The Magic Flute

Director Ingmar Bergman was a lifelong fan of Mozart’s late operatic masterpiece Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), having seen the work as a young boy. Decades later, in late middle-age, Bergman would go on to direct a filmed adaptation of the opera for Swedish television, featuring a libretto in his native language by the poet Alf Henrikson. For the film, which deploys a thrillingly theatrical framework of 18th-century stagecraft to animate the classic fairy-tale adventure narrative, maestro Eric Ericson conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and a cast that included a number of young Scandinavian artists, most notably baritone Håkan Hagegård—who sang nearly 90 performances for Met audiences—as the charming bird catcher Papageno.