On a chilly December morning, West View Elementary third graders filed into theater No. 5 at the North Hills Cinemark to watch the Metropolitan Opera’s 2006 rebroadcast of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
The children chattered excitedly until the screen came to life, and a hush fell over the theater as the story began. They laughed at the silly moments — particularly those involving Papageno, the humorous birdcatcher — and some even followed the lead of the recorded audience by clapping after each song. Once the show was over, some students could be heard imitating the famous soprano staccato parts from the Queen of the Night’s aria.
With the help of educators Martin Richter and John Thomas, the North Hills School District is one of only 66 school districts nationwide that gets to participate in the Met Opera’s HD Live in Schools program, allowing students to experience the magic of opera for free at their local movie theaters.
In the classroom
The week before the field trip to the Cinemark, Richter and Thomas visited West View Elementary’s third grade classes to teach the students about what they would see and hear during their viewing of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
Richter taught them about arias while Thomas taught them about the repeated visual and narrative appearances of the number three.
During Richter’s lesson, students worked together in small groups, each group in their own corner of the classroom with their own iPads and worksheets.
“Each group is listening to a different aria from ‘The Magic Flute.’ Arias are kind of analogous to descriptive passages in stories,” Richter said. “There are action sequences in operas, and then there are parts where the action stops, and the characters sing an aria that tells about themselves through the music and through the words. So the students are gathering information about some of the main characters of ‘The Magic Flute.’”
Once the students finished studying the arias, they moved to the next classroom for Thomas’ lesson, which focused on the repeated use of triangles in the visual design of the opera.
As a Freemason himself, Mozart worked typical Freemason themes and symbols into “The Magic Flute.”
“Equilateral triangles were something that the Freemasons liked an awful lot because it is the strongest shape to use in building, like pyramids, honeycombs, things like that,” Richter said. “In ‘The Magic Flute’ opera itself, there are a lot of things that are in threes. There are three ladies, three tests of the hero. There are three chords in the introduction of the opera. There’s a whole bunch of threes you can find.”
About the program and the educators behind it
The Met Opera’s associate director of education, Nicholas Rinehart, said the HD Live in Schools program is the “foundational bedrock program of the Met’s educational initiatives.”
“It’s the reason the education department was founded in 2007,” Rinehart said. “The idea behind HD Live in Schools is basically to make it possible for students across the country to attend live transmissions of Met operas in their local movie theaters.”
According to Rinehart, the baseline of the program consists of the Met purchasing the tickets for the students and teachers and sending the opera recordings to the local theaters, though the program goes beyond just that.
“We provide teachers with curricular materials and things they can do with students. We do professional development training for teachers and administrators,” Rinehart said. “We do virtual student engagement initiatives for students across the country so they feel part of a broader community.”
Sixty-six school districts across the country currently participate in the HD Live in Schools program.
Rinehart said the Met selects the districts based on a few factors, one being that there must be an accessible movie theater nearby and another being that the school district must be supportive at the administrative level.
Most importantly, there must be teachers or administrators who can “take on the project and lead it and be the face of the project in their home communities.”
“There really has to be at least one person who takes it under their wing and says, ‘This is something that is worthwhile, and this is something we’re going to develop with our colleagues and our families and our students,’ ” Rinehart said.
For the North Hills School District, those project leaders are Richter and Thomas.
“Martin Richter is one of our favorites, a pillar of the program,” Rinehart said. “He is just a wonderful, wonderful teacher to work with, and he and John are doing amazing things in North Hills, and they’re so creative. And you know, the fact that they’re both retired and still keeping at it, and keeping the community involved, and getting involved with local students and teachers, it’s just a really amazing thing.”
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Richter studied music theory at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University before getting his master’s in education at Duquesne University in 1993. From 2007 to 2020, he taught in the gifted and talented program at West View Elementary School, where he met Thomas.
Thomas said that for 20 years Richter invited him to the opera. Thomas turned him down over and over again until one day he took him up on it. From that day forward, Thomas became an opera advocate alongside Richter.
According to Thomas, the school districts that are selected to participate in the HD Live in Schools program usually are either very large districts or are significantly economically disadvantaged. North Hills School District is neither, which Thomas said is why the Met turned them down multiple times. But Richter kept applying, about five times by his own count, and eventually they were accepted into the program around 2019.
Much like Rinehart, Thomas credits the North Hills School District’s ability to participate in the HD Live in Schools program to Richter’s passion and perseverance.
“We have this program because we have Martin Richter,” Thomas said. “It was a singular individual within the organization that said, ‘You know, it’s not exactly what it is that we normally go for, but this guy is so on fire and is working so hard that they deserve a shot, and that’s why I’m willing to throw in in whatever modest way I can.’ ”
Richter was determined to get the North Hills School District into the program so he could get the chance to help children understand an art form that typically is not covered in the school curriculum.
“Because it’s storytelling and music, there are connections to every curricular area there. There are math implications. There’s engineering just in the way that you set up an opera stage,” Richter said. “There’s math, there’s history, there’s English, there’s science — everything in opera. And I thought that this was a real chance to be able to share that. To use opera as a jumping off point for the various subjects to enrich children’s lives.”
Seeing the show
After the show, third graders Freddie Scherer and Rocco Gualtieri agreed it was long but fun. Freddie particularly enjoyed “all of Papageno’s songs” and the part where “the ugly guy (Monostatos) was sneaking up on the Princess.” Rocco especially liked Prince Tamino’s aria.
Thanks to their lessons from Thomas and Richter, both students noticed the reappearance of the number three.
“There were pyramids,” Freddie said.
“Don’t forget those three ladies,” Rocco added. “Three trials, three kids (spirits). There was just a lot of threes in it.”