Damon Albarn previews new “electro-opera” ‘The Magic Flute II: La Malédiction’, premiering next week

nme.com:

Damon Albarn has shared a preview of his forthcoming “electro-opera” The Magic Flute II: La Malédiction.The opera, which is set to premiere in Paris next Thursday (March 27), is based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1807’s The Magic Flute Part II.

The 1791 original was an opera in two acts to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. You can view footage below.Albarn previously said of the opera in its early stages: “I’m doing an opera at the moment, using Goethe’s fragment he wrote about The Magic Flute Part II, which is fascinating.”He continued: “You’ve heard of Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’?

Well, Goethe, who is a contemporary of Mozart, wrote ‘Part II’ of that – the sequel – but it never got put to music. It’s this legendary lost thing.”A post shared by Damon Albarn (@damonalbarn)Now in a new statement, Albarn said: “The idea of ​​me writing an opera and for it to be a continuation of The Magic Flute sounds ridiculous, it was and is, not only was I grappling with the genius of Mozart but I had Goethe to contend with too!!“I suppose I took a relatively reductionist approach to the question, how the fuck do I do this?

The answer came from a surprising source but one no less brilliant, Kraftwerk.”Producer Jean-Luc Choplin who worked with Albarn on his previous production in the ’00s, Monkey: Journey To The West, added: “Reading Benoît Chantre’s book on Friedrich Hölderlin, Le Clocher de Tübingen, I discovered that during an evening in Tübingen attended by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe, the latter said he was writing a sequel to Mozart’s famous ‘Singspiel’, The Magic Flute.“This triggered my curiosity and I set off in search of Goethe’s script and sketches.