THE MAGIC FLUTE REVISITED

Once upon a time, a handsome young prince 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 the rulers of a kingdom founded on virtue, justice, and wisdom. One imagines that they lived happily ever after. For this fairy tale, Mozart wrote some of his most sublime music. The general public took this opera to its heart from the very beginning and has 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, however, 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 within him 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. How unfortunate that this critic did not heed Sigmund Freud’s advice about the dangers of seeing sexual symbolism in everything. After all, the illustrious 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 des 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 was 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 the composer 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 impenitent 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 understanding. 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 Masonic beliefs by structuring The Magic Flute as a spiritual journey. His heroes, the prince Tamino and the princess Pamina move from the shadow 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 as a very impressionable, naïve young man. His loss of consciousness while being pursued by the serpent and his subsequent awakening symbolize his spiritual rebirth. But it will take him most of the first act to gain an awareness of the direction in which he must travel in order to fulfill his potential. He becomes enamoured of Pamina as soon as he sees her portrait. His emotion is unquestionably heartfelt, and the ardently expansive aria where he expresses his rapture proves this. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Pamina is still only an illusion since he has not yet had an opportunity to relate to her as a live human being. Tamino is also taken in by the Queen of the Night’s exhibitionistic display of maternal sorrow. He believes her unconditionally when she depicts the High Priest Sarastro as a malevolent magician and a monster. He promises the Queen that he will storm the temple where the priests of the Sun reside and rescue her daughter Pamina. But then a significant change occurs. Once he engages in a dialogue with a wise, elderly priest of the temple, his certitude begins to waver. At first, he breathes fire against Sarastro, and for a long time, his phrases have an angry impetuousness about them. But at the end of their lengthy musical conversation, Tamino’s aggressiveness has been disarmed. He realizes that Sarastro embodies wisdom, not evil. In his perplexity, he cries out, “Oh endless night, when will you be gone? When will daylight greet my sight?” Although he had spoken to himself, voices from far off answer him: “Soon, young man, soon or never.” This mysterious answer implies that the access to wisdom will depend ultimately on no one other than himself. By applying his free will towards this goal, he eventually reaches it. Thus, when he meets Sarastro towards the end of the first act, he is more than willing to submit to the initiation rites in order to achieve spiritual plenitude and win Pamina as his bride.

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. 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. She falls in love with the Prince as soon as Papageno informs her that he is on his way to rescue her from captivity. She has a child-like belief in love’s uplifting power without having experienced it herself. This is evident in the charming duet she sings with Papageno in the first act where they declare that the unselfish love between man and woman is the source of human happiness.

In a significant sense, the trials she endures are far worse than Tamino’s. Sarastro has abducted her in order to remove her from the nefarious influence of her mother, the Queen of the Night. Being a girl of immense tenderness and sensibility, however, Pamina suffers acutely from this enforced separation. Moreover, the jailor assigned to guard her is a sadistic, sex-obsessed fiend, Monostatos whose music fairly prances in a priapic frenzy. It is only Papagneo’s unexpected arrival that saves her from being raped. Later on, her mother hands Pamina a dagger and orders her to kill Sarastro or risk being repudiated as a daughter. But the worst pain she endures stems from not knowing why Tamino cannot speak to her in the second act. Having taken a vow of silence as part of the initiation rites, Tamino cannot show her that he does indeed return her love. Pamina interprets his silence as a sign of glacial indifference. Her unconsolable grief is reflected in one of the most poignant arias Mozart ever penned: “Ah, ich fuhl’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 heard in her duet with Papageno now sustains her vocal line as it rises in keen anguish and falls in utter dejection. When her singing ceases, the strings, contained till then, pour out in a flood of compassion. If all this suffering were not enough, Sarastro informs her in the presence of Tamino that the Prince must face terrible ordeals from which he may not emerge alive. All this pain brings her to the verge of suicide from which she is saved in the nick of time by the Three Boys, ethereal spirits who represent the noblest part of our human nature.

Once the three boys convince Pamina that Tamino has never ceased loving her, 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. Just look at organized religion today! Even Sarastro, one of the noble musical pronouncements on brotherhood and forgiveness, senses that Tamino and Pamina must succeed him as ruler 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 channeling 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 sex-crazed jailor, but the most striking 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 as a pretext 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 by her imperial presence. In the second, “Der holle 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 illustrate this.

In this fairy tale 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.