Warner New Media Audio Notes Series: The Magic Flute
HyperCard and CD Audio Program
Pros: Rich wealth of material; highly inter- active structure; attractive graphic design.
Cons: Uses a lot of hard disk space; poorly documented.
Company: Warner New Media.
Requires: Mac Plus; hard disk with 6MB free space; CD ROM player.
List price: $66.
For those who love to leaf through a libretto while at the opera, or who always wished they had done so before attending one, a CD ROM that serves up fine opera plus synchronized libretto and measure-by-measure commentary should answer their every music-appreciation prayer. Warner New Media's The Magic Flute is the second product to take advantage of the Macintosh CD ROM device's ability to play back both audio recordings and computer information (see Reviews, June 1990).
The Magic Flute, a set of three CD ROM discs, contains a complete performance of the music of the Mozart opera, plus HyperCard stacks with more than 7000 screens full of opera text and commentary, plus an extra 77 minutes of recording that includes summaries of the spoken dialogue and music used to demonstrate points made in the commentary. The set also includes MIDI versions of some demonstration segments and a HyperCard link to the videodisc of the Ingmar Bergman film The Magic Flute. The opera, which can also be played on a normal CD player, is a Teldec recording of the Zurich Opera production directed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with a cast that features Matti Salminen, Hans-Peter Blochwitz, Edita Gruberova, Barbara Bonney, Anton Scharinger, and Peter Keller.
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
Basically, once you've installed the program and set the opera in motion, as you listen you can jump around among notes and comments that point out musical niceties in the performance, provide historical background, or explain basic musical concepts. It's like flipping through a thick program book during a performance, but you don't have to worry about annoying the people near you with rustling pages. And some of the comments include buttons that let you play examples to demonstrate, say, a turn, or a decrescendo, or five kinds of cadences.
If you prefer to listen straight through without side trips -- and the quality of the recording merits that attention -- you can watch on screen the German or English libretto, a summary of the story's action, or a play-by-play musical analysis synchronized to the recording.
The analysis zooms by at a pretty fast clip sometimes, but fortunately you can open a simple CD control panel that lets you rewind and replay or skip around among the tracks. There's also a more detailed musical analysis you can peruse that is not tied to the opera's progress; it's peppered with buttons that play musical examples.
LOST IN INTERFACE
The structure of The Magic Flute stacks lets you get at the information many different ways, through indexes, an outline of the opera, a glossary, and buttons that appear fleetingly at the bottom of the screen offering topics relevant to the current musical passage. This wealth of options really puts you in the driver's seat; but the dashboard controls don't look familiar; and it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how to run the thing.
The card graphics look tasteful and clean, but most of the buttons on the main opera card, however charming, aren't self-explanatory. For the first 40 minutes of fiddling with the program I wished for a legend to keep next to the Mac that pointed out the buttons and explained how they work.
This deficiency made starting up The Magic Flute the most frustrating thing about the program. When I double-clicked on the Magic Flute CD icon only an array of generic icons popped up. The brief insert was no help in figuring out the next step. After trying several generic icons and getting lots of error messages, I finally called Warner New Media for help. To save yourself the long-distance charges, double-click on the Installer file from the first CD to put everything you need on your hard disk. If you have enough disk space, do the same for all three CDs so you don't have to interrupt the opera for further installation. Thereafter you can start the program by double-clicking any Magic Flute stack icon in the CD window.
FINE TUNING
Another annoyance is really a matter of expectations: when you listen to a professional audio recording, no matter what the shortcomings of the performance, you don't expect to hear music stands toppling over, or divas clearing their throats. And you don't hear that on the Magic Flute recording. But the accompanying stacks have a bit of a garage-band feel: sloppy audio edits in some examples, typos, obscured text in the Introduction stack, and of course the confusion when you try to start up.
These complaints, though, concern minutiae. Although I wish more than just a few snippets of the score were included, the substance of the product is worthwhile, covering the same range as the standard opera reference works with more depth, plus music fundamentals and a full libretto. And at only $20 to $40 more than most audio-only CD sets of the same opera, it's a good value. Warner plans to issue a full series of Audio Notes, ranging from counterpoint to jazz improvisation. I hope that future stacks show the same polish as the recordings they accompany.
For teachers, students, autodidacts, and opera fans who enjoy listening best while poring over a libretto, I heartily recommend this Magic Flute. Music lovers who eye what Virgil Thomson calls "the appreciation racket" with suspicion, on the other hand, will probably stick to listening, on the much cheaper audio-only CD players.
