The Arts - Reviews: Opera - the Philosophers' Stone St Jude's Church London

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THE GREAT may be the enemy of the good, but we need to know the good (and sometimes the not-so-good) to make sense of the great. Mozart's The Magic Flute is a great opera, but although we know that it was written for the popular, rather than the court theatre, we don't know much about what the popular theatre offered. Mozart did it best; why bother with the rest?

Yet the Hampstead and Highgate Festival's British premiere of Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosophers' Stone) showed that a minor work can throw new light on a masterpiece. The Philosophers' Stone was premiered at Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden in 1790, a year before The Magic Flute appeared at the same theatre. …