The Magic Flute at the Vienna State Opera

Hey everybody, this is Ben. I'm writing the morning after I went to see the Magic Flute. It was pretty awesome (for an opera! ). The singers were really good and the sets were really cool. In the beginning there was a HUGE back drop with a picture of the Queen of Die Nacht with her eyes closed, and then when the music changed, she opened her eyes!! It was sehr cool. It had great detail too! The building itself was pretty amazing. It had these cool paintings, and the architecture was wunderbar! We had great seats too. you can see everything from the balcony, and the seats are placed so that your not looking at someone's gigantic head the entire time, although the woman in front of me was a real downer, she just had to fix her in the dark because EVERYBODY could see her. She flipped her hair over my subtitles (but she left before the second half). There was a lot of funny parts, and Mozart went a bit heavy on the light, dark, good, evil (and especially the cheesy parts about love), but it was really good. Afterwords we went to our favorite ice cream place, Zanoni & Zanoni. then I had a couple slices of pizza (Lucas stole one) and went home. So that's about it. Later!

Hey everyone, this is Lucas! The serpent in the beginning was really cool. It was huge, green with red eyes! The Queen of the Night sang some hard stuff. Really high, like a chicken... "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!"  I had binoculars to see stuff, and there were translations in front of your seat to read. It was kind of scary to think about how high up we were, but still, our seats rocked! After awhile I got tired and hot. But overall, I liked it.

Photo captions by Jack:

The Opera House at Night. Magic!

 After 3 attempts, a smile from Ben... it wasn't that he didn't want to go, he just can't smile on que.

 The view of part of the hallways.

 View from our seats.

 Marisa and Lucas! The little rectangles in front of them are the screens for the subtitles. The boys loved them. THey were into it the whole time, and got mad when they got stuck and didn't keep up with the dialogue.

 The curtain.

 Looking down at the people during the Intermission.

 Portrait in the lounge.

 There are busts of all the previous Music Directors. Mahler ran the house from 1897-1907.

 This is a copy of the Rodin Mahler bust. (Or one of the many "originals", by Rodin. He made about 8 or so...)

 

 Von Karajan, Music Director from 1956-1964. His and Mahler's times are considered the two "Golden Ages" of the Vienna Opera. Both left in frustration and hard feelings, unable to maintan the efforts needed to keep the house from falling back into it's old, lazy ways...

 Ben, during the break.

 The spot where Mahler, Strauss and so many others led the orchestra.

 They like him now, but back then it often got ugly...

On the way home we went past the Theater an der Wien. This was the theater built by Schikaneder, who was the original Papageno in the Magic Flute. The building has been rebuilt many times, but this original portal still exists. It's called the "Papageno Gate". You can see him, playing his pipes, with the birdcage at his side, and the three little angels who help him find his "Papagena" in the opera.