San Francisco Opera’s ‘Magic Flute’ a bit out of tune

Maltman_Papageno_small.png(Photo by Terrence McCarthy)
Joshua Kosman [SF Chronicle, 15 October 2007]
One of the things that makes “The Magic Flute” so difficult to pull off is that Mozart’s late opera begins as a comic-book fairy tale and then takes on philosophical weight – not always convincingly – as it goes along.