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Welcome to the second post in a new mini-series here on Playing by the book – Stories in tune – all about picture books inspired by classical music.

In the first Stories in tune post I talked about picture book versions of Peter and the Wolf. This time round we are looking at, reading and listening to The Magic Flute by Mozart – a story I thought would lend itself naturally to the format of children’s picture books given its fairy tale-like quest to rescue an imprisoned princess with plenty of magic and mayhem along the way.

What I found with introducing Peter and the Wolf was that in the beginning, before they became familiar with the music, both my girls most enjoyed listening to the music when it was the sound track to the wonderful animation by Susie Templeton. Listening to the music just happened naturally, almost without them noticing that they were listening. Once they were familiar with the music, they then enjoyed listening to it on its own.

This listening-by-stealth was much more successful than trying to sit them down to listen to a piece of music without any “warming up” or preparation and so I did something similar with The Magic Flute – before sitting down with a book or turning on our CD player we watched a BBC animated (and abridged) version of this opera by Mozart on YouTube. Here’s the first part:

Here’s part 2 and part 3. I think this is the same animation as is available on this DVD, which for some reason you can get in the States but not in the UK.

Now this video may not please all of you, especially if you know The Magic Flute well, as the version in the animation is only 30 minutes long and consequently a great deal of music from the original opera is left out, the story is adapted to fit the time frame, and it is sung in English. None of these things will sell the animation to an opera buff, but all of these things combined to make the animation compulsive viewing for both my kids – even J was transfixed for the full 30 minutes.

Having viewed the video several times I then started playing the music in the house whilst we were getting on with other stuff and both girls clearly recognised the arias and were excited to hear them again (you can’t imagine how pleased I was at this!). It was at this stage I introduced the picture book versions I had found of The Magic Flute, and here’s what we thought of them: