Saturday song #2
Cosy up this weekend with a smattering of Bergman-related musical entertainment! Every Saturday, we offer up a new song that relates to Bergman in some interesting manner. Over time, we plan on building up a pretty-little playlist suitable for any occasion, aptly entitled The Original Ingmar Bergman Spotify Playlist. (For more on Bergman and music, click here.)
Saturday song #2 is:
Bergman referred to The Magic Flute as his life companion, which makes perfect sense. His renowned TV film of the opera was staged at the Drottningholm Court Theatre, but as blazing spotlights, fiery torches and guards donning burning helmets were considerably reckless fare within the walls of an incredibly fragile 18th-century wooden building, Bergman elected to construct a copy of the theatre at Stockholm’s Filmhuset studio.
The duet, which in Alf Henriksson's Swedish translation was renamed ’När kärlek vaknar till en kvinna’ (’When Love for a Woman is Awakened’), with Irma Urilla as Pamina and Håkan Hagegård as Papageno, provides one of the film’s most charming scenes.
The recording from the film is not on Spotify, but we found a suitable replacement. Not only is it performed by the Drottningholm Court Orchestra, soprano Barbara Bonney was also previously married to Håkan Hagegård, who, by the way, appeared in this production as The Speaker.
And somewhere within this digital soundscape, one can detect the unparalleled acoustics offered nowhere other than within the wooden walls of a baroque theatre.