Why The Magic Flute?

MUSON’s reworking of The Magic Flute is not an isolated example. In fact, I will argue that it is part of an extended historical practice of adaptation and localisation of the opera across global cultures and within diverse performance settings. In this section, I explore the centuries-long tradition of adapting and localising The Magic Flute, and its particular malleability in different contexts, which can perhaps be traced to its plot’s richness in symbols with unstable referents. The Magic Flute is unarguably Mozart’s most frequently performed work in opera centres across the world.Footnote ¹¹ Austin Glatthorn has recently documented the original audience’s unanimous acclaim for it, and the fact that excerpts from the opera began to be adapted for domestic and public music-making within weeks of its premiere.Footnote ¹² With multiple sold-out productions, the opera grew gradually to become a cultural phenomenon that permeated everyday life and left a significant material trail.Footnote ¹³ The opera remained in performance at the Theater auf der Weiden after its premiere there, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century it had received over 200 performances in Germany and throughout Europe.Footnote ¹⁴

The Magic Flute began to be adapted for other local contexts shortly after its premiere. It was the second most performed work at the Thun Theatre in Prague in 1793. Multiple translations were recorded from 1794, including into Czech (though retaining its original title) and Italian (as Il flauto magico) by Giovanni de Gamerra. Performances were seen in opera houses from Augsburg (1793) to Leipzig (1794), Amsterdam (1794), Moscow (1802–5), Copenhagen (1816) and Milan (1816).Footnote ¹⁵ Many of these productions were adapted specifically for local audiences. Peter Branscombe has identified Christian August Vulpius’s production at Weimar as a prominent example. Vulpius turns the serpent in the first scene of Act I into a fire- and smoke-breathing dragon, Sarastro becomes the Queen of the Night’s brother-in-law – and he retires from his office as high priest in favour of Tamino. In Vulpius’s estimation, these changes were needed to make Die Zauberflöte suitable for the ‘delicate audience’ at Weimar.Footnote ¹⁶ Other stagings and adaptations sprang up all over Europe during the early 1800s, including Les mystères d’Isis, given in 1801 at the Paris Opéra with the text rewritten and score rearranged to include recitatives; and Karl Meisl’s Die falsche Zauberflöte, performed nineteen times at the Theater in der Leopoldstadt in 1818.

While it was never staged as frequently in the British Isles as on the European continent, The Magic Flute nevertheless circulated from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the form of excerpts, and it was performed regularly in its entirety in English opera houses from around mid-century. One of the earliest such productions was de Gamerra’s Il flauto magico, staged in 1811 at the King’s Theatre as a benefit performance for the tenor Giuseppe Naldi in the role of Papageno.Footnote ¹⁷ This Italian version returned to London in 1851,Footnote ¹⁸ and again in 1914, when it was conducted by Thomas Beecham, with dialogue converted into musical recitatives.Footnote ¹⁹ Though it met with some resistance in Anglophone countries in the early twentieth century, in January 1923 The Magic Flute became the world’s first live operatic radio broadcast, from Covent Garden via the BBC.Footnote ²⁰ In the United States, from the 1960s onward, there were new stagings including those at Houston in 1966, Chicago in 1967 and New York in 1972.Footnote ²¹ As Branscombe concludes, by the end of the twentieth century, The Magic Flute had been seen not only in different interpretations for the stage but also with the addition of a spoken ‘Metalogue’ and in television and film adaptations with changes to the text and some reordering of musical numbers and scenic flow.Footnote ²²

On the African continent, The Magic Flute continues to undergo changes, translations and adaptations. In the last two decades in particular, composers and performance artists, regardless of their racial, cultural and religious affiliations, have continued to create reimaginings of The Magic Flute that speak specifically to their current African experience. William Kentridge, for example, a White South African, in 2005 reinterpreted the opera through a postcolonial lens, exposing its underlying colonial ideologies. He contrasted the opera’s Enlightenment themes – light and reason – with oppressive colonial structures. Sarastro is reinterpreted as an embodiment of authoritarian imperial power, and Monostatos as a figure trapped within colonial hierarchies; both are excluded and complicit in oppression. Through colonial imagery, such as panopticons and imperial maps, Kentridge critiqued The Magic Flute’s entanglement with colonial oppression and Enlightenment. Another notable example is the opera’s translation to ‘colloquial Arabic’. Translator Sarah Enany, working with producer Neveen Allouba, has described this attempt as a means of ‘legitimising’ their language and ‘bringing it the respect it deserves’. Staged at the Library of Alexandria in January 2010, the work was described by the performers as ‘performing art for the poorest of people’, including women and girls, who have been alienated by the social restrictions of standardised opera settings at the Cairo Opera House.Footnote ²³ Similarly, the Isango Ensemble in South Africa has produced adaptations that merge Mozart’s score with indigenous musical traditions, while in Nigeria, the Abuja Metropolitan Music Society in 2016 and 2024 staged The Magic Flute at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, with the 2024 production themed ‘The Magic Flute in a Nigerian context’ (approaches I will explore further below).Footnote ²⁴

So what is it about The Magic Flute that accounts for its continuous popularity with opera companies and audiences since its premiere? For a significant part of its history, scholars and audiences have understood it as possessing what Rose Subotnik has described as a ‘basis of appeal to everyone’.Footnote ²⁵ Most importantly for my purposes, such writings attribute the opera’s early reception and subsequent proliferation not only to a socially heterogeneous local Viennese audience but also to a culturally heterogeneous audience – in Vienna, Prague, Bohemia and the Italian peninsula. Judith Eckelmeyer notes that for many nineteenth-century scholars, the work’s continued popularity can be attributed to factors such as the mysterious Egyptian-religious setting and the didactic layers of ‘symbolism that point to something larger than the stage work itself’.Footnote ²⁶ Such qualities are highlighted in the critical response in the press. One reviewer, for instance, applauds the elaborate scenery and the large-scale transformations carried out on stage;Footnote ²⁷ another notes ‘all classes hastened to see the Zauberflöte’.Footnote ²⁸ In other words, right from the outset the opera seemed to speak to unusually diverse audiences with varied expectations, and had a universal attraction.

