Once upon a time, there was a handsome young prince who fell in love with a ravishingly beautiful princess just by gazing at her portrait. After many trials and tribulations, they were finally united in marriage in the Temple of the Sun and became rulers of a kingdom founded on virtue, justice and wisdom. One imagines that they lived happily ever after. For this fairytale, Mozart wrote some of his most sublime music. Audiences have taken this opera to their hearts from the very beginning and have cherished it for over two centuries now. Illustrious poets as different as Goethe and W. H. Auden have revered it. Yet critics and musicologists have often given The Magic Flute only grudging praise. They have refused to take its message seriously. They have found the plot foolish and vulgar; they have dismissed the text as juvenile and full of hot air. One of the finest American music journalists in the 50s and 60s, Winthrop Sargent of the New Yorker Magazine, remarked that although the music was sheer enchantment, he could never figure out what all those priests were doing parading around in their Ku Klux Klan attire and why the protagonists had to go through those weird initiation rites.
Admirers of the opera have not always helped matters, however. In fact, they have frequently done it a disservice as a result of their esoteric interpretations. They have been fixated on the belief that secret meanings could be found in just about every compositional detail. One critic writing in L’Avant-Scène Opéra is convinced that the terrifying serpent pursuing Tamino at the very opening of the opera symbolizes the erotic energy coursing through his body with which he has trouble coping. The slaying of the beast by the three lady attendants of the Queen of the Night represents his psychological castration. With all due respect to a distinguished publication, I can’t help feeling that the gentleman was high on drugs when he wrote this. How unfortunate that he did not heed Sigmund Freud’s advice about the dangers of seeing sexual symbolism in everything. After all, the celebrated Viennese psychiatrist once observed that there are times when a cigar is only a cigar. Another, Jacques Chailley, sees Masonic influences in just about every word and note in the score. So the non-specialist can feel justifiably bewildered, and wonder what kind of an opera The Magic Flute is supposed to be and what Mozart wanted to convey to us through it. I will endeavour to answer these two questions in the time we have together.
To answer the first question, I believe Mozart wanted to compose an opera that would be immediately accessible. Contrary to a long-held fallacy, Mozart did not compose The Magic Flute because he was in desperate need of money and so was driven to slumming-it by accepting a commission from a suburban theatre in a working-class district of Vienna. Mozart held the director of the Theater auf der Wieden and the librettist of his opera, Emmanuel Schikaneder, in very high esteem. True, Schikaneder, who also created the role of Papageno in the opera, wanted the composer to produce a very popular form of Viennese entertainment called a Singspiel, meaning literally a play with singing. It would be the equivalent of the Broadway musical today. But far from feeling demeaned by having to write such a work, Mozart, like the good Viennese that he was, embraced the genre wholeheartedly. He saw nothing wrong in this form of popular theatre with its mixture of magic, streetwise humour, mystery, farce, spectacle and elevated sentiments. In fact, noted specialists have suggested that he saw in this commission the opportunity to create a specifically German opera, mixing playfulness and solemnity, the vernacular and the lofty. This explains the kaleidoscopic sweep we find in The Magic Flute. That he succeeded in raising his Singspiel to such a dizzyingly high level is understandable. Given his genius, this is what he generally did with the material at his disposal.
The Magic Flute has another dimension that distinguishes it from other singspiels in the composer’s time: it is imbued with the Masonic spirit. Both Mozart and Schikaneder were Freemasons. Schikaneder was eventually booted out of his lodge for his unrepentant womanizing. Nevertheless, he knew a great deal about that society’s rituals. As for the composer, the Freemason philosophy corresponded to his own profound yearning for a world order founded on the principles of brotherhood, justice, peace, and harmony. In this respect, Mozart was truly a man of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century belief that the human condition was capable of indefinite perfectibility. Some commentators like Robbins Landon believe he wrote The Magic Flute as an eloquent plea for tolerance at a time when the Freemasons were in danger of being persecuted by the Austrian monarchy rattled by the aftermath of the French Revolution. Others—and I am among them—are convinced that Mozart wanted to seize the opportunity to communicate his spiritual ideals to a wider audience. Mozart wrote his opera not as a secret work for initiates of the Masonic ideology but for all who kept an open mind and were willing to listen.
