For those of us who share an interest in, even love for, classical music, the programming of the Melbourne Festival has come to stand as a rather depressing sign of this music’s apparent decline in relevance and esteem. For most of the past decade there had been limited, if any, interest, shown by successive Artistic Directors to engage positively with this repertoire. Instead, the Festival trumpets its credentials as an event which is aggressively contemporary and cutting edge. Weighted in such a balance, classical music seems wanting indeed.

At first glance, however, this year’s Festival under Brett Sheehy seems to have brought something of a rapprochement. Performances by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, the Seraphim Trio, and two of the most famous classical music performers in the world today: James Rhodes, and the Kronos Quartet, alongside the establishment of the Quarttethaus, a season of The Magic Flute, and the premiere of David Chisholm’s Kursk: An Oratorio Requiem, all suggest a renewed engagement with classical music.

All the same, if we needed to know how tenuous this interest was, proof was to be found in the Festival brochures scattered around the city venues that promoted its “contemporary music” program. None of these aforementioned acts were included, notwithstanding that much of the music they played was indeed composed within the last ten years and, moreover, was being played in novel contexts and ways. Even when classical music is contemporary, it seems, it still isn’t.

Surely a more ‘contemporary’ approach to programming would recognise that terms like ‘classical music’ and ‘contemporary music’ are increasingly meaningless when our use of personal music devices like iPods allow us freely to browse across musical time, space and genre as if we have been set loose in a vast virtual record store where no one is looking. Indeed, one consequence of the privatising of music listening is that no one is there to judge us on our choices.  

More significantly, without labels, aesthetics returns with a vengeance. Interviewed on Melbourne radio, pianist James Rhodes repeated his oft-declared hatred for the term ‘classical music’, but then immediately claimed that the music he performed by Beethoven and Chopin was ‘immortal’. Suddenly we are forced to ask: ‘why?’ Similarly, without ‘contemporary’ being wielded as a self-justifying quality, we are free to rediscover how even the most ‘up to date’ music is always wrapped up in the past, and how music of the past can still speak to, and of, who we are today. So freed, the judgment of the Artistic Director becomes first and foremost a matter of quality, not temporality.

A supreme example of how classical music could be contemporary in the best sense was found in Isango Ensemble’s reimagining of The Magic Flute. Here Mozart’s last opera was reimagined as a fable as naturally at home in a South African township as a late eighteenth century Viennese theatre. Both share a belief in the power of ritual and story-telling to make sense of our world.  

As it happens, I confess I don’t actually like the original opera very much. Sure, the music is, well, miraculous, but the plot? It is not just full of absurdities – after all, that seems de rigueur for opera – it also shamelessly depicts the kernel of misogyny and racism that appears as the Enlightenment’s evil twin.

At best, women are harmless, at worst they lead (in the figure of the ‘Queen of the Night) to lust, murder and revenge, qualities the Queen shares in the original with the moor Monostatos. Thus, Pamina, the opera’s heroine, is almost raped by Monostatos, she is then given strict instructions by the high priests of the Temple of Reason to be an acquiescent servant to her future husband, Tamino. She stands as more a symbol of the Vienna of sexual hypocrisy than the Vienna of Enlightened despotism.

By emphasising Tamino’s child-like naivety while celebrating Pamina’s sexual agency, and by subsuming the racial themes of the original, this production, however, effectively rescues the work from itself. In so doing, it also refocuses our attention on its lasting value to us as a story – its recognition of maturity as a state arrived through experiencing life’s trials as much as through intellect, its celebration of the contract of marriage as a social, as well as personal, bond, and its overarching affirmation of the redeeming power of love.

Ultimately this production’s success was dependent on the commitment, talent, and imagination of the performers, and this we were given in intoxicating excess. As such, this Magic Flute represented both a masterclass and a challenge to local musicians and artistic directors alike. Here classical music, indeed an opera no less, reasserted itself as an unquestionably contemporary art form, with relevance and vitality in abundance.

Peter Tregear