The Magic Flute:
From the Silly to the Sublime
By Kip Cranna
Contemplating the multi-faceted plot of The Magic Flute, the famous Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein commented:
This all seems merely a fantastic entertainment, intended to amuse suburban audiences by means of machines and decorations, a bright and variegated mixture of marvelous events and coarse jests. It is such an entertainment, to a certain extent; but it is much more, or rather it is something quite different, thanks to Mozart.
One of the world's most unusual operatic masterpieces, The Magic Flute was Mozart's last opera, first performed on September 30, 1791, just five weeks before the composer's death. His librettist, Emanuel Shikaneder, was an old Salzburg friend who enjoyed a long career as an actor (famous for such roles as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear as well as comic parts), impresario, and playwright. It was at his Theater auf der Wieden in suburban Vienna that the premiere took place, with the librettist himself in the role?tailor-made for his talents?of the bird-catcher Papageno.
Shikaneder had earlier created a farcical character named "Dummer Anton" (Silly Tony), who was featured in no less than seven different plays. It might suit modern opera-goers to think of Shikaneder as an Eighteenth-century combination of Robin Williams and Sir Lawrence Olivier, with a touch of Sol Hurok thrown in!
The invitation to collaborate with Shikaneder must have appealed to Mozart, who had long been wanting to write another German opera, or Singspiel (literally, "sing-play"?a spoken play with singing). Shikaneder's troupe specialized in this type of entertainment, which often featured a mixture of low farce and more serious musical fare, with heavy emphasis on stage machinery and special effects. Indeed the specific genre known as Zauberoper ("magic opera")?featuring exotic plots, animals, sudden scenic changes, and magical tricks?was a great favorite with Shikaneder's public.
The subject matter for this Mozart/Shikaneder collaboration came from several sources, chief among them:
a. Magical fairy tales, especially a story by A. J. Liebeskind entitled Lulu, or The Magic Flute , contained in C.M. Wieland's collection of such tales called Dschinnistan . Another story in this collection is probably the source of the Three Spirits.
b. Freemasonry: Mozart and Shikaneder were both ardent Freemasons, and clearly wished to present Masonic ideals in their opera?perhaps in defense of a movement that was under threat of persecution by Austria's new emperor, Joseph II, and was being blamed for fostering the dangerous beliefs that had led to the French Revolution two years earlier. (Indeed, by 1794 Masonry in Austria had been forced out of existence). Mozart had already written several works for use by Masonic lodges, and clearly sought to emphasize Freemasonry's dedication to such ideals as brotherhood, reason, truth, and enlightenment.
A principal source for the Masonic material in the opera is Jean Terrasson's novel Sethos (1731), set in ancient Egypt, the supposed origin of Masonic rituals. Here Shikaneder found the basis for such things as the two Armed Men, the Three Ladies, the serpent, and the trials by fire and water.
c. Shikaneder himself no doubt contributed much to the story, including the character of Papageno [the name derives from the German Papagei (parrot)]. The lovable bird-catcher may be based on the Italian commedia dell'arte character Truffaldino, who sometimes wore a beak-like mask. An actor such as Shikaneder would have been at ease with what to us is a sometimes quirky Shakespearean-style combination of the serious and the goofy. (Karl Ludwig Gieseke, an actor in Shikaneder's troupe, later claimed authorship of the libretto himself, but this notion is discounted by most modern scholars.)
The story is laden with Masonic symbolism, much of it centered on the number three. Besides the Three Ladies and the three temple doors (labeled "Wisdom," "Reason," and "Nature"), there are the Three Spirits?an expert suicide-prevention team who manage to talk both Papageno and Pamina out of doing themselves in with a noose and a knife, respectively. The also counsel the hero Tamino to be "steadfast, patient, and silent." Specific symbolic musical references abound as well, most notably the threefold chords in the overture (repeated three times, making 3 X 3)?symbolic of ritual knocking on the temple door. The overall theme of the opera is itself based on the Masonic ideal of passage through trials of initiation from spiritual darkness into light.
Much has been written about the plot's change of direction near the end of Act I, when Tamino approaches Sarastro's temples. From this point onward the Queen is shown to be evil, rather than the wronged paragon of goodness we had been led to consider her. This leaves certain inconsistencies unexplained. The Three Spirits, the flute, and the bells are all given to the hero by the Queen's Three Ladies, yet these forces all turn out to be acting against her interests. And why is the loathsome Monastatos tolerated by the wise ruler Sarastro, and even put in charge of Pamina?
Some have argued that the appearance in June 1791 of an opera from the rival producer Marinelli called The Magic Zither , also based on Lulu, or The Magic Flute , caused Mozart and Shikaneder to make an abrupt midcourse alteration in their work-in-progress in order avoid too close a replication. Others discount this premise, maintaining that duplications and inconsistencies of plot were common in comic operas of the time. But whether abruptly conceived or pre-meditated, the opera's change of course is unmistakable. As Andrew Porter has observed, "When Tamino, before the temples, learns that nothing is quite what he?and we?have been led to believe, the opera takes its first step toward the sublime."
The serious characters in The Magic Flute are all musically distinct. Tamino's noble, earnest character is evident from the beginning notes of his love aria to Pamina's portrait, Dies' Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön ??This portrait is enchantingly beautiful.? (The first Tamino, Benjamin Schack, was an excellent flautist who played his own magic flute.) Sarastro is the solemn but fatherly embodiment of reason and clemency. The Queen, by contrast, is a character straight out of the Italian opera seria ?one-dimensionally vengeful, formal, static, spouting electrifying high F's?less a person than an idea. (Significantly, the first Queen of the Night was Mozart's sister-in-law, Josefa Hofer, née Weber, whom he had once hoped to marry before settling for her sister Constanze.) The heroine Pamina is the feminine ideal whose initial innocence evolves into the strength to lead Tamino toward his final trials.
What of Papageno? Here we find Mozart's loving portrait of the Common Man?good, decent, simple, uninterested in spiritual enlightenment or the struggle for higher understanding, content instead with life's simple pleasures?as long as they include a loving wife. His music is accordingly straightforward, strophic, with directly appealing ease, as in his irresistible "magic bell" song, Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen ??A sweetheart or a little wife.? (Mozart gleefully wrote to his wife about a performance at which he played a joke on Shikaneder by sneaking backstage and playing the bell cues himself (as the singer mimed the action), deliberately changing the rhythm to ruffle Papageno's feathers!)
The Magic Flute can in one sense be viewed as an opera that combines the silly and the sublime to foster the ideal of a world of enlightenment and mercy. No one has summed up this achievement better than the Manchester Guardian Critic Neville Cardus, who was paraphrasing Bernard Shaw when he wrote, " The Magic Flute is the only opera in existence that could conceivably have been composed by God."
Clifford (Kip) Cranna is the Musical Administrator of the San Francisco Opera, and teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
©2004 Kip Cranna