As for the meaning of the opera itself—to answer my second question—Mozart illustrates his beliefs by structuring The Magic Flute as a spiritual journey. His heroes, Prince Tamino and Princess Pamina move from the shadows of ignorance and superstition to the dazzling light of reason. This journey is fraught with perils but, as the protagonists realize themselves once they reach the end of their trials, the obstacles they must surmount are necessary to develop within them an unassailable strength of character. A seeker of wisdom must have an unshakeable resolve. Hence the initiation rites they must submit to. Tamino and Pamina start off from different directions. However, when they finally enter the Temple of the Sun to the acclaim of the whole priesthood, the suffering they have endured separately and together has forged their characters like tempered steel.
Tamino begins his momentous adventure by fainting while being pursued by a serpent. His loss of consciousness and subsequent awakening symbolize his spiritual rebirth. But it will take him a long time to acquire the wisdom he seeks. There is a huge gap between the very naïve, impressionable young man we see at the beginning of the opera and the hero he becomes as his journey unfolds. As Tamino will discover, wisdom does not simply mean registering the data of one’s experience. It signifies deciphering the reality behind appearances and assessing the knowledge one gathers within a larger context. This is why Tamino’s evolution is so striking. At the beginning of his quest, he falls in love with an illusion, since Pamina is just a portrait that enraptures him. Towards the end of his adventure, this elemental attraction becomes embedded in something infinitely more significant: a loving commitment to another human being that will expand and deepen through time.
Another example: in the first act, Tamino is taken in by the Queen of the Night’s exhibitionistic display of maternal sorrow. By the second act, he remains completely indifferent to her plight, having by then penetrated her malevolent personality. If we were to zero in on the moment when the Prince starts to mature, it would be during his lengthy musical dialogue in the first act with a wise, venerable priest of the temple. For the first time in his life Tamino finds within himself the strength of character necessary to question all his certitudes. Once he does this, he can move forward and begin to fulfil his spiritual potential.
If Tamino walks triumphantly through the final, terrible ordeals of the second act, it is because Pamina accompanies him as his partner and his equal. She, too, undergoes a remarkable transformation. When we first encounter her, she, too, is an impressionable, naïve, albeit adorable creature: something like a living Barbie doll. She falls in love with the Prince as soon as Papageno informs her that he is on his way to rescue her. She has a child-like belief in love’s uplifting power without having experienced it herself. Just like Tamino, her fainting in the face of danger and subsequent regaining of consciousness symbolize a spiritual rebirth. But she, too, will have to embark on a soul-searching journey before she can gain wisdom.
In a significant sense, the trials Pamina endures are far worse than Tamino’s. At least Tamino knows why he is undergoing his initiation rites. He understands that they are necessary to make him a better person. Pamina has one form of suffering after another inflicted on her without comprehending what their purpose is supposed to be. Her worst affliction occurs when she interprets Tamino’s glacial silence as proof that he no longer loves her. Her unconsolable grief is reflected in one of the most poignant arias Mozart ever penned: “Ah, ich fühl’s” (“Ah, I know that all is ended.”). As though to accentuate the bitterness of her fate, the same pattern of notes in the same metre that accompanied her naïve declaration of faith in the power of love in her duet with Papageno in the first act now sustains her vocal line as it rises in sharp anguish and falls in utter dejection. When her singing ceases, the strings, contained till then, pour out in a flood of compassion.
