Mozart's The Magic Flute runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 13 December 2026 to 17 February 2027, in David McVicar's production.
Mozart wrote The Magic Flute for a suburban Viennese theatre rather than a court, to a libretto by its actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder, who played Papageno himself. It opened on 30 September 1791 and Mozart was dead nine weeks later, at thirty-five. It is a Singspiel: songs with spoken dialogue, in German rather than Italian, aimed at a paying public — and it contains, side by side, the most sublime music he wrote and a bird-catcher doing comic business with a padlock on his mouth. The plot makes almost no sense: the Queen of the Night is the villain in Act Two and the wronged mother in Act One, and nobody has satisfactorily explained why.
None of that matters in performance, which is the interesting thing about it. It works on children who have never seen an opera and on people who have seen forty. McVicar’s staging has been in the repertoire here since 2003 and is the version most Londoners under forty will have seen first, and that is its own argument for keeping it.
David McVicar’s staging returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Sunday 13 December 2026 to Wednesday 17 February 2027. It alternates with The Nutcracker through the winter — the house running its two most reliable family titles against each other for two months.