Damon Albarn is working on an opera. Albarn has revealed he’s putting 1807’s ‘The Magic Flute Part II’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the sequel to Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, to music for the first time.
The 1791 original was an opera in two acts to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder.
Damon told the ‘Broken Record’ podcast: “I’m doing an opera at the moment, using Goethe’s fragment he wrote about The Magic Flute Part II, which is fascinating.
“You’ve heard of Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’?
“Well, Goethe, who is a contemporary of Mozart, wrote ‘Part II’ of that — the sequel — but it never got put to music.
“It’s this legendary lost thing.”
However, the ‘Parklife’ hitmaker admits he has no idea what he’s doing and feels like an “idiot”.
He added: “I don’t really know what I’m doing.
“I never know what I’m doing in that world, I’m a complete idiot.
“I don’t know if it’s any good.
“With songs, I’m more confident about that.”
A new Gorillaz album is also in the works.
However, it will have a completely new sound , with the animated band started by Damon and illustrator Jamie Hewlett switching things up on the follow-up to 2023’s ‘Cracker Island’ in a bid to keep the group “alive”.
He spilled: “I’ve done a few tunes.
“It’s not going to be as dramatic as a quantum shift, it will be a paradigm shift, it will be very different.
“It will be an entirely different approach to everything — to the band, to everything.
“We’re at a point where we’re going to change.
“Why? Because it was always just Jamie and I.
“Although it is a very big thing now, it is still, in essence, just two people.
“If we decided between us that we want to do something unrecognisable then we will.
“You need that for it to stay alive, really.”
Damon recently reunited with Blur for a string of headline dates – including two sold-out concerts at Wembley Stadium – for the first time since 2015, and they are set to release the LP ‘The Ballad of Darren’ on July 21, their first since ‘The Magic Whip’.
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