My purpose in this overview of the opera’s reception and its many different stage versions is to bring its purported ‘universality’ more clearly into focus. By the middle of the twentieth century, musicologists had offered not only psychological and analytical readings of The Magic Flute, but even Masonic interpretations.Footnote ²⁹ H.C. Robbins Landon, for example, identified Masonic symbols – including numbers, verbal phrases and rhythms – embedded in the libretto. But such symbols would have spoken to a relatively small subset of audience members, mainly in Europe, and they are insufficient to account for the work’s broader popularity and adaptability. My gambit here is that what has passed for the ‘universality’ of The Magic Flute is, in fact, the opera’s ability to participate in the local politics of cultures across different societies. Its internal–external politics seem to engender a search for the characters’ relationship to culture beyond the theatre. I suggest that this link between politics within the opera and the politics of the environment is the key to the opera’s adaptability and impact across different regions. By this means, it opens up the possibility of localised signification and creates a viable framework for engaging critical readings of the opera’s meanings.

Modern critical analyses of the opera highlight three aspects that have proven especially fruitful for its adaptation into global contexts: its invocation of a complex nature–culture binary, its internal heterogeneity of characters and idioms, and its explicit thematisation of the power of music through the symbol of the flute. In Subotnik’s reading of the opera, it owes its success at least partly to the fact that it draws on a range of theatrical and musical traditions, which when interpreted from an Enlightenment perspective become the basis for its mass appeal. Subotnik’s title question – ‘Whose Magic Flute?’ – and points of her interpretation are remarkably prescient for the present purposes. She engages its symbols, signs and rituals in a well-known maxim that she considers one of the characterising ideals of the European Enlightenment and an explicit theme in the libretto: ‘Social rank does not equal human worth.’ In her analyses, she explores the relationship between the music written for each character and the embodiment of their dramatic traits as either a point of convergence or a divergence from the maxim. Papageno, for example, conveys the authenticity of the natural, which reinforces the maxim. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a man at one with nature in his first aria, but on the other hand, he betrays this oneness when he aligns himself further with society as a construct divided from nature in the second act.Footnote ³⁰ Papageno, in this sense, bridges the gap between nature and culture, representing the authenticity of self that surpasses the demands of his environment.Footnote ³¹ The instability of the nature–culture binary is further reinforced in the character of the Queen of the Night. In the first half of her first aria – Larghetto – the Queen is torn between taking on the natural emotions of a grieving mother in order to draw Tamino into her world, and remaining cold and unbending, as befits her rank as Queen. By the second half of her aria, she can no longer maintain the façade of naturalness and steps back into the protection of her social privilege. Tamino’s ability to be a man of both nature and culture underscores Subotnik’s argument. His personality encompasses the capacity for real emotions in his love for Pamina, and his ability to fulfil the rites of initiation in the trials by fire and water. From an Enlightenment perspective, the man truest to nature is also the man of culture.Footnote ³²

In so far as Subotnik makes an argument for The Magic Flute as a powerful statement in favour of the Enlightenment, the latter half of her article, based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, speaks more to the opera’s ability to capture the attention of a variety of people across world cultures regardless of their familiarity with the genre.Footnote ³³ Bakhtin describes the novel as a literary form that is created through a diversity of social speech types, a dialogue between languages – the language of the text, and the languages that make up the world where the text exists.Footnote ³⁴ Its strength is in presenting diverse languages and the numerous subcultures whose viewpoints and strengths cannot be ignored. Subotnik’s application of Bakhtin’s principle of cultural heterogeneity hinges on examining the opera characters to see if there are any inconsistencies between what they appear to signify in their original Enlightenment context and what they seem to signify to us in reality. For example, in Subotnik’s reassessment of Papageno’s first aria, she concludes that the illusion of naturalness portrayed by an Enlightenment reading is shattered by interrogating the relation between appearance and reality. Throughout the opera, Papageno is presented as a character enslaved by bodily needs and without strength of character. Papageno’s first audiences might have coded him as a child of nature. Still, they would also have likely identified with him as a member of a lower class and remote from the aristocracy. It is this combination of characterisation and social language that affords Papageno’s character credibility. Subotnik carefully crafts her argument through the connection between the diversity of social languages evoked within each character and the material conditions of the Enlightenment through which these languages are manifested and interpreted. She concludes that though the opera leans towards the German Enlightenment, its ownership has been thrown open, and The Magic Flute has become ours.Footnote ³⁵

Marianne Tettlebaum takes on Subotnik’s reading and asks ‘Who owns the magic flute’? Tettlebaum focuses on the magic flute rather than The Magic Flute, the instrument rather than the opera, shifting her focus from the question of what the opera represents to how it represents.Footnote ³⁶ This question is premised on the argument that whoever owns the flute wields the power, determines the course of events, has their power represented, and sees their worldview prevail.Footnote ³⁷ She evokes Jane Brown’s assertion that an important part of the confusion about what The Magic Flute represents is due to its libretto being at the intersection of allegorical dramatic representation – where artistic objects reinforce the divine or supernatural forces – and mimetic drama, where events are driven by the causality of material circumstance reinforcing individual psychology.Footnote ³⁸ For Tettlebaum, like Subotnik, the message of social equality may be the reason for the opera’s continued popularity.Footnote ³⁹ However, examining the characters of the opera as a social microcosm anchors the opera to the physical world rather than the fairy tale of the supernatural flute. The flute’s agency is betrayed in its inability to function fully either as a musical instrument or as an object of the supernatural. In other words, Tettlebaum argues that the world we see on stage, no matter how foreign it is made by fantastical staging, is the mundane one we inhabit.Footnote ⁴⁰ Subotnik contends that The Magic Flute, through the multiplicity of social languages embedded in its character, transcends its Enlightenment roots. Tettlebaum adds that the flute’s efficacy relies on the extent to which it is conceived as an object of the physical world in which it participates, reinforcing the opera’s universal interpretability and its ability to lend itself to displacement across cultural landscapes.

