Wholesome performance of 'Papageno's Perilous Pastiche' expands opera's audience

Bright vibratos, rich baritones and every voice between filled Moeser Auditorium in Hill Hall on Saturday and Sunday as UNC Opera presented Papageno’s Perilous Pastiche as part of the Martha Flowers Ensemble Series, a collection of voice performances supporting student activities across the music department. 

The performance, directed by Jeanne Fischer, was a collection, or pastiche, of different opera scenes strung together to tell a story. Fischer's intention was to make an approachable piece of opera to help introduce younger audiences to the art.

The performance featured music from notable artists including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi, and was accompanied by subtitles to help the audience follow the lyrics that were in Italian, French, German and English.

The story was about a bird-man, Papageno, and his mission to save a captured princess with friends he made along the way. 

The colorfully-adorned animal characters looked straight out of a children's story book. Many scenes garnered laughter from the audience, including the Trio of Birds — Papageno's friends — and the attack of the snake, where a rainbow plush snake landed on stage, throwing off the characters and bringing them into a song about bravery.  

This pastiche is the first kid-friendly outreach performance in the opera program, Fisher said.

"I think it's important to show young people that opera can be fun, that it's not a sort of stodgy art that has to be elitist, or for older audiences, that there's a lot of fun and humor and adventure in opera,” she said.

The 12 performers are enrolled in Music 212: Ensemble II, a class that has a blend of new and returning students said Eden Rosenbaum, who played Princess Lucia.. 

“In the past, opera scenes have been a set of like disparate and not really connected scenes from a variety of shows," Ryan Smith, who played Papageno, said. “This is the first time we put it together into a production that tells a through story, and is something we're trying to work with and take and really make something out of, rather than just an exercise for learning.”

This year the students also got to be more involved in all aspects of the production. Ella Kate Guthrie, who performed as part of The Trio of Birds and as a Siren, wrote large portions of the show.

These opportunities wouldn’t have been possible without Fischer, Rosenbaum said.

The program has gone through three directors in the past four years. Fischer came in as a "hero,” Rosenbaum said, and created a production the ensemble is happy and proud to be a part of.

“Being able to craft stories specifically for young people taking some of the most popular tools that you probably already heard, I think it's really great to make it make kids excited about it,” Rosenbaum said.

The story may be tailored to a young audience, but the ages of the audience members at the performance varied.

Annie Ascher, a junior studying music and advertising and public relations, initially attended the concert because Fischer is her voice teacher, and some of her peers performed. 

As a music major, Ascher said she appreciated the creativity and the variety of language, style, composers and periods of opera.

In her school work, Ascher focuses her research on making classical music more accessible and approachable to everyone. She said that this story's format was very digestible for those not as familiar with opera. 

“I mean opera in general, and classical music, is such a huge part of culture and history, and I think that it's so important that people at least have a base level kind of knowledge awareness about it,” she said. 

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