miracle of being back for the first time since the funeral. Here's the gravestone for the burial-place Ingmar shares with his wife (no relation to the great actress who starred alongside Liv in his Autumn Sonata). It's in a quiet corner of Fårö Church, furthest from both the road and the sea, and fronted by a crazy-paving sweep expressly against the greensward surrounding the master requested.


After the question and answer session with Jannike Ahlund, Ullmann came out the back to speak to the Magnificent Eight, as one of my fellow critics dubbed us (there's my roommate Li standing next to her in the top shot. Shame it doesn't catch her bright blue eyes - there's a better head shot by the official photographer in the TAD piece). I did film her talking about how the scene with the broken glass in Persona wasn't premeditated; nor was the iconic shot of hers and Bibi's faces joining together. Both came about by accident. Stupidly, I shot the little speech in portrait format on my camera, and forgot that films, unlike stills, can't be turned round. Still, I have that little piece of history to treasure and hope we can revisit the interview proper (which was professionally filmed).

Should add just a bit more about the private cinema, too, as not all the photos I wanted could be accommodated in the TAD piece. Here's Liv and Ingmar's daughter Linn talking outside it about her childhood, and how they'd all meet at 3pm and sit on the bench by which she's standing:


And, since she recalled the premiere screening of The Magic Flute - which was edited in the room above the 15-seater, here's the only adornment in the cinema, which seems so modern (and in fact was opened to a very select public when we were there for the first time). It's a rather marvellous tapestry by Anita Grede, depicting characters from the opera against the background of Fårö scenes.


Some of the film's people, especially the Queen of the Night, the Three Ladies and Monostatos, are represented as we see them in the film. But there, of course, is Bergman himself playing Sarastro with the magic flute.


I've just begun Linn's novel A Blessed Child, by the way, partly based on her relationship with her father and the island (dimly veiled as 'Hammarsö' - Hammars is where Bergman's house is situated). It's written with a poetic simplicity that must be well reflected in Sarah Death's translation from the Norwegian.


And that will have to do for now. There were so many stills I wanted to use of scenes and rehearsals for the Fårö five - Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, Shame and The Passion of Anna - but since Swedish Film International demanded $200 a shot, that just wasn't possible. Next time, we'll have a look at a few places NOT associated with Ingmar on Fårö.