The possibility of a universally engaged magic flute is by no means the preserve of Euro- American adaptations, reimaginations and scholarly readings. The agency of the flute was put to the test in Impempe Yomlingo, the South African reimagination of The Magic Flute by Isango Portobello, which premiered in 2007. Isango’s production was an attempt to merge the fairy tale of the flute with the world of South African identity politics. The libretto was adapted to isiXhosa and Setswana settings; the orchestral score was rewritten entirely for eight marimbas and augmented by a township percussion section comprising oil barrel drums, glass bottles filled with water, and djembes.Footnote ⁴¹ Sheila Boniface Davies and James Q. Davies note that Impempe was Isango’s flagship production, a project meant to guide black national theatre, after years of white-sponsored apartheid theatre, to what Isango’s Sarastro called ‘a better land’.Footnote ⁴² They further argue that in this production, the flute is an object of transition, an instrument which heralds a ‘turn from the malevolent world of the Queen of the Night to the benevolent dispensation of Sarastro’s realm’.Footnote ⁴³

Hilde Roos, in her study of opera in South Africa, examines attempts such as Isango’s to represent a process of indigenisation, which she understands as a process, a technique or an action whereby an entity is gradually transformed into an ‘altered state’.Footnote ⁴⁴ For Roos, indigenisation implies that the entity is ‘somehow changed by place, space, time and people that surround it’, and can always be recognised in its ‘altered state’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Isango’s reimagination of The Magic Flute was intended to be not mere indigenisation or localisation, but rather an attempt to underscore (in the words of Boniface Davies and Davies) the ‘transformative elements of the story while negotiating the politics of cultural and aesthetic reform’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Two levels are evident from Boniface Davies and Davies’s analysis. First, as with Subotnik, The Magic Flute has been thrown open: by going through the trials of transition, it has become theirs – that is, it belongs to South Africans. This production is Isango’s attempt to renegotiate the concept of indigenisation and the politics of Africanness within operatic contexts. On a second level, however, as Tettlebaum has described, the magic flute – heard as the sound of a trumpet in Impempe – mirrors the physical world in its inability to lead black theatre through the intended transition completely.

This inability is evident in the production’s failure to garner as much local support as it had on the international scene. Even more, despite these intentions, staging opera in African contexts comes with its own unique sets of challenges, not least of which are the essentialising tendencies within African discourses about opera itself. In their analysis, Boniface Davies and Davies describe the South African Minister for Arts and Culture commenting on the performance of European opera in Africa, stating that ‘there is “nothing wrong with someone from Soweto wanting to sing Verdi – but it’s a bit like exporting spaghetti to Italy […] What the Italians want to see is not someone imitating an Italian composer. They want to see someone from Africa doing something African. That is what they want from Africa.”’Footnote ⁴⁷ In this sense, then, the practices of operatic localisation and indigenisation ask whether it is possible to locate an African imagination in the performance of European-style opera in African contexts. I will return to this question below.

MUSON’s production of The Magic Flute

The Musical Society of Nigeria’s performance of European-style opera and Western classical music more broadly is an offshoot of a long performance tradition that carries with it the complexities of any performance genre. European-style opera in Nigeria dates back to Lagos’s colonial modernity, which maintained an influence on the early postcolonial Lagos elite class. As early as the 1840s, European-style cultural entertainment was common among the Lagos elite community. This included concert parties and ballroom dances as a standard part of elite Lagosian living. During the colonial period in Lagos (1860–1960), soirées and concert parties, through their specific programming, played a significant role in this process of ‘civilising’ the Lagos colony and served as a platform for disseminating English culture and values among the Lagos elite class.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, from the late nineteenth century, members of the Lagos elite class began to kick back against the authoritarian tendencies of the colonial class and the European Christian missionaries. This discontent propelled nationalistic attitudes against the Europeans and the pursuit of a localised version of these European-style entertainments. More importantly, the tradition of hosting soirees and private concert parties by the Lagos elite class continued well into the middle of the twentieth century; it was at one of these, hosted by British ambassador Sir Mervyn Browne, that the aim of this musical society to promote the enjoyment, understanding and education of classical music in Nigeria was first mentioned. The Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON) was founded in 1983 through a collaboration between Browne, Akintola Williams and other prominent Nigerians, and has since been at the forefront of classical music performance and education in Nigeria, with opera and operatic performances a significant aspect of its pursuits. This commitment is evident in the society’s diverse programming, showcased at festivals and regular concerts, and through the contributions of students and visiting artists over the years.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, the MUSON Festival of the Arts has become one of the grandest classical music festivals in Nigeria, featuring performances by the symphony orchestra, the MUSON choir, and gala concerts showcasing its soloists. Its programmes include concerts of Western classical music (vocal and instrumental music) as well as jazz, African drama and opera. From around 2012, however, there was a remarkable shift concerning opera productions in Nigeria. Young Nigerians who had started performing in MUSON and then studied outside the African continent now returned to Nigeria to perform and assume leadership roles in the organisation.

This opera was Thomas Kanitz’s first major production at the MUSON Centre since he began at the Society as Artistic Director in 2011. It was performed at the Shell Hall with the thirty-five-member MUSON Symphony Orchestra (Figures 1 and 2).Footnote ⁵⁰ As noted above, the sung element was performed in German, the dialogue was rendered in English, and a narrator was added to summarise some portions of the plot and make it clearer for the audience. The Festival planning Committee described it as ‘in concert’, but the chorus were sat on stage, and Kanitz has described this presentation of The Magic Flute as a way to ‘bring the opera to Nigeria’.Footnote ⁵¹ While Kanitz created his overarching goal of situating the opera within the Nigerian context, it was the performers, who were all born and raised in Nigeria and understood the culture, who collectively curated the indigenous figures onto which the opera’s characters were mapped. The singers were a major part of the decision-making about which indigenous character would correspond to each character of the opera. They also participated in the artistic process by providing personal effects, including footwear, make-up kits and clothing accessories as part of this reinterpretation. In what follows, I analyse images of each character and the multiple layers of identity they contain, and the unstable relations presented through them, especially the markers for indigenous epistemologies. The photographs analysed in this section are drawn from a diverse array of sources, including MUSON archives, personal archives of performers, and the social media platforms of audience members, as well as newspapers, blogs and other online media.

Figure 1.

Title page for The Magic Flute in the MUSON 2012 Festival of Arts.

Figure 2.

Shell Zenith Bank Hall (author’s photograph).

