MOZART’S THE MAGIC FLUTE
A SHORT GUIDE TO A GREAT OPERA
The opera and its composer
Who’s who and what’s what
The interval – talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
Mozart took his seven-year-old son, Karl, and his granny to The Magic Flute. Karl was allowed out from a school which his parents thought was pretty useless. He ‘was absolutely delighted at being taken to the opera’, according to his father. Children have always been enchanted by Die Zauberflöte. Why? It has a strong resemblance to pantomime.
But it is no pantomime. There have been many different interpretations of what it is about, some elaborate and psychological. It has roots deep in Freemasonry, but also in the Commedia dell’arte played by the traditional strolling masked players, and various other sources.
It is an allegory. Two ‘lofty’, ‘noble’ lovers must pass through various trials of constancy, endurance and discretion, before they can come together and attain ultimate bliss. The story contains messages, conveyed using the symbolism of Freemasonry, about love for humanity, and its role in the quest for self-betterment. Progress, presided over by a priesthood, is made through the reconciliation of opposites: light and darkness, good and evil, enlightenment (i.e. the use of reason) and superstition.
The opera ends with a hymn to beauty and wisdom; and, at ‘half-time’, the chorus proclaims that when virtue and justice prevail, Earth becomes Heaven, and mortals become gods. Later, the High Priest declares in his second exquisitely beautiful aria that happiness comes from fraternal love, not from revenge.
The target audience for Mozart and his librettist was not the usual sophisticated high society. It was suburban, and middle or lower class. In a development well ahead of its time, they were using opera to disseminate ethical messages. To appeal to this new audience, the high-faluting material needed softening, lightening. Thus, it was interspersed with farcical incidents involving a comic, primitive man who has no hope at all of achieving ‘lofty’ objectives. These are the pantomime aspects which delight children. They also provide dramatic contrast.
The ‘lofty’ and the comical merge, almost embrace, in the beautiful duet Mann und Weib, which audiences since the first night have greatly applauded. A ‘lofty’ woman and the primitive man declare that husband and wife, whether high- or low-born, together strive towards the divine. Not surprisingly, the modern conception and the music have impressed people of great stature, such as Goethe.
Mozart began to compose The Magic Flute in March 1791. The libretto was provided1 by Emanuel Schikaneder, a fellow Freemason, whom Mozart had known for over ten years.
Mozart was working frantically hard. He finished La Clemenza di Tito in a coach as he headed to Prague for Leopold II’s Coronation festivities. This was just in time for its production in the first week of September. The Magic Flute was produced in Vienna at the end of that month, on 30 September 1791, in the Theater auf der Wieden, a somewhat rudimentary building in the Vienna suburbs. Mozart conducted from the clavier. Schikaneder, the star attraction, played the comical Papageno. It was a tightly knit production: Mozart’s sister-in-law Josefa sang the sensationally difficult part of the Queen of the Night.2
Less than ten weeks later, on 5 December, Mozart was dead. Two days before the première, Mozart had completed the ‘March of the Priests’ and his greatest instrumental prologue, the overture. These constitute his farewell to the musical stage. The Requiem was unfinished at his death.
It has been suggested that Schikaneder knew of Mozart’s difficult personal circumstances and need for cash, and proposed the creation of an opera in a brotherly, ‘masonic’ way. Others have suggested that Schikaneder himself was in financial trouble, and he approached Mozart for a show that could put him back on the rails. Maybe Mozart and his friend just had a vision that art would be an excellent medium through which to broadcast important messages about the Age of Reason. There are differing views about almost everything to do with The Magic Flute.
The Magic Flute, a success when first performed, has not always been as well received since. In 1816, a performance at La Scala was such a flop that it almost bankrupted the theatre. Many of the fashionable and distinguished, in their time, have taken a negative view, and have suggested that The Magic Flute is ‘incoherent’, ‘a jumble of nonsense’. Ruskin, the English essayist, thought it was ‘a silly extravaganza’. The Parisians decided it should be rehashed in what Berlioz called ‘a lamentable concoction’, The Mysteries of Isis, which included items from other operas, (including Don Giovanni’s ‘Champagne aria’ rearranged for two sopranos and a bass). A mid-nineteenth century critic referred to ‘the extreme wearisomeness of this elaborate puzzle’. For him, the music was admirable, and suitable as ‘concert and home music, but not as part of a drama, which has no clear meaning on the stage’ – even when performed by top-flight singers.
