My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.

I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.

Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.'

Simon McBurney Quotes