Not a bit of it - Bergman's The Magic Flute is undiluted bliss from beginning to end. Many distinguished directors have attempted to film opera - Joseph Losey did Don Giovanni, Francesco Rosi did Carmen, Franco Zeffirelli had a stab at La Traviata and Otello - but all were flawed by the opening-out process: the most artificial and stylised art form there is gains little from being staged in realistic settings.

Bergman, by contrast, maintains and even exaggerates this artificiality by setting the whole thing in a theatre (the famous Drottningholm Court Theatre), with an audience watching a stage performance of The Magic Flute (though in the event the film itself was made in the studio with the actors miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack: it's not a "live" performance as such), with all that that implies in terms of production values and special effects - when the magic flute attracts the various woodland creatures (which includes a walrus, for some reason), they're obviously either puppets or people in costume.

There are also some delightful glimpses of life backstage (particularly during the intermission, which alone should give the lie to the myth that Bergman couldn't do comedy!) - bored technicians, Papageno fast asleep and nearly missing a cue, rickety stage machinery not always doing what it should, and so on. Bergman was as much a man of the theatre as of the cinema (over a forty-year professional career, he directed plays in the winter and shot films in the summer) - and this is his way of using one medium to pay tribute to the other, in a way that also gives a fascinating glimpse of what Bergman was like as a stage director.

As for the opera itself... well, it remains what it has always been: some of the most sublime music ever written allied to a concept and libretto that veers perilously close to the ridiculous: a fairytale plot in which Prince Tamino (Josef Köstlinger) goes in quest of Princess Pamina (Irma Urrila), who has been imprisoned by the evil sorcerer Sarastro (Ulrik Cold), who in the second act turns out to be the good guy and the fount of all wisdom. This side of the film is a blend of conventional heroics and (believe it or not) Masonic propaganda (both Mozart and his librettist Schikaneder were keen Freemasons), which is offset by ample comic relief provided by the bird-catcher Papageno (a wonderfully spry, cheeky Håkan Hagegård, who effortlessly steals the whole show).

Amadeus is not exactly the best source for historical facts about Mozart, but it got one thing right: the fact that The Magic Flute was commissioned as a "people's opera", designed to be performed in the language of the common man as opposed to the more standard Italian. It would have been sung in German at the premiere, and the excerpts in Amadeus were presented in English, so it's entirely logical that Bergman's Magic Flute would be sung in Swedish. And it sounds surprisingly convincing - the lilting tone and rhythms of the language seem to suit Mozart's music perfectly.

There's only one slight artistic misstep, and since it's right at the beginning it's easy to ignore - the overture is accompanied by shots of the faces of individual people in the audience, cutting one after the other, roughly in time with the music. A minor quibble is that it's implausible beyond belief that such a vastly diverse racial mixture would be sitting in a small Swedish theatre - but a major one is that it's so clumpingly unsubtle a way of underlining the cross-racial, cross-generational appeal of Mozart's music. Particularly annoying is the way he keeps coming back to a supposedly angelic-looking girl, and I can't tell you how delighted I was when I came across Pauline Kael's review in which she said she wanted to strangle her by the time we'd seen her for the tenth time or so. But apart from that, the film is the very incarnation of ecstasy, and anyone even vaguely interested in Mozart, Bergman, opera or great cinema in general should snap it up at once.

Surprisingly, given that this is a Criterion disc, there's not a lot to say about the DVD, except to say that it's pretty much what I expected. The film was shot on 16mm and in the 4:3 aspect ratio (it was originally made for Swedish television, though Bergman's reputation secured it an international cinema release), which means that the image is inevitably on the soft side (sometimes very noticeably so) and there's a modicum of grain - though it's neither obtrusive, displeasing nor indeed inappropriate for this material, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist's warm tones and subtle colour palette come across very well (the last time I saw the film in the cinema, the colours had faded slightly, which certainly isn't a problem here) The print is generally in excellent condition, though there are a few tiny spots and scratches. But these are relatively minor quibbles - and the fact is that this is probably as good a transfer of this particular film as you're ever going to get.

The real bonus - at least in terms of delivering something I hadn't come across before - is the soundtrack. Unsurprisingly for a 1974 made-for-TV film, it was originally released in mono - though it was actually recorded in stereo in advance of shooting, to enable the release of a tie-in soundtrack LP. So Criterion simply matched the recording to the original film - and on the DVD it's presented in uncompressed PCM stereo, offering the best sound quality that a digital medium can cope with.

And it sounds terrific - if it doesn't quite have the sharp focus and clarity of a contemporary digital recording, there's an overall bloom to the sound that suits the material very well. It's certainly a huge improvement on my old VHS copy or the (mono) cinema version - some of the sound effects (knocking at a large iron door, for instance, and it subsequently creaking open) have far greater impact in this version than I've ever heard before. There are 24 chapter stops, and the subtitles are optional, a useful bonus for those whose familiarity with the opera doesn't need a translation.

Sadly, though, that's it - aside from Criterion's trademark colour bars, there are no extras on the disc at all, though it does come with a typically insightful printed essay by Bergman expert Peter Cowie (who contributed rather more extensively to Criterion's The Seventh Seal). But in common with other extra-free Criterion discs, it's ten dollars cheaper than the norm which, while still high in comparison with typical DVD prices, does at least buy you probably the best transfer of the film itself that you're ever likely to see. And in this case, I don't particularly mind the high price, since I know it's going to help subsidise more releases along the likes of Brazil, The Third Man, The Red Shoes and La Grande Illusion, which rank very high among the finest DVDs yet released.

Michael Brooke