Entrance of the Queen of the Night in Act I of Die Zauberflöte (set design for an 1815 production by Karl Friedrich Schinkel)
In my master’s degree program, I was fortunate to take a seminar course on the operas of Mozart with Henry Burnett. Burnett was one of those eccentric sui generis master teachers who in days gone by were sometimes granted tenure even without publishing much, and was a specialist both in 18th-century European music and in the shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument. He had a theory that the genesis of one’s appreciation for Mozart’s operas inevitably followed the path of personal development: a callow young listener, he asserted, would prefer Die Zauberflöte to the rest of the operas for of its fairy-tale magic and its spectacular finale. This same listener, growing older and wiser, would cycle through Mozart’s other late-period operas until at last, at the summit of intellectual strength and worldly understanding, his or her allegiance would switch to the sophisticated Così fan tutte.
I found this theory mystifying. Così seemed brittle to me, the weakest of Mozart’s mature operas. And even though I was Burnett’s archetypal callow young listener, I was more partial to Mozart’s brilliant sonic portrayal of evil punished in Don Giovanni than to the weird mashup of masonic symbolism and vaudeville in The Magic Flute.
I’m now no longer young, but I only began to change my mind about Così fan tutte in the past few months, mainly due to a small regional production that I saw more or less by chance this summer. This Così revealed all the constrictions American opera has undergone over the past two decades: a makeshift performance venue, nonexistent set, and costumes that looked like they’d been designed by Chappell Roan, paradoxically combined with surprisingly high ticket prices and first-rate singing that would not have been out of place on a major stage.
Pop singer Chappell Roan.
In some ways, the implosion of the art form — with some opera companies folding, others cutting their seasons short, and all enduring record low ticket sales — has been very much to the benefit of smaller regional companies. The Così I saw boasted a polished cast of young singers, with the soprano who sang the role of Fiordiligi offering a performance that was almost devastating in its emotional honesty and her ability to use music to express profound truths. I left the hall deeply moved and, for the first time, thinking about the character of Fiordiligi (the name means “flower of loyalty”), one of two fickle sisters who swear to be true to their men but who, with the help of a cynical hoax, turn out to be easily persuaded to switch partners.
Fiordiligi’s music is famous for its astonishingly wide intervallic leaps. Mozart apparently wrote the role to the emphasize the gifts and disguise the shortcomings of its creator, soprano Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, but he also used these particularities brilliantly to reveal the character’s growth and change from one act to the next. In her first act aria, “Come scoglio,” Fiordiligi’s vocal leaps are spiky and exaggerated to the point of comedy, while in her second, “Per pietà, ben mio, perdona,” these same almost bizarre vocal quirks create the framework for an impassioned monologue full of tenderness and sorrow. For instance, in this wonderful performance by Dorothea Röschmann, the coda, starting around 6:52, reveals depths of feeling that provide a sharp contrast to Mozart’s ironic use of French horns, an old musical symbol of cuckoldry.
Last year I created a course for my homeschooled high school senior about Professor Burnett’s Mozartian emblem of childhood, Die Zauberflöte. My aim was to situate the opera in the context of liberal thought and the background against which Mozart wrote it, the French Revolution. Like many teachers, I’ve often developed courses based on what I want to learn myself, and in this one I wanted to explore questions of whether the eponymous magic in The Magic Flute was the culmination of the Enlightenment or a reaction against its excesses. Is The Magic Flute Classical or Romantic? Was Mozart signaling the apotheosis of the liberal project, or its failure?
Music has been associated with politics at least from the time of Plato’s Republic. Beethoven famously wrote his Third Symphony in honor of Napoleon, who he thought would bring the ideas of the French Revolution to the German-speaking lands, but when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor he scratched out the dedication so violently that he tore a hole in the manuscript paper. In France, the Saint-Simonians, a utopian socialist community that flourished during the period of the July Monarchy, prescribed the use of music as part of their schema for improving the lives of workers, also influencing the work of composers like Liszt and Berlioz. The political nature of the music of the 20th-century folk music revival is well known. And so on.
The Weavers, purveyors of politicized folk music, 1940s.
But The Magic Flute emerged explicitly from the Enlightenment project. Mozart wrote the opera at the behest of one of his Masonic Lodge brothers, Emmanuel Schikaneder (who created the role of the birdcatcher Papageno), and the opera is essentially a Masonic morality play, full of the visual, textual, and musical imagery of what Freemasons call “The Work,” which dovetail neatly with the Enlightenment ideals of progress, brotherhood, and the ultimate perfectibility of mankind. Mozart completed the opera shortly before his death, just as the French Revolution was morphing into a bloody campaign of terror. As its title makes clear, it is a “magical opera” — part of a sub-genre of 18th-century drama that relied on magical settings and the intervention of magical objects as crucial plot devices (I learned this in Professor Burnett’s seminar). How does this fanciful scenario work with or against the political unrest of its own time, when most things dealing with enchantment in public life, most notably religion, had been suppressed?