Now a cynic might argue that suffering does not necessarily make a person stronger or wiser since Pamina nearly succumbs to the temptation of suicide. But we should view her near-fatal despair within the framework of her personality. Pamina is an outgoing, tender and trusting person. This explains her vulnerability. Moreover, her reaction is perfectly normal. Many of us, in times of utter distress, entertain a death wish if only for a split-second. Often all one needs to reaffirm the beauty of life is some irrefutable proof that it is still worth living. For Pamina, salvation comes when the Three Spirits assure her that Tamino has never ceased loving her. These Three Spirits represent the most noble aspirations within our human condition. They can also be interpreted as embodiments of the irreducible idealism within Pamina herself that compels her to reject death as an option.
Once Pamina has recommitted herself to life, the sorrow accumulated within her all through her trials is transformed into a magnificent strength of character. Now she is fearless. It is Pamina who leads Tamino through death’s dark night in the final test. It is she who bids him play the magic flute. That instrument, symbolizing the spiritual power of man and woman united, will enable them to pass through the furnace and waterfall unharmed. When they do vanquish the night, the jubilant priests salute them in the Masonic key of e flat major, the same one Mozart used at the beginning of the overture to his opera.
Pamina’s display of unassailable and unostentatious courage is in flagrant contradiction to the misogynistic statements made by the Priests, including Sarastro, during the course of the opera. How could the so-called guardians of the Temple of Wisdom hold such disparaging and totally unacceptable views on women? The answer is that although the Priests represent the order of enlightenment, many of them still have a long way to go before achieving it themselves. Even Sarastro, he of the noble musical pronouncements on brotherhood and forgiveness, senses that Tamino and Pamina must succeed him as rulers of the kingdom in order to ensure the victory of light over darkness. That is why he was so anxious for the Prince to triumph in his trials and why he had chosen Pamina to be Tamino’s consort.
But what about the other characters in the opera who couldn’t care less about rising to such sublime heights? What is to become of them? In the case of a person like Papageno who embodies uncorrupted Nature, the basic kindness and decency of his temperament make him just as worthy of respect, according to Mozart. All Papageno wants from life is plenty of food and drink as well as a lovely woman to have fun with and who will be a faithful wife. Despite their lofty spiritual values, the Priests of the Temple obviously must have empathized with him because in the end, they do give him a delectable little partner, Papagena. As the bassoons in the orchestra gurgle with pleasure, these two elemental creatures plan on channelling their life force towards the creation of many little Papagenos and Papagenas during the course of their long and fruitful relationship.
Some natures, however, cannot change for the better. There is Monostatos, Pamina’s sadistic, sex-crazed jailor, whose music fairly prances in a priapic frenzy. But the most gripping example is the Queen of the Night. This character is a study of pathological narcissism. The grief she says that she feels over her daughter’s abduction may well be sincere, but she uses it to legitimize an insatiable thirst for power and revenge. She appears never to have forgiven her late husband for having transferred the leadership of the priesthood along with the circle of the Sun to Sarastro rather than to her. Hence her vehement outbursts. In this context, the fiendishly difficult vocal pyrotechnics of her two arias make perfect psychological and dramatic sense. In the first, she is determined to overwhelm the gullible Tamino with her imperial presence. In the second, “Der hölle rasche kocht in meinem herzen” (“The wrath of Hell boils within me”) her destructive rage shoots up into the stratosphere to encompass the whole cosmos that she wishes to subjugate, and her F’s above high C exemplify this.
In this fairytale opera she, incarnating the forces of darkness, is vanquished by Light’s dazzling splendour. But would such a victory have necessarily occurred in reality? As a fervently committed Mason and man of the Enlightenment, Mozart wanted to believe that such victories were not only possible but inevitable. What, then, would he have thought of our 20th and 21st centuries? They have witnessed the most hellish explosions of hatred in human history. Would he have succumbed to despair? Given the faith in human nature that he expresses so eloquently in The Magic Flute, I would like to think that the great composer would have preferred to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. And I dare say that the delightfully fanciful new production the COC has mounted to celebrate his genius would have given him much pleasure.
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