What do you see in Figure 3? A religious ceremony? A ritual performance? Or an African drama? This is the Finale of the second act of The Magic Flute. In this image, Sarastro places Tamino’s hand over Pamina’s while the chorus sings ‘Heil sei euch Geweihten’. The singers in this production embody a duality of character that both captures the original character in the opera and transports the listener into the ‘fabled Western Nigeria’.Footnote ⁵² Pamina, sung by Prisca Enyi (1979–2021), wears a white wrapper tied to the chest, and is adorned with beads and ornaments on the head, neck, hand and waist (Figure 4). This costume points to the attire of several traditional societies, figures and cults,Footnote ⁵³ but most obviously it suggests the attire of Olókun worshippers. Olókun is the deity of the sea worshipped in Nigeria among the Benin and the Yorùbá people, and in the Republic of Benin among the Fon people.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although Benin is the capital of Edo state in present-day Nigeria, the Kingdom of Benin dates back to the eleventh century, and was involved in transatlantic trade with Europeans, especially the Portuguese, as early as the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Benin cosmology, Olókun is strongly linked to the court of the Oba of Benin. The deity is seen as an emblem of the king’s wealth; Olókun’s wealth, fertility and abundance are idealised in the display of affluence in the court and palace.Footnote ⁵⁶ While Olókun’s personality is male in Benin cosmology, the Yorùbá Olókun appears as female. In Yorùbá cosmology, the Olókun is linked to Yemoja, who is also a deity of the waters, and as in Benin culture, is closely associated with the monarchy. Described as the last wife of Ọ̀rúnmìlà – the Yorùbá deity of wisdom, knowledge and omniscience – she represents the maternal source of life.Footnote ⁵⁷ With its importance to Benin and Yorùbá royals, the Olókun deity is also favoured among upper-class members of both societies. Like Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, whose character carries implicit upper-class qualities, Pamina in this production is modelled and characterised as a member of the royal family who is also an Olókun worshipper. It is not only her costume that signals this association; Pamina also performs a trance-like dance particular to Olókun worship at the end of the aria ‘Ach ich Fuhls’, while being held up by the Three Boys (here played by women) (Figure 4).Footnote ⁵⁸

Figure 3.

Final scene of Act II of MUSON’s The Magic Flute (left to right: Tamino – Guchi Egbunine, Sarastro – Obinna Ifediora, Pamina – Prisca Enyi) (author’s photograph).

Figure 4.

Pamina and the Three Boys (left to right: Prisca Enyi, Maryann Agetu, Tobiloba Aregbesola, Olaide Ayodeji).

Monostatos was the only character in this production who was modelled after a non-indigenous figure. Sung by John Lucien Eclou (b. 1989) in the performance runs beginning on 28 October 2012, and 17 February 2013, and by the present author in the 10 March 2013 run, Monostatos was reimagined as a British officer in Sarastro’s castle. In Figure 5, Eclou is dressed as an officer in a red jacket, black trousers and a black hat, holding a baton. More striking is the colour of his face and hands. Eclou’s face and hands were coloured in an obvious attempt at ‘whiting up’ his character.Footnote ⁵⁹ The practice of colouring the skin for racial blending has been problematised widely,Footnote ⁶⁰ but the focus has been on the tradition of ‘blacking up’ – wearing theatrical blackface makeup to mimic or imitate Black culture.Footnote ⁶¹ In this production, we see the reverse.

Figure 5.

Monostatos (John Lucien Eclou) in ‘white face’, dressed as a British military officer for the 17 February 2013 run (author’s photograph).

Kanitz, in an interview with the author, describes the thinking behind Monostatos’s reimagination as a White British officer. In Kanitz’s interpretation, The Magic Flute has one villain – Monostatos – but his description as Black in the libretto is racist. Kanitz reimagines the villain as White and, further, as a White British officer. Concerning Monostatos’s depiction as Black in The Magic Flute, several authors argue that this depiction is symbolic and, therefore, serves as a frame to communicate specific attributes to the audience. However, the literature is divergent as to whether this symbolism is racist or not. Some authors argue that the culture of blacking up Monostatos – added to his abhorrent character and negative references to him in the opera – takes place within a racist frame.Footnote ⁶² Others argue that Monostatos’s blackness is solely symbolic and without reference to race.Footnote ⁶³ The latter argument ignores the fact that Monostatos’s character was described not simply as Black, but as Black and a Moor (Blackamoor).Footnote ⁶⁴ This description, John Cowan argues, is twofold: it points to both race and ethnicity.Footnote ⁶⁵ Cowan argues that Monostatos, textually described as Black, fat, ugly, and portrayed as lecherous, untrustworthy, self-interested, cowardly and intemperate, aligns with the late eighteenth-century Viennese stage practice.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, the character is made more complex by its close relation to the Turkish stereotype of the harem keeper and the Court Moor. The practice of ‘blacking up’ Monostatos is therefore both physical and metaphorical. It pointed the opera’s initial audiences to a familiar conception of the Black Court Moor on the Viennese stage.Footnote ⁶⁷

Monostatos’s depiction as Black further serves the relationship between The Magic Flute’s dramatic, symbolic and moral frameworks. It feeds directly into the juxtapositions of light (good) and dark (evil), and the triumph of the latter over the former, which has a long history in European thought and was a strong part of Enlightenment philosophy and the opera’s ‘something for everyone’ factor discussed in the preceding sections. However, in Kanitz and MUSON’s production, the reimagining of Monostatos’s identity is not a mere attempt to turn the tables for blackness; it is an index of Nigeria’s colonial relationship with the British. For Kanitz, the attributes that formed the core of Monostatos’s Blackness in The Magic Flute are also those that the British embodied during the colonial periods in Nigeria.

In this production, Sarastro, sung by Obinna Ifediora (b. 1985), draws inspiration from the archetype of an Ifá priest. This is evident in his attire: white dànṣíkí (top), sóró (trousers), àbètí àjà (cap) and white traditional beads (Figure 6). Ifá is one of the traditional cult systems of the Yorùbá people of Southwestern Nigeria: it is the cornerstone of Yorùbá religion, metaphysics and spirituality and regarded as a complete system of divination and a repository of knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁸ According to Wande Abimbola, in Yorùbá mythology, Ifá refers to the sacred corpus through which Ọ̀rúnmìlà – the Yorùbá deity of wisdom, knowledge, intellectual development and omniscience – communicates.Footnote ⁶⁹ Conceptually, Ifá gives voice to Ọ̀rúnmìlà’s philosophy. In contrast to other forms of divination in this region that employ spirit mediumship, Ifá divination does not rely on a person having oracular powers but rather on a system of signs interpreted by a diviner – the Ifá priest or Babaláwo. Like other scripture-based religions, Ifá’s system of sacred texts, the Odù Ifá, provides the moral, social, cultural and ethical foundation for the Yorùbá people. In other words, Ọ̀rúnmìlà’s philosophical thoughts and their meaning are codified in the Odù Ifá, which consists of 256 parts subdivided into verses called Ese, whose exact number is unknown as they are constantly increasing (there are around 800 Ese per Odù). Each of the 256 Odù has its specific divination signature, determined by the Babaláwo using sacred palm nuts and a divination chain.Footnote ⁷⁰

