Magic Flute

Before the afternoon concert (17:00 St. Nicolaikirche) otte1 will show the video Magic Flute by Ilmars Blumbergs and Viesturs Kairišs on Saturday, 22 March at 16:00 in the Künstlerhaus otte1.

Both film and theatre directors, showed their film Magic Flute for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2001. In brittle, oppressive images, the film shows how the poorest people in Riga are buried, not in a cemetery but in a forest, where the dead are taken in a rickety van. In 2009 it was part of the accompanying programme of the Provinzlärm-Festival with the country focus on Latvia. The film then transforms this dreary situation into a touching scenario full of pathos, in which the entire chorus of the Latvian National Opera’s Magic Flute performance in theatrical, bizarre costumes takes up position between the grave mounds alongside set pieces from the stage. For the dead, who were never able to come into contact with opera in their lives, Mozart’s music resounds as a funeral song.

“… as death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death’s image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling” – thus said Mozart about death. Mozart died at the age of 31 in 1791 and was buried in a mass grave, as standard at the time in Vienna for a person of his social and financial situation. In 2000, 452 of Riga’s deceased — people without relatives, the homeless and the unidentified — were buried at the Jaunciems cemetery.