Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte opens with the hero, Tamino, being pursued by a terrible monster. It’s always a challenge to depict such a creature on stage but for the first performances of Nicholas Hytner’s now much revived production at English National Opera, a startling image was conceived. The tenor Tom Randle (then, as now, unaverse to showing off his well-toned torso) would appear, naked, wrapped in the writhing coils of a live snake. A snake handler was duly found and turned up for rehearsal with a battered brown suitcase from which emerged yard after yard of python. Serpent and singer got on well and all seemed set fair until the unfortunate discovery that one of the Three Ladies, whose job is to rid Tamino of the troublesome monster, suffered from acute and insurmountable ophidiophobia. Pawnee the python was promptly packed up again and removed from the premises.
Animals, as part of the plot, crop up in a surprising number of operas. Ravel wrote roles for a pair of cats, an owl, a dragonfly, a nightingale, a bat and a squirrel in L’enfant et les sortilèges, the heroine of Rameau’s Platée is a lovelorn frog and Janácek gave us the eponymous cunning little vixen, along with a fox, a litter of fox cubs, a dog, mosquito, woodpecker, cricket and a flurry of chickens. Britten’s Noye’s Fludde has an entire arkload of creatures but Walton’s The Bear, disappointingly, features a bearish or boorish central character, rather than an actual grizzly.
Some opera directors have been tempted (misguidedly in most cases) to bring animals on stage for a touch of local colour or artistic verisimilitude. Franco Zeffirelli was always particularly keen on spicing things up in this way, his 1996 Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen featuring dogs, horses and monkeys.
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