TAYMOR'S MYTHOLOGY.

In the fall of 1791, Mozart was a sick man who felt his life slipping away. Still, he was intensely happy. The motive for his joy was "The Magic Flute," which had opened at the end of September, in Vienna. Representatives of the musical elite were hailing the opera as perhaps the richest of Mozart's career. Antonio Salieri told his sometime rival that it was "worthy of being played at the greatest festival for the greatest monarchs." Members of the brotherhood of Masons smiled among themselves as they recognized a kindred spirit at work: the tale of handsome young Tamino, who passes a series of tests set by the mysterious magus Sarastro, was both a parable and a parody of the rituals of Freemasonry. Yet "The Magic Flute" wasn't a proper opera at all; it was a Singspiel, a hybrid genre akin to musical theatre. The staging aimed to astonish the eyes: one visitor reported seeing "a thousand grotesque forms." Tickets cost between seven and seventeen kreuzer--about what you'd spend on a round of beers after the show. Mozart had made his imperial art democratic, and he exulted in the many-sidedness of his appeal. "What really makes me happy," he wrote to his wife, "is the Silent applause!--one can feel how this opera is rising and rising."

I reread stories of Mozart's last months just before seeing Julie Taymor's production of "The Magic Flute," at the Metropolitan Opera. They stayed with me as Taymor's deeply dazzling vision took hold. "Silent applause" is an apt phrase for what happens when a listener's inward experience locks in synch with the experience of several thousand others. It's the sense of a performance "rising and rising," as Mozart said; of a jaded, lonely crowd made to grin like kids; of a world gone right. I hung on to the feeling as long as I could.

"The Magic Flute" is half mystery play, half street comedy. Directors usually bend it in whatever direction their sensibility lies. Taymor, who first directed the opera back in 1993, well before she created her Broadway production of "The Lion King," does not try to resolve its tensions. Instead, she mobilizes every device in her repertoire to render with extreme vivacity whatever Mozart and his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, throw at her. To the usual Masonic symbology she adds motifs from the Kabbalah, Tantric Buddhism, Bunraku, Indonesian puppet theatre, and so on. The Met stage has never been so alive with movement, so charged with color, so brilliant to the eye. The outward effect is of a shimmering cultural kaleidoscope, with all manner of mystical and folk traditions blending together. Behind the surface lies a melancholy sense that history has never permitted such a synthesis--that Mozart's theme of love and power united is nothing more than a fever dream. But Taymor allows the Enlightenment fantasy to play out to the end.

Mystery sets the tone before comedy takes over. Forty-three triangles hang in a spooky, asymmetrical pattern on the stage curtain. James Levine's tempos have been exhilaratingly fleet of late, but I wish he'd lingered longer on the three majestic, light-dark chords that set the music in motion--E-flat major, C minor, E-flat in first inversion. They pose a question that the opera never quite answers. George Tsypin, who created sets for "War and Peace" at the Met two seasons ago, suspends Masonic and Kabbalistic emblems in towering Plexiglas facades, gateways, and columns. That these sets could serve as the backdrop for some very scary Vegas magic show--David Copperfield raising the dead, perhaps--is part of the whimsical appeal of the production, which stops well short of taking itself too seriously.

An incredible variety of figures and creatures swirl through Tsypin's hieroglyphic castles. Tamino and Sarastro both look like Japanese princes, while Papageno, the bird-catcher well on his way to being a bird himself, has a streetwise look, wearing a green ...