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Chagall had created inventive sets for ballets in the 1940s but did not venture into opera until Sir Rudolf Bing, the director of the Met, persuaded him to work on a new production of the latest opera from Mozart, a fantasy about a prince charged with saving the abducted. daughter of the queen of the night.
Bing, who was friends with Chagall, had tried to get him to design a production for a ballet in the 1950s. Chagall said no to that project and to Verdi’s “Nabucco”, which was scheduled for the 1960 season. But he didn’t. couldn’t say no to “The Magic Flute”. It was a favorite. “There is nothing on earth that comes close to these two perfections, ‘The Magic Flute’ and the Bible,” he once said.
Chagall, then 70, had just unveiled a new painted ceiling at the Paris Opera, in fact a set of panels placed over the original circular painting by Jules Eugène Lenepveu. Chagall created a whirlwind of figures and symbols that paid homage to “Carmen” by Bizet, “Tristan und Isolde” by Wagner and “Boris Godunov” by Mussorgsky, among others – and “The Magic Flute”.
And then he immersed himself in the new Met production. His granddaughter Bella Meyer described the curtain as “quite a celebration” of the composer. “It was an extraordinary adventure for him to be able to enter the world of Mozart and be able to stage it,” she said in an interview.
“The Magic Flute” was scheduled for the Met’s first season at Lincoln Center. Chagall “drew and painted sketches from morning till night,” Bing writes in his memoir, “A Knight at the Opera” (1981), and met Günther Rennert, the production manager.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the result. John Canaday, New York Times art critic at the time, said Chagall “seems to have thought of the mission a bit too much like a solo show,” while Harold C. Schonberg, The Times’ chief music critic, complained that the opening night audience weren’t listening to the tunes but “were busy trying to count the number of characters in the background.”
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