The New York Times
By Anthony Tommasini
SALZBURG, Austria — The American director Lydia Steier was 9 years old when “The Princess Bride” was released. She pays homage to that popular 1987 Rob Reiner film in her charming, and mysterious, production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” here at the Salzburg Festival.
In the film a grandfather reads a bedtime story to his video-gaming grandson, who at first resists the tale of romance and adventure but becomes completely engrossed. Ms. Steier borrows that framing device for her staging of Mozart’s fairy-tale opera, presented at the main festival hall.
Here a grandfather, whom we first see at dinner with his prosperous family in a house that suggests Vienna just before World War I, reads “The Magic Flute,” a story he seems to know well, to his three grandsons. The grandfather’s engaging narrative, written by Ms. Steier and the dramaturge Ina Karr, is refashioned from the opera’s spoken dialogue, usually the most awkward element of any production. And the actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, no less, makes a touching grandfather.
In the multilevel set we see circus posters plastered to the walls of the boys’ bedroom and shelves crammed with toy soldiers. As the grandfather reads the story, the boys imagine it taking place in their home with people from their lives transformed into the characters. Three sullen servants become the Three Ladies who serve the Queen of the Night. The boys’ petulant mother becomes that forbidding Queen (the brilliant soprano Albina Shagimuratova). A jocular household employee becomes Papageno (the hearty bass-baritone Adam Plachetka).