The negative views do not prevail today. Goethe thought them shallow and uneducated. He said that ‘more knowledge is required to understand the value of this libretto than to mock it.’
A role reversal in the middle of the opera confuses the story. In the first half, evil appears to be personified in the High Priest Sarastro, from whom the Queen of the Night – the mother of the heroine – wishes to rescue her daughter. In the second half, Sarastro becomes the High Priest of Enlightenment, and of all that is good, whereas the Queen of the Night becomes tainted by the forces of darkness.
Many commentators have tried to rationalise this. It has been suggested that, halfway through the composition, Mozart and Schikaneder feared that they might be accused of plagiarising a similar story which was already on stage,3 so they undertook a ‘drastic revision in mid-course’. Apparently the story of The Magic Flute is fully comprehensible to people initiated into the ritual of Freemasonry.
Mozart’s opera was written as a Singspiel, a form of opera in which music was interspersed with spoken German dialogue, instead of musical recitative. Mozart’s earlier Die Entführung (Il Seraglio) took this form. The Emperor had encouraged this form of opera: it was less exclusive and more suitable for the people. But, as a result, the libretto is long, so today it is usually truncated, with some of the heavier material about virtues, trust and so forth being omitted. The cuts did not save Sir Geraint Evans, a famous Papageno, from being ticked off because he spoke his lines with a Welsh accent.
On the day Mozart took Karl and his granny, he also drove his rival Antonio Salieri and his mistress, a top diva, out to see The Magic Flute. They were extremely enthusiastic about it and thanked him profusely. This incident is reported in Mozart’s last letter, and would seem to indicate that Mozart had a cordial relationship with Salieri, the villain of the film Amadeus.
How the ordinary folk comprising the audience must have been awestruck by the music! The Queen of the Night has two arias which rank among the most sensational ever composed by Mozart. Bernard Shaw, the writer and critic, thought that Sarastro’s music was fit to emerge from the mouth of a god. Pamina’s Ach ich fühl’s has been called ‘forty-one bars of musical perfection.’ The music of the others, including that of Papageno, is also very beautiful, popular and entertaining. All this in the dingy Vienna suburbs, with an audience heaving their sides at the antics of the clown. This was the propagation of the Enlightenment. Is it surprising that Mahler chose The Magic Flute as the Mozart opera with which to make his début as conductor at the Vienna Hofoper a century later?
The Mozart family was employed in the service of the highly influential Archbishop of Salzburg, the local potentate where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756.
From the age of six, he spent much time away on tour. His father Leopold needed to extract, while it lasted, the most value out of his son and daughter Wolfgang and Nannerl, who were both infant prodigies. When Mozart was seven, the family went on a three-and-a-half year European tour to London. Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, Wolfgang went on three tours to Italy.
As an adult, his father wanted him to get a permanent and secure position, which he never did. He went to Paris in fruitless search of a job, accompanied by his mother, who died there. Later, aged 25, he left Salzburg and fell out with the Archbishop. This did not provide a good basis for his ambition to work as a freelance in the capital of the Habsburg Empire, Vienna. There, the challenge was to distinguish oneself from the many other competing composers. At first, Mozart was successful in this precarious existence.
He married Constanze Weber, whose sister had earlier rejected him. With Constanze, he had two sons. It seems she was a liability: she was often away at a health spa, and Mozart was very worried by her tendency to flirt. He got into debt, fell ill, died and was buried in a common re-usable grave. The cause of his death, on 5 December 1791, is not known, and has been famously attributed to Salieri, not least in a play by Pushkin, an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov and in Peter Shaffer’s drama Amadeus (1984). Mozart had worked himself to death: he spent almost a third of his 36-year life – 3,720 days – away from home. Yet the piled-up volumes of the ‘Mozart Edition’ on display in Salzburg measure over six...