If there is an opera of Mozart’s that deserves the Wagnerian term “Music of the Future,” it is surely Die Zauberflöte. None of the great composers had attempted anything like it before. A fairy-tale pantomime that reveals itself as a Pilgrim’s Progress of the Enlightenment, it far transcends the operatic category in which it was conceived.
Until then, “magic” opera had been a genre of modest pretensions, the province of minor practitioners such as Wranitzky, and already on its way to becoming fashionable with a middle-class public. It flourished at the suburban theaters of Vienna, one of which—Das Freyhaustheater auf der Wieden—had been acquired in 1784 by Emanuel Schikaneder, an enterprising theatrical manager whose acquaintance Mozart had made in Salzburg, and for whose troupe he had written incidental music to Gebler’s play König Thamos as early as 1773, adding to it six years later. By 1791 both he and Schikaneder had become fellow-Masons; and when in the spring of 1791 the manager invited him to set his libretto, Die Zauberflöte, Mozart accepted readily enough (“I am always for German opera,” he had once written to his father, “even if it means more trouble for me”).About the proposed venue he may well have been less enthusiastic, but by this time he had little choice in the matter.
Opera, it has been said, is a political gesture—a monstrous generalization certainly; but for that particular fin-de-siècle it has more than a grain of truth. Two years before becoming sole emperor, Joseph II had established the National German Opera (Singspiel) in the capital; nor did his interest in opera and drama cease with his accession. it was he who commissioned Die Entführung aus dem Serail from a Mozart whose metropolitan fame was yet to be established. If the finished result fell short of his hopes (“Too many notes, my dear Mozart!”) he continued to support the composer, whose music embodied the “enlightened” ideals that he himself was endeavoring to realize in political terms. The Viennese performances of Figaro and Don Giovanni took place because of him. He even granted Mozart the position of Chamber Music Composer to the Imperial Court left vacant by the death of Gluck in 1787—though at a reduced salary. In 1790, with his policies lying in ruins about him—the Belgian nobles in revolt; the people alienated by the war with Turkey, which put up the price of food; the upper classes terrified into political reaction by the French Revolution—one of the last acts of the dying emperor was to command the performance of Così fan tutte at the Imperial Burgtheater. His successor, Leopold II, while sharing many of his brother’s political aims, was shrewder in his tactics. He knew that the only way to win friends was by dissociating himself from everyone who had enjoyed Joseph’s favor—not least the two perpetrators of Figaro and Don Giovanni. Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was expelled from Vienna as an undesirable alien. Mozart was refused the post of second Imperial Kappelmeister, which would nave ensured a comfortable living for himself and his family. Politics, it is true, were not the only, perhaps not even the principal reason in the last three years of his short life Mozart fell on evil days; domestic fecklessness certainly played its part. But it is significant that for his last public concert given at the Himmelpfortgasse the list of aristocratic subscribers was reduced to one—Baron van Swieten, a well-known supporter of the late emperor. In the still more repressive reign of Francis I the term “Josephinian” was held to be almost synonymous was “Jacobin.” No need to wonder, then, that for his last Viennese opera Mozart should have been banished from the city center to the suburbs.
The first performance of Die Zauberflöte took place on September 30, 1791. Mozart himself directed from the forte-piano; Schikaneder played Papageno; and the rest of the cast included Mozart’s sister-in-law Josepha Hofer as the Queen of the Night and the two singer-composers Franz Gerl and Benedikt Schack and Sarastro and Tamino respectively. Among the mute extras was the actor Karl Ludwig Gieseke, who would later claim authorship of the entire libretto—whether justifiably or not. Certainly Mozart could not complain of the opera’s reception. Night after night the theater was packed, so he told his wife. On October 13 “I called in the carriage for Salieri and Mme Cavalieri [Mozart’s first Constanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail] and drove them to by box . . . You can hardly imagine how charming they were and how much they liked not only my music, but the libretto and everything . . . Salieri listened and watch most attentively and from the overture to the final chorus there was not a single number which did not call forth from him a ‘bravo!’ or “bello!’. It seemed as if they could not thank me enough for my kindness . . . . When it was over I drove them home.” So much for the notion that Salieri was mortally envious of Mozart! If anything, the envy had been entirely on Mozart’s side, resenting as he did his colleague’s uncanny knack of securing prestigious commissions. By this time they were evidently on the best of terms. But that mention of the carriage gives one pause for thought. To maintain the equivalent of a limousine together with private chauffeur is not much help in liquidating one’s debts.
