Damon Albarn: between Goethe and Mozart for his new work
Damon Albarn He shared a preview of his next “electro-opera” “”The Magic Flute II: Malédiction“.
The work, which will debut in Paris next Thursday (March 27), is based on “The Magic Flute Part II” of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of 1807. The original “The magic flute“of 1791 written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart It was a two -act work on the German booklet by Emanuel Schikaneder, staged for the first time a few months before the death of the Austrian composer.
In the initial preparation phase of the work Albarn had said: “I am doing a work at the moment, using the fragment that Goethe wrote on” The magic flute part II “, which is fascinating”. He added: “Have you heard of Mozart’s ‘magical flute’? Well, Goethe, who is a contemporary of Mozart, wrote the ‘Part II’ – the following – but it has never been put into music. It is a legendary and lost thing”.
Now, in a new statement, Albarn said: “The idea that I wrote a work and that it is the continuation of” the magic flute “seems ridiculous, it was and it is, not only I was struggling with the genius of Mozart, but I also had Goethe to face!”.
“I suppose I have adopted a relatively reductionist approach to the question: how the fuck do I do this? The answer came from a surprising but no less brilliant source, Kraftwerk“.
The producer and theatrical director Jean-Luc Choplinwho worked with Albarn in his previous production of the 1900s, “Monkey: Journey to the West”, he added: “Reading the book by Benoît Chantre on Friedrich Hölderlin, the Clocher de Tübingen, I discovered that during an evening in Tübingen in which Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe participated, the latter said that he was writing a sequel to a sequel to Famous ‘Singspiel’ of Mozart, “The magic flute”. He continued: “As Hölderlin and Goethe prophesied, and paraphrasing Benoît Chantre, this electro work speaks to us of a possible ‘European night’, and at a time when the glaciers melt and the cities are on fire, this new fairy tale is a good way to reflect on our world and draw a moral lesson of courage and optimism.”
The show will remain staged for three evenings at the Théâtre du Lido until March 30th.
It is not the first time that Damon Albarn ventures with particular “soundtracks” as well as working on “Monkey: Journey to the West“(From 2008 soundtrack of the theatrical adaptation of the novel” Journey to the West “of Wú forDr Dee“Of 2011 (based on the life of John Dee, occultist and scientist medical and scientific councilor of Elisabetta I -1533/1603).
In the meantime, the Blurs have spoken to their future. “We can’t leave him too long because we are knocking,” he said Graham Coxon referring to Albarn and looking at the band’s next ads. “From a creative point of view, we will always be able to do something, but it is important that we live life for a while and we hope not to go through something so traumatic before returning together again”. “Damon has always said that we have to live life in order to have something to put together if we want to do something again. If all this happens, then there should be no reason not to do it.”