Sarastro, who is the High Priest of the Cult of Isis and Osiris, is characterised as an upright man, rich in wisdom, and (as Eckelmeyer describes) as the carrier of a philosophical or spiritual lineage rather than the heir of a bloodline.Footnote ⁷¹ Likewise, the Ifá priests embody the essence of Ọ̀rúnmìlà and the Ifá system, and their aim is to aid humanity in achieving balance and harmony in life. Thus, Sarastro, in this MUSON production, is projected as an embodiment of wisdom, one who understands justice, especially when it is seen through the lens of the Ifá system. The Ifá system is also symbolic for MUSON’s production, especially in the third scene of the first act, where Tamino is guided into the temples marked Temple of Wisdom, Temple of Reason and Temple of Nature. Rowland Abiodun, in his study of Yorùbá art and its relationship with indigenous knowledge systems, describes the initiates of the Ifá cult system as men of stature, and revered members of the indigenous communities known to be full of wisdom and reason.Footnote ⁷² Just like the test that Tamino was instructed to undergo to prove his suitability and nobility to marry Pamina (Figure 7), the Ifá knowledge system is employed in traditional Yorùbá society to test the state of the heart of any human; an attempt rooted in the Ifá moral anthropology which states that ‘humans are divinely chosen to bring good in the world’ (Odù 78:1).Footnote ⁷³ For an audience familiar with Yorùbá culture, the Ifá iconography in this production would have produced a deep understanding that would not have been possible if the opera had been staged in its original cultural frame.

Figure 6.

Sarastro singing ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’ (author’s photograph).

Figure 7.

Pamina, kneeling beside Sarastro at ‘the mountain of ordeal’, with members of the chorus standing behind them, Act II scene 7 (left to right: Obinna Ifediora and Prisca Enyi) (author’s photograph).

In Figure 8, Tamino kneels before the Queen of the Night as she instructs him to save her daughter from Sarastro. The character of the Queen of the Night, sung by Ranti Ihinmoyan (b. 1986), here draws inspiration from the Erelu Kuti, a prominent figure of the traditional Lagos aristocracy dating back to the eighteenth century, and the highest-ranking female member of the Lagos royal dynasty: she is charged with bearing the ritual essence of Oloye Erelu Kuti I.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Erelu Kuti is a member of the Council of Kingmakers, the Queen Mother of Lagos and the Regent to the throne when vacant. In this role, Ihinmoyan is attired in the traditional white Iro and Buba, complemented by the Ileke (beads) typically associated with the Erelu, symbolising her esteemed status. Throughout the production, she wields the Irukere, a staff traditionally crafted from horsetail, signifying the Erelu’s authority and royal standing.

Figure 8.

Tamino, kneeling before the Queen of the Night at her first appearance with the Three Ladies in the background in Act 1 scene 3 (left to right: Ranti Ihinmoyan, Guchi Egbunine) (author’s photograph).

With these costumes and props, Ihinmoyan not only embodies the character but skilfully evokes the persona of the Erelu in her demeanour and stance throughout the performance. This production took place at the MUSON Centre, situated in Onikan on Lagos Island, about four kilometres from the Lagos traditional palace, so the persona of the Erelu of Lagos would have been very familiar to the audience. While Ihinmoyan’s character speaks to the Queen of the Night’s royal status and probably her strength in standing against male dominance – especially if the Queen of the Night is understood to be modelled after Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, who opposed male-dominated Masonic Lodges – the shift in the Queen’s character in the second act contradicts that of the Erelu. The Erelu functions as the Queen Mother, the leader of the women’s guilds and organisations in Lagos’s traditional society and is not a villain who sinks under the diabolic tendencies of the human condition.

In MUSON’s first run of The Magic Flute, Papageno and Papagena were sung by Johnpaul Ochei (b. 1983) and Suzie-Mae Ogunseitan (b. 1986); in the second and third runs of the opera, Papagena was sung by Nkiru Andrew-Eze (b. 1978). Papageno’s and Papagena’s characters were modelled after male and female Hausa/Fulani herders. The Fulani people are mainly nomads who live in arid and semiarid parts across the Sahel area of Africa. They are scattered across Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Ghana, Senegal, Guinea, the Gambia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Mauritania, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Liberia and as far as Sudan. In Figure 9, Papageno is seen in the traditional Mudukare garment of the Fulani people with a leather purse hanging over his neck. For the women, the Mudukare is a sleeveless half-top worn over a wrapper. As seen in Papagena’s costume in the same image, this traditional look would be incomplete without the accompanying beads and bracelets worn on the hands, head and waist. Salihu Maiwada describes the women as wearing their hair in five long straight braids, usually decorated with cowries and silver coins passed down through generations.Footnote ⁷⁵ The men wear a similar shirt style – a longer sleeveless shirt and a pair of three-quarter shorts. On their heads, they wear a conical-shaped hat called Habar-kada.Footnote ⁷⁶

Figure 9.

Papageno and the Three Ladies, Act I scene 1 (left to right: Fatima Anyekema, Chika Ogbuji, Johnpaul Ochei, Tinuola Paul) (author’s photograph).

