David McVicar's staging of Mozart's The Magic Flute, in the repertoire since 2003, gives most young Londoners their first opera this winter at Covent Garden.
The Royal Opera revives David McVicar’s staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Sunday 13 December 2026 to Wednesday 17 February 2027.
Mozart wrote the opera for a suburban Viennese theatre, to a libretto by its actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder, who played Papageno himself. It opened on 30 September 1791, and Mozart died nine weeks later at 35.
It is a Singspiel: songs with spoken dialogue, in German rather than Italian, written for a paying public. The score sets some of his finest music beside a bird-catcher with a padlock on his mouth.
The plot does not hold together. The Queen of the Night is the wronged mother in Act One and the villain in Act Two, and nobody has explained why.
In performance the opera works on children who have never seen one and on listeners who have seen forty. McVicar’s staging has been in the repertoire here since 2003, and it is the version many Londoners under 40 saw first.
Through the winter the production alternates on the Main Stage with The Nutcracker.