Not everyone would share Salieri’s admiration of the libretto. Indeed, many believe that the plot was changed at the last moment, either because in its original form it bore too close a resemblance to Wenzel Müller’s Kaspar der Fagottist [Kaspar the Bassoonist], which had gone into production at the Leopoldstadttheater (E.J. Dent: Mozart’s Operas) or because it was in danger of giving away too many Masonic secrets (Brigid Brophy: Mozart the Dramatist). How, Miss Brophy goes on to ask, can it make sense in the context of a fairy tale for the forces of evil represented by the Queen of the Night and her three ladies to voice sentiments of irreproachable morality during the first third of the opera? Surely the scheme must have been reversed, but at too late a stage to prevent first intentions from showing through. Against this, Alfred Einstein’s contention (Mozart, His Character, His Work) that the plot makes complete sense as it stands might be dismissed as German reverence for a Meisterstück [masterpiece]. But a moment’s consideration will show that there are powerful arguments on his side as well.
Die Zauberflöte was composed at leisure over several months, not run op in haste like Mozart’s other late opera, La Clemenza di Tito; nor does it seem to have cost the composer undue effort (“I’ve written an aria for my new opera out of sheer boredom,” he wrote to Constanze at Baden, no doubt with a touch of exaggeration). If there had been a last-minute change of plan, with all the trouble that this would have involved, he would not have failed to tell her about it. Moreover, those who, like Miss Brophy, attempt to explore the literary background of Mozart’s operas and its bearing on his music would do well to begin with the writers whom he is known to have read and admired—notably that trendsetter of the German Enlightenment, Christian Martin Wieland, whose collection of Oriental folk tales entitled Djinnistan is the immediate source of Schikaneder’s (or Giesecke’s) libretto. In his best-known work, Die Abderiten, a satirical parable of contemporary Germany, to which Mozart refers enthusiastically in one of his letters, Wieland uses a deceptively simple, low-keyed narrative to make some very subtle and sophisticated points. Mozart and his librettist can be seen to do likewise when they have the Queen’s three ladies extol the virtues of truth, courage, and constancy. In the course of the opera Tamino is won over from a conventional creed that accepts the all-too-human emotions of hate and vengefulness to a better one in which they have no place at all. But all movements based on creeds, however harmful in their effects, must pay at least lip service to the basic social virtues, otherwise they would not cohere as movements at all. A philosophy of evil is a contradiction in terms. The queen herself could hardly hope to enlist Tamino’s support by appealing to his worst instincts. Unless the change of perspective had been envisaged from the start, the opera’s message, which is as relevant to our own day as it was to Mozart’s, could not have been conveyed. Nor is the apparent amorality of the three genii, who seem to take first one side then the other, in any way illogical. They are surely the guardians of music, symbolized by the flute and the bells, and music is at the service of all nations and all creeds. But those who obey its innermost spirit will sooner or later find themselves in the realm of light—a belief entirely worthy of one who was both a musician and a Mason. No wonder he was furious with a spectator who refused to take the opera seriously: “I called him a Papageno and cleared off. But I don’t think the idiot understood my remark.” Significantly, Goethe, himself a Mason, not only approved of the plot but began a sequel to it that, alas, he never completed.
True, there are aspects that may seem a little puzzling to the uninitiated (the numerology, for instance) and even dated. The excessive emphasis on secrecy must be understood in the context of a time when Freemasons were subject to persecution by the authorities. Here and there an anti-feminine bias rises to the surface, especially when the Queen of the Night is mentioned. But this is firmly countered in the scene of the trial by fire and water, where Pamina assumes command (“Ich selbe führe dich . . . “). For some people Sarastro remains a problem. The high priest of universal benevolence was supposedly based on Ignaz von Born, spiritual head of the Viennese Masonic lodges, but he nevertheless sentences Monostatos to seventy-seven lashes on the soles of the feet; indeed, an English critic of some eminence has described him as a sadist! And one may be pardoned for wondering how he could have been so imprudent as to entrust Pamina to the care of one “whose spiritual soul is as black as his fact.” But I believe there is an explanation.
Like most of his German contemporaries, Mozart knew his Shakespeare, as a reference to Hamlet in a letter to his father written during the composition of Idomeneo makes clear. It