Mozart: The Magic Flute (Sverige Radio, Svensk Filmindustri, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of one of the most delightful movies ever made: Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute. This was originally produced for Swedish television, though it was released theatrically elsewhere in the world. Charles and I both saw it in the late 1970’s in its initial U.S. theatre run. I’m not sure if this was the first time I saw it, but I remember a screening at San Francisco State University when both my then-girlfriend Cat and my first boyfriend Bruce were students there. I invited both of them to attend it with me and read them a synopsis of the plot, and Bruce started giggling every time the synopsis contained the word “gay.” Cat got irked with him and said, “The word ‘gay’ does not always mean ‘homosexual’!” Bergman cast his opera with then little-known singers from the Swedish National Opera and had them sing in Swedish, though the sonorities of Swedish are close enough to those of German (the language in which Mozart and his librettist, Emmanuel Schickaneder, wrote the original) that the overall sound was right even though it was weird, in the scene in which Papageno (Håkan Hagegård, one of two singers in the cast who went on to international careers) is contemplating suicide and intends to do so on the count of three, says “en … två … tre” instead of “eins … zwei … drei.” Bergman and his co-writer, Alf Henrikson, did something that made the plot of The Magic Flute more sensible and dramatically coherent. In the original, Prince Tamino (Josef Köstlinger) is recruited by the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Irma Urrilla) from the clutches of the sinister wizard Sarastro (Ulrik Cold). Only when he gets to Sarastro’s compound he finds that Sarastro is actually an enlightened spiritual leader and the Queen of the Night is a villainess who wants to kill him so she can take over the world. What Bergman and Henrikson did was to make Sarastro Pamina’s father, so the story becomes simply a particularly nasty and violent custody battle – even though it’s hard to imagine Sarastro and the Queen ever having had a sexual relationship. (I had the same problem with my parents; my mom and dad broke up when I was 1 ½, and so I not only never experienced them as a family, but they were so different from each other, and seemingly so incompatible, that my own existence remains the only evidence I have that they ever had sex.)

Papageno, the birdcatcher, is the comic-relief character; early in the opera the Three Ladies of the Queen (Britt-Marie Aruhn, Kirsten Vaupel, and Birgitta Smiding) kill a serpent that is menacing Tamino and thus save his life. When Tamino comes to, Papageno tells him that he killed the serpent, and the Three Ladies respond by literally putting a padlock over his lips so he can’t lie any more. The titular “magic flute” is given Tamino by the Three Ladies, who tell him that its music will cast a magic spell over anyone in the vicinity. They also give Papageno a set of magic bells, and one night in the original 1791 production (which was a major hit, by the way) Schickaneder, who was on stage playing Papageno, was startled when Mozart, who was leading the orchestra in the pit and also playing the glockenspiel to supply the magic music, got out of synch with him so his motions on stage no longer matched what the audience was seeing him do. According to Alicia Malone, TCM’s host for foreign films, Bergman originally wanted to shoot it inside the Drottningholm Theatre in Stockholm because it had been built in the 18th century and therefore was historically accurate for the production. Alas, the Drottningholm management vetoed it as a location because of the fire hazard, so Bergman had to re-create the Drottningholm’s stage machinery on a Swedish soundstage. Bergman cuts back and forth between a theatre audience (in modern dress) supposedly watching the opera being performed, charmingly anachronistic sets representing how The Magic Flute would have been performed when it was new, and a few scenes of striking realism: notably the one in which Pamina, put out by the fact that Tamino won’t say a word to her (because of a vow of silence Sarastro extracted from him as one of the three trials he’d have to go through to prove himself worthy of her and Sarastro’s order), contemplates suicide with the dagger the Queen of the Night gave her to kill Sarastro. (Among the audience members shown on screen were Bergman himself, actors who’d appeared in his previous films like Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, and his cinematographer, Sven Nyqvist.)

According to Malone, Bergman deliberately cast singers with relatively small voices to preserve the intimacy of the drama. He failed with just one cast member, Ulrik Cold as Sarastro, whose voice is nice enough but does not have the weight and gravitas to sing what George Bernard Shaw once called “the only music fit to come from the mouth of God.” Bergman also cast a tenor, Ragnar Ulfung, as Monostatos, the Moor who’s part of Sarastro’s entourage but is secretly an opportunist whom the Queen recruits to her side by promising him Pamina. Mozart originally marked Monostatos as a tenor role, but he wrote the music low enough it can be sung by a baritone and usually is in modern productions. Bergman also wisely avoided the temptation to have Monostatos play the part in blackface, and Ulfung was the other singer besides Hagegård in this cast to go on to an international career. The rest of the casting is fine and the film itself, with its magnificent shifting between the various levels of realism and stage artifice, is one of the best examples of filming an opera and making it live as a movie. Charles and I both found it charming in the late 1970’s, and we still do. It also makes me curious to watch Ivor Bolton’s 2012 DVD of The Labyrinth, Emmanuel Schickaneder’s 1798 sequel to The Magic Flute. With Mozart having died just two months after The Magic Flute’s premiere, Schickaneder needed a new composer, and after Beethoven turned him down (though Schickaneder signed Beethoven for another opera which became Fidelio) he signed a man named Peter von Winter (1754-1825) to compose it and concocted an even more convoluted plot than he had the first time around.