Several analyses of Papageno conclude that he is a natural man, given over to the environment and to its mundane, sensory and physical experiences. Eckelmeyer, for example, describes the character as good-hearted but unable to understand and rise to the responsibilities of the nobility, especially as these pertain to the deeper issues of a trial.Footnote ⁷⁷ Subotnik also notes that Papageno personifies traits which eighteenth-century aristocratic audiences would have connected to an escape from ‘the rigidities of its own social conventions’ in favour of ‘the actuality of the lower class’ and a license for ‘social irresponsibility’.Footnote ⁷⁸ If Papageno belongs to the earthly realm, then MUSON’s Papageno fits this bill, a ‘natural’ herder whose quest is to feed his cattle, find love and enjoy the earthly environment without worrying about the future. Unlike Papageno, however, the Fulani nomad believes that nature and all it contains are gifts from God or a higher being, so no one has authority over nature.Footnote ⁷⁹ While Mozart’s Papageno has no recourse to any form of transcendence or wisdom, and is content to remain absorbed by the sensual pleasures of talking, eating, drinking and procreating, MUSON’s Papageno, in the figure of the Fulani nomad, sees nature as a gift to tend faithfully. More importantly, he sees his identity as intricately tied to this cause and considers any attempt to change it as an encroachment on his fundamental right as a being of nature. In this sense, while Mozart and Schikaneder’s Papageno is continually described as ‘everyman’ – a quality that we all like or despise in others but would never for one moment admit to finding in ourselves – MUSON’s Papageno takes a different turn and becomes a bridge between the human and his environment, between nature and culture.

Other characters of The Magic Flute were also modelled after traditional figures for this production (Figure 10). The Three Boys, sung by three ladies – Olaide Ayodeji (b. 1990), Francesca Boyo (b. 1980) (first and second run), Tobiloba Ajayi (b. 1989) (third run) and Maryann Agetu (b. 1979) – were modelled after boys in Yorùbá culture. In Figure 11, the Three Boys are seen wearing Àdìre bùbá (top) and sóró (trousers) with an àbètí àjà with a traditional bead over their necks. The Three Ladies sung by Tinuola Paul (b. 1986), Chika Ogbuji (b. 1979) and Fatima Anyekema (b. 1980) wear a long Àdìre gown (Figure 12). Àdìre is the popular Yorùbá ‘tie and dye’ technique, in which wax-resistant methods are used to produce designs in arrays of tint and hues.Footnote ⁸⁰ According to Judith Byfield, Àdìre has been used historically by the local craftspeople of Oyo and the Abeokuta people in Southwestern Nigeria. The patterns on the material are usually geometrical shapes of animals, human forms and plants.Footnote ⁸¹ These figures are symbols that carry specific meanings within Yorùbá tradition.Footnote ⁸² Although the designs printed on the Àdìre clothing worn by the Three Ladies and the Three Boys do not speak directly to the context of The Magic Flute in relation to MUSON’s reimagining, it is nevertheless a part of the larger web of symbolism.

Figure 10.

A curtain call for the entire cast at the first run, 28 October 2012 (author’s photograph).

Figure 11.

Tamino and the Three Boys (left to right: Francesca Boyo, Olaide Ayodeji, Guchi Egbunine, Maryann Agetu) (author’s photograph).

Figure 12.

The Three Ladies during the first run, 28 October 2012 (left to right: Chika Ogbuji, Tinuola Samuel, Fatima Anyekema) (author’s photograph).

Tamino, sung by Guchi Egbunine (b. 1980), wears a traditional white shirt and wrapper (Figure 11). His costume could be read as modelled on those of the Igbo or the Ijaw. The Igbo people are from the Southeast of Nigeria and one of the three major ethnic groups that were amalgamated (with the Hausa and Yoruba) to form the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1960. As an ethnic group, the Igbo date back to the twelfth century, but they have since fragmented into several chiefdoms. The Ijaw people, also from the South of Nigeria, live mostly across the coastal fringes of the Niger Delta. Tamino’s shirt is the traditional upper wear of the Ijaw people called Etibo. The wrapper is locally called ‘plain George wrapper’. Tamino’s outfit is therefore that of a middle-class man, not the prince described in the opera’s libretto: unlike Pamina’s costume, his does not confer the authority of royalty. Indeed, his apparel was subject to critique in the press. A review of the 22 February 2013 performance described his costume as an ‘aberration’.Footnote ⁸³ Omiko Awa describes the proper way of wearing the Igbo traditional costume, with the Isiagu as the shirt and the wrapper worn over black pants.Footnote ⁸⁴ Tamino wearing the Isiagu would have affirmed his position as an Igbo Prince better than the traditional white shirt he wore. Though Awa considered Tamino’s appearance and character problematic, another journalist, Bayo Ogunyemi, writing in the same newspaper a day after Awa’s comments were published, praised the unmistakability of the actions and plot of the production. Ogunyemi writes that ‘not even the smallest member of the audience in the theatre was lost in the story and performance’.Footnote ⁸⁵ These remarks illustrate the diverse perspectives on the opera at the time of its staging. Both Awa’s rejection of Tamino’s character and Ogunyemi’s praise of the plot’s clarity demonstrate the production’s legibility for its audience.

From the ancient Kingdom of Benin to the traditional aristocracy of Lagos, to contemporary Igbo culture, to Fulani pastoral settings and the Ifá cult system of Yorùbá society, the characters of MUSON’s The Magic Flute described in this section evoke references from a variety of indigenous cultures and epistemologies in Nigeria (Figure 10). These characters and allusions create the symbolisms that support the new world superimposed on the world of Mozart’s Magic Flute in this production’s attempt to locate the African imagination within operatic performance spaces. As Mbembe notes, such an attempt is not simply a product of ‘static customs’ within African cultural systems but of the mixing, blending and superimposing of different cultures over time; tradition in performance art is not untouched by historical processes such as vernacularisation, the collision of cultures and invasions.Footnote ⁸⁶ The characters open the channels for a dialogue between tradition and performance art within the broader conversation about African identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Opera and the search for an African imagination

The performance of European-style opera in Nigeria, as explained above, is an offshoot of Victorian entertainment in the nineteenth century and colonial concert music activities throughout the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ Since then, the genre has undergone transformations in different parts of Nigeria, especially in Lagos, and across the continent of Africa more broadly. In recent years, opera in Africa has given rise to a vibrant interdisciplinary field, with related but distinct terms and concepts such as indigenisation, Africanisation, transculturation, intertextuality and multiculturalism at the fore of the conversation.Footnote ⁸⁸ As a point of entry into their exploration of the performance of opera on the African continent, Van der Hoven et al. foreground the use of the term ‘opera’ in the field of musicology and, specifically, its manifestations across Africa. They argue that beyond the genre’s own Italian origins and 400-year history within Europe, and its connection to colonial/settler communities, opera conceived of in African performance spaces is complicated by conceptions of its performative dimensions within dramatic theatre. For example, the ubiquitous concept of African Total Theatre – as an all-encompassing art form – is a means of understanding and engaging operatic performance by African composers and performers.Footnote ⁸⁹ Many practitioners understand opera as being in line with African Total Theatre because of its integration of music, dance, drama and other artistic modes in a single performative unit. In MUSON, several artists (especially in the design team) have been trained in African Total Theatre practices and consider opera as an art form that aligns with its performative tendencies.

