We’re taught to think of the Enlightenment as the Apollonian Age of Reason. Yet at the same time it called for that Dionysian counterculture of secrecy and shadow we know as Freemasonry. No news there for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a brother in the lodge Zur Neugekrönten Hoffnung (“New-Crowned Hope”), whose Magic Flute dramatizes the tug-of-war between the opposing energies. In the patchwork Zaïde, or The Path of Light, Raphaël Pichon (countertenor turned conductor and now stage designer) reconstructs this chiaroscuro dynamic in materials from various Mozart rarities. An incomplete abduction-from-the-seraglio scenario—also entitled Zaïde—is likely Pichon’s most important source. Other numbers are lifted from Davide Penitente (a Biblical oratorio Mozart cannibalized from his Great Mass in C Minor, K. 427, also incomplete) and the quite awesome incidental music for the embarrassing playscript Thamos, King of Egypt. The director Wajdi Mouawad, a theater artist of quietly shamanic power, has supplied new dialogue. Pichon’s crackerjack period band Pygmalion is in the pit. The seraphic soprano Sabine Devieilhe, whose native element is the stratosphere, leads the cast—which, since she and Pichon are a couple, gives their partnership a whiff of The Magic Flute’s celebration of Tamino and Pamina as fellow seekers and equals. The Paris run of their project follows its summer premiere at the Salzburg Festival. —Matthew Gurewitsch