The Magic Flute.

GLYNDEBOURNE Festival Opera is the only unsubsidized company of international stature in the United Kingdom. It was founded more than half a century ago by John Christie on a Sussex country estate to stage Mozart operas for a discerning audience. Since then the scope of repertory and style has broadened. Two years ago a production in expressionist style of Janacek's Katya Kabanova, starring the brilliant American soprano Nancy Gustafson, was a highlight of the season. It is repeated this year, along with the European premiere of Michael Tippett's New Year, and works by Britten, Richard Strauss, and Verdi.

Glyndebourne has a reputation for excellence, but it was probably inevitable that sooner or later someone would turn up there to produce a classic in the cheap Germanic Sixties style which is meant to epater les bourgeois. This summer American director Peter Sellars has done just that with The Magic Flute. For shallow, barbaric, and silly interpretation, and pathetic theatrical and musical incompetence, it would be hard to match. In a venue like Glyndebourne it can only be regarded as a grotesque aberration.

Sellars himself seems to have had doubts about the production-so much so that he inserted a Xeroxed apologia into the massive Glyndebourne program. This announces that he has cut all the dialogue, and dispensed with psychological motivation "because the characters have been ordained by God." The setting is described in the supplement as an "imaginary Los Angeles landscape . . . a Technicolor cliche promoted by every cop show on the box." (Possibly Mr. Sellars has never seen Miami Vice.) Maybe," he admits, "this evening's production is a shallow travesty peopled by drug addicts, alcoholics and crazies. But maybe even they are people, and even they are searching for something in their lives."

The audience has been warned. It is supposed to greet Mozart's great work not with the eyes and ears of opera lovers, but with the prejudices and conscience of a social worker.

There are a number of things about the production that undermine the opera, even on Sellars's terms. In the program he quotes one of the mottoes on the American dollar bill, Novus Ordo Seclorum, and says that this is The Magic Flute's "proclaimed" message. The production, we are told, portrays this new order by doing away with all the old fairy-tale images and costumes. Tamino appears as a T-shirted beach bum, the Queen of the Night is an Oriental California suburbanite, Monostatos is an orange-faced greaseball with a handgun, and Sarastro is draped in quasi-Buddhist style; his followers mutate from punk drug addicts, alcoholics, and crazies into gowned acolytes inhabiting a subterranean vaulted ashram. And Papageno? Sellars has not been able to discover a suitably Sixties image for him, so the Novus Ordo is dropped. Papageno wears the same old ungroovy feathers, in black, with a bright yellow face to jazz it up a bit.

The set's aleatory collection of color-slide L.A. views-freeways, a swimming pool, palm trees, a hill of flower gardens, a city-scape apparently on fire in the distance, etc., etc.-is supposed to create "a world of pure color, vibration, feeling, timelessness, and hope." Alas, every one of these slides, as Sellars's apology says, is a visual cliche, from a million advertisements, from article illustrations, magazine covers, and films as well as television. The colors are not pure, but garish. The effect is not vibrant; it has the impact of someone bawling nonsense in the background, making time hang heavy, draining away all hope of a decent show, let alone any other sort of hope. It is the characteristic of a cliche that too much familiarity has leached out whatever emotional content it might have had. So-no feeling, either.

Sellars's treatment of the music and words accords perfectly with his own travesty" label: The Magic Flute is a crowning achievement of the eighteenth-century Viennese Singspiel tradition. This blended a number of influences and traditions (fairy-tale spectacle, magic, harlequinade comedy) into what was intended as a popular entertainment. With emetic pretension, Sellars puffs up The Magic Flute's metaphysical ingredients-the moral purification of Tamino and Pamina, the conflict between the powers of darkness and light-into a veritable raison d'etre for the show. He vaunts them as "the piece's larger discussion of the struggle in each character between the flesh and the spirit, and the tug of the visible and the invisible worlds." Of course this species of contrast was standard, almost incidental, in Viennese popular theater, subordinate to the visual theatrical effects and the pleasing music. In any event the Manichaean aspects of the opera cannot be grasped or understood without the dialogue, which Sellars has discarded. Lacking such an integral part of The Magic Flute's very structure, the production becomes an unexplained pattern of bizarre behavior punctuated by songs.

In the place of spoken words Sellars proposes to "let the music tell its own subtler story," whatever that may mean. In fact Mozart's librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, prevailed upon the composer to keep his music simple and lowbrow to please the audience. Some of the tunes in the opera were composed by Schikaneder himself-in particular those for the part of Papageno, which he created. The musical "stuttering" of Papageno is also supposed to have been Schikaneder's idea, shouted at Mozart during a rehearsal. Certainly the aim of librettist and composer, consistently followed in the creation of The Magic Flute, and very well documented, was to create an amusing and entertaining spectacle which the popular Viennese audience would pay to see. This is the common sense of the music and the words. Sellars-his pretensions fixed on higher things-has chosen to ignore it,

A great deal of the director's pseudoserious rhetoric, the appalling visual effect of the flashy backdrops, and even the excising of the dialogue, might have been partly tolerable if the music had been well played and sung. Here too Sellars's hand weighed heavily, for he had a strong influence on the casting. Among the lead parts only Kurt Streit as Tamino and James Maddalena as Papageno belonged on the Glyndebourne stage, giving wellsung but emotionally crippled performances. The Korean coloratura Hellen Kwon, carrying a handbag and wearing a very ordinary dress as the Queen of the Night, had serious problems with pitch. As Pamina, the Chinese soprano Ai-Lan Zhu gave the part a certain bravery, but little feeling. If Howard Haskin as Monostatos or Mark Doss as Sarastro had been able to sing or act, the material given them by Mozart might have defeated their egregious director. Unfortunately Haskin, prancing about with his handgun, was poor in pitch and coarse in his acting, while Doss, despite the hushing of the orchestra to help him, was simply inaudible about 30 per cent of the time. The other parts-the three Genii and the three ladies who save Tamino from the serpent (which, by the way, never appeared)-managed to sing in tune, but performed with a curious lack of conviction and energy. This malaise spread over the rest of the cast, and in the second act became so bad that at one point the singers parted company with the orchestra for what seemed almost a minute. before. In 1988 he directed a successful production of a contemporary opera, The Electrification of the Soviet Union. It may be that his talent, such as it is, suits new work. Though any good venue will give scope for creative experiment with the classics, Sellars's destructive, self-indulgent games with Mozart are something else again. The well-bred Glyndebourne audience actually booed The Magic Flute on the first night, and when I saw it the comments in the foyer were trenchant. The arrogance of it," said one woman. "I wanted to boo, but I didn't think I'd be very good at that."

Even a company as fine as Glyndebourne is entitled to the occasional ghastly mistake. But if Sellars has treated it and its audience as the Prussian Emperor Frederick II treated Voltaire, then Sellars deserves the same reply that Voltaire gave his imperial host. The story is that Frederick commanded Voltaire to take part in a perverted orgy on a Thursday night. Voltaire did, and acquitted himself so well that Frederick invited him to a more exclusive perverted orgy on Saturday night. Voltaire said, "Sire-once, a philosopher. Twice, a degenerate."