Is opera in Africa a completely imported practice, an adapted practice or an indigenised practice? Before we consider this question as it relates to the Lagosian Magic Flute, and opera in the Nigerian context more broadly – terrain which is almost entirely unknown to English-language musicology – we should consider how the terms have been deployed in the abundant scholarship on South African opera. Hilde Roos describes the impact of local aesthetics and traditions as well as a shift in the ideological and social configuration of national politics on the performance of opera in South Africa.Footnote ⁹⁰ She argues that opera’s exposure to local cultures resulted in productions which departed from Western aesthetic norms and prompted innovation.Footnote ⁹¹ Roos, like Boniface Davies and Davies in their analysis of Isango Ensemble’s production of Impempe discussed above, refers to this process – the transformation from ‘opera in South Africa to South African opera’ – as indigenisation, which results in indigenised opera. Roos’s argument falls within the boundaries of Akin Euba’s ‘parameters of an African Opera’.Footnote ⁹² For Euba, in an attempt to provide the framework for what he calls ‘neo-African music’, an African opera must be based on an African or Africanised story, set in an African community either at home or abroad; it must employ music, dance, drama, costumes and other artistic means that are modelled on African traditional or contemporary practice; its realisation must depend on the performing expertise of Africans; and it must represent something with which the average African can identify.Footnote ⁹³

In a sharp departure from Roos and Euba, Juliana Pistorius described European-style opera, in her reading of the Eoan Group’s production of La traviata, as a foreign practice in Africa, one that functions not as a ‘neutral aesthetic category but as a historically situated politics of race and class’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Pistorius argues that the production’s reliance on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings evokes an ‘imagined Italian heritage’, and thus the Italian tradition as presented on stage became a banner under which coloured singers reinscribed whiteness.Footnote ⁹⁵ By this analysis, Pistorius calls into question readings by Roos, which describe the Eoan Group’s attempt to indigenise opera as a move from ‘opera in South Africa to South African opera’. With a plethora of performances and productions across the continent that could be categorised in one or more of the ways suggested by the different positions discussed here, it is evident that opera in Africa is constantly negotiating its Africanness within different performance contexts.

It is in this contestation of Africanness in MUSON’s production of The Magic Flute that we may locate a search for what several African scholars have referred to as the ‘African imagination’. The African imagination has been posited in relation to the experiences of Africans on the continent and in diasporic contexts. It is a ubiquitous term for the character of what makes a thing truly African. Abiola Irele first evoked this phrase while exploring the convergence of themes and collective interest in self-expression found within the body of literary works on the African continent (and in the diaspora) designated as African literature. Irele describes the African imagination as a ‘conjunction of impulses’ that are ‘grounded both in common experience and cultural references’.Footnote ⁹⁶ For Irele, though the notion of an African imagination is developed primarily as an ‘ideological construction’, it has been further expanded into a sense of an African belonging that commands the vision of an entire people regarding their place in the world. The notion of an African imagination arises from the African people’s reaction to the historical circumstances of the pervasive influence of western modernity on African discourse, shaping the way Africa is imagined and represented.Footnote ⁹⁷ In other words, the African imagination is African peoples’ attempt to live out their Africanness away from Western modernity’s description of what constitutes Africanness in the world. In this same vein, Kofi Agawu, in his book The African Imagination in Music, delineates what he calls ‘characteristically African articulations’ in the music of the African continent, again pointing to the factor of Africanness in the music performed on the continent.Footnote ⁹⁸ He examines the specifiable essence in African art music through the complex relationships between music and spirituality, and music and orality.Footnote ⁹⁹ Agawu, however, diverges from the strand of thought that finds Africanness simply in the rejection or avoidance of representations of Western modernity. He argues for what is truly African as opposed to what is uniquely African. For Agawu, that which is truly African is not so because of its origin, language and formal and performance structures: it need not prove its difference but should act out its authenticity. True Africanness in performance, in Agawu’s terms, is measured by its depth of experience, its subtlety and sincerity of utterance, not by the familiarity of the art form or musical technique.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

When we search for the traces of an ‘African imagination’ in any given phenomenon, the tendency is to look at precolonial roots or to see the extent to which the phenomenon is removed from Western modernity. However, recent studies in African philosophy and cultural history have critiqued the idea of the ‘precolonial’ as misrepresenting Africa as a simple whole. For instance, Olufemi Taiwo argues that the idea of a precolonial Africa treats the continent as if it were a single analytical unit.Footnote ¹⁰¹ More importantly, he argues that a unitary precolonial Africa denies the continent’s histories of cultural hybridities, complexified by diplomatic relations across empires, by extensive migration and by trade networks across several parts of Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world.Footnote ¹⁰² Taiwo further stresses the historical complexity of African society and identity and the importance of transcending narratives of mere colonial causation while prioritising the agency of African people. Taiwo argues that the term ‘precolonial Africa’ is a distortion of the past that cannot illuminate our understanding of Africa and its history.Footnote ¹⁰³ Furthermore, a decolonial approach that uses the ‘precolonial’ as its criterion ‘discounts the agency of the ex-colonised’, taints their ‘intellectual product and institutional practices’ due to their perceived proximity to what could be regarded as the colonial experience.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For Taiwo, then, a multiplicity of histories, ideas and processes is always already at the core of African identity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Furthermore, writers such as Taiye Selasi and theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Simon Gikandi have expanded the impulses that make up the African imagination beyond doctrines of continental origin, birth and genealogy. These theorists argue for what has been called the Afropolitan ethos, a departure from conventional notions of identity in Africa, fundamentally questioning who an ‘African’ is, and what makes Africanness in the world. Mbembe argues against notions of culture and race that pit Africa against the West in many post-independence African settings.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Opposing many conceptions of African authenticity, Mbembe argues against the static view that African authenticity is based only on racial differences. In his words, aesthetic creativity in contemporary Africa should be viewed as expressions of colliding cultures, caught in the maelstrom of war, invasion, migration, intermarriage and a history of various religions we make our own, of techniques we exchange, and of goods we trade. Afropolitanism encourages the fusion of diverse cultural elements.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It celebrates the blending of traditional African cultural practices with global influences, creating a dynamic and evolving identity that is not bound by tradition. Though Afropolitanism has been criticised as producing social hierarchies and class formations of its own, Mbembe argues that African identity under the Afropolitanist ethos is no longer only characterised either by its attributed precolonial roots or the imprints of slave trade and colonisation but is now made up of poles between which there is constant passage, circulation and trailblazing, forming layers of cultural deposits from which artistic creation in Africa can draw.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Ultimately, I argue for an Afropolitanist view of the compelling visual, material and epistemological hybridity evident in the characters of MUSON’s production of The Magic Flute, and in the identities formed by the characters, the institution and the audience. The production attempted an ideologically sensitive exploration of new representations of familiar forms. This was intensified by the intentional collusion of cultures through which new layers of identity are forged by the coexistence of multiple personalities or personas within each character of the opera – the personas of the performers, the indigenous characters portrayed, the personas of the libretto and those of the music.