Emannuel Schikaneder as Papageno in The Magic Flute.
In his epic 1950 novel about the Spanish Civil War, The Cypresses Believe in God, José Maria Gironella examines the beliefs and actions of each of the many factions on both sides of the conflict, including Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Carlists, Falangists, Traditionalists, and, yes, Freemasons, who made common cause with the left-wing political parties to support the Popular Front government. At one point a young Communist hides a young Falangist with an outstanding arrest warrant because, though they belong to bitterly opposing parties, the two are friends. The father of the Communist Pedro has died a suicide, and Pedro believes, as he tells his Falangist friend Mateo, that if he could only have lived in Soviet Russia, his father would have survived, “because he would have been happy there.” But:
Mateo tried to explain to him that in Russia happiness was impossible because believers suffered persecution and non-believers bore within their soul, there as everywhere, the suffering of being incomplete.
. . . He told himself that every soul about him was searching for the absolute, and that the absolute — St. Augustine made it very clear — could not be supplied here below, not even by the Falange. [emphasis mine]
The Falange, later absorbed by Franco, was a movement loosely based on Italian fascism with a quasi-mystical plan for renewing Spain to its pre-modern glory, the anticipated “daybreak of Spain.” It acknowledged that some of its best would fall in the struggle, but urged them to “die singing.” Its adherents included people like the novel’s Octavio, who
called himself a “humanist” because he much preferred having a drink in the company of friends to scaling a peak of the Pyrenees or exploring a cave. [He] had for some time been prolonging the after-dinner conversation with the keeper of [his boarding-house] and his daughter Rosario, until one day he told the girl he loved her . . . Now Octavio wore [the] blue shirt [of the Falange] and his sweetheart, Rosario, ironed it for him.
The romantic, transcendental program of the Falange filled a void in fiercely anticlerical Spain, the void of meaning that desolates human society whenever religion flees or is banished. This void yawned wide in Revolutionary France during forced dechristianization, inspiring the Republican government to institute a new state religion, the Cult of Reason. In Year 2 according to the new Revolutionary Calendar — i.e., 1793 — Festivals of Reason were held across France, including at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris, where an altar to Liberty was erected, “To Philosophy” was inscribed on the arch over the cathedral doors, and an actress in a Greco-Roman gown impersonated the Goddess of Reason.
Feast of Reason at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris, 1793.
Clearly, people need something transcendent to believe in.
In The Magic Flute, the callow young hero, Tamino, aspires to the Temple of Wisdom and its Brotherhood, ruled over by the priestly Sarastro (a name reminiscent of Zoroaster, the prophet who reformed the ancient Persian religion known as Zoroastrianism). To win admission, he must undergo severe trials, but he has been given a magic flute that aids him in danger. Tamino’s aria addressed to this flute, “Wie stark ist nicht dein Zauberton” (How strong your magical tones are), comes when he is on the brink of despair, but is consoled when he remembers the flute. As he plays on it, something truly magical happens: wild beasts emerge, dancing, from the shadows.
This scene is always tremendously moving; it is symbolic in miniature of Mozart’s entire body of work: the music that sets the wild beasts dancing is an exegesis of art itself, and of art’s power to bring peace and order to the inchoate wildness of the world. This is music about music, and about what music does. The performance linked below is especially marvelous: the wild beasts, dressed in 18th-century clothing, look like philosophes, not only tamed, but enlightened as well.
The actor Kenneth Branagh made an underappreciated English-language film of The Magic Flute in 2006. I always taught the opera in my music history survey class, and, because I usually had veterans, reservists, or active duty military in my classes, the Branagh film seemed like a natural choice to show my students. It’s set during the First World War: Tamino is a young officer, Sarastro, sung by the great German bass René Pape, is the director of a field hospital, and the Three Ladies are Red Cross Nurses.
The last scene, the Act II Finale, depicts the ultimate triumph of art: the healing of both nature and humanity. The Magic Flute has brought not only order and reason to the ravaged earth, but also renewal and peace; the shell-shocked wounded dance for joy as the war-torn land itself is restored.
The wild beasts dancing and the renewal of the land remind me of the modernist poet Wallace Stevens’s parable of art and nature, “The Anecdote of the Jar”:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Like the Magic Flute, the jar in Tennessee is a compressed symbol of art itself. Like the flute, the jar not only orders nature; it also transforms it. Stevens regards it with wonder, but he does not divulge whether this new order restores the world. We know, though, that Mozart’s music does.
As Charles Osborne wrote in our textbook for Professor Burnett’s seminar, The Complete Operas of Mozart:
Although Die Zauberflöte may be a Masonic opera, it is not only that. It is both a suburban Viennese farce and a masterpiece of transcendent spirituality. . . The great final chorus, ostensibly praising Isis and Osiris for having penetrated the recesses of darkness with their radiant light, is a hymn of praise to virtue and wisdom of whatever religious or philosophic persuasion.