Predictably, given what I have described here, the local media reception of MUSON’s The Magic Flute focused on identity as it was thematised by the director’s approach. Uche Nwamara, writing a response piece for The Symphonette, described The Magic Flute as ‘very European, very Germanic’; he states additionally that the opera portrays a ‘specific worldview’ and does not ‘lend itself to Africanisation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In his estimation, these efforts had a ‘trivialising effect’ for what he considered a ‘localised worldview rooted in Mozart’s association with freemasonry’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For others, the director’s strict adherence to the written music and the German language were the alienating factors. These comments also reinforce a common perception – especially among those who consider opera and classical music as too far removed from African culture – that any attempted reinterpretation of opera or classical music as being inescapably a performance of European modernity (or even whiteness) on the Nigerian stage.

Contrary to these positions (and aligning with Vlado Kotnik’s stance that opera is the arena where different social agents meet on common ground), I argue that MUSON’s production is a point of entry for negotiating the social tensions between national, musical, ethnic and institutional concerns within the Nigerian art music scene.Footnote ¹¹¹ Even more, as I have shown, The Magic Flute has a long history of adaptations, and it is the opera’s poignant quality of cultural heterogeneity that MUSON’s production relies upon. As Subotnik states, the multiplicity of varying perspectives and performances that have appeared since The Magic Flute’s first staging strongly negates the idea of a simple or homogeneous interpretation of the opera.Footnote ¹¹² Even further, the founders of MUSON aimed at a unitary, puristic artistic product and language at the founding of the institution, but the performers and the culture of performance have created an environment where opera and classical music are generally approached from a multilingual perspective.Footnote ¹¹³ More strikingly, what is really happening through this production of The Magic Flute is a deliberate reshaping of stories by the director and performers to create a multilayered, multifaceted performance experience that speaks to somewhat contradictory social languages but amalgamates them into a single experience for the audience. For instance, Kanitz employs whiteness as a marker of cultural and political functions, imposing whiteness on black skin as a means of satirising the racial hierarchies within The Magic Flute. Yet there are deeper meanings, too, relating in complex ways to the larger postcolonial frame. In MUSON’s production, Monostatos – the British officer – is now the slave/servant with debased and untamed desires, being called to a higher understanding of Sarastro’s/Ọ̀rúnmìlà’s Temple of Light and Justice. In this (re)presentation, Sarastro, in the form of Ifá Ọ̀rúnmìlà, attempts to enlighten Monostatos in the form of the British colonialist, and finally expels him from the enlightened world, here represented by Yorùbá epistemology. Yet it may also be mapped, more uneasily, onto comments such as those mentioned above, which identify a latent whiteness in any opera of European origins performed on an African stage.

This purposeful representation of multiple social languages is expressed at different levels: first at the level of the artistic genre within society and then at the level of the multiple cultures presented by the different characters. Even further, this production stands precisely at the intersection of the allegorical and the mimetic. The artistic objects and/or objects of artistic representation in the production both have meaning within traditional religion and society and are an interplay in the causative flow of MUSON’s interpretation. For instance, Subotnik argues that even though the opera’s first audience would have related to Papageno’s character, he did not try to persuade us that his relation to nature was real rather than symbolic. On the other hand, MUSON’s production persuades the audience of the closeness of Papageno’s character to Nigerian society. MUSON’s Papageno is simultaneously Mozart’s Papageno and a Fulani herdsman. In this sense, both an imagined Papageno and a real Papageno. This is done while maintaining the character in dual frames: German Papageno, singing classical music in German, and a Fulani herdsman; a voice speaking through another voice, a voice heard in another voice.

The type of layered imagery described in the character of Papageno is a key feature of Afropolitanism. It is the idea that African identity is not monolithic but rather a complex mosaic formed by various cultural, historical and contemporary threads.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The duality in character seen in this production also reinforces the depth and complexity of African cultures and encourages exploration beyond superficial representations. This point is further enforced by the conscious interplay of religion and spirituality, whether with Pamina reimagined as an Olókun worshipper or with Sarastro as a priest of Ifá divination. This is what Simon Gikandi, commenting on Afropolitanism, regards as the displacement of cultural elements in artistic representation.Footnote ¹¹⁵

This adaptation shows the capacity to recognise one’s face in the face of a foreigner, to domesticate the unfamiliar: as Mbembe puts it, it shows the capacity to work with what appear to be contradictions.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This production finds intersections of experiences and blurs representational limits and contradistinctions. It creates a melting point of modernity in performance between the cultural text, the spectacle and its beholder, consequently transforming this work from being essentially European to artistically African. Put simply, this production creates new realities for the audience, striving to balance the desire to replicate expected international best practices of opera staging while creating works that remain locally relevant. To answer the question I posed earlier: What do you see? I see Sarastro, but only through the lens of Ifá Ọ̀rúnmìlà. I see the Queen of the Night, but in the persona of Erelu Kuti. I see Pamina through the lens of an Olókun devout. I see Tamino through the lens of an Igbo prince. I see Papageno through the lens of a Hausa/Fulani herder. Through these visual elements, The Magic Flute was situated within Nigerian indigenous epistemologies. These costumes, gestures, facial makeup and objects of adornment become sites of contestation between the written language, culture and setting of the opera and the local environment in which it is staged. They become a focal point from where the performers engage the roles they perform, as well as a medium in which the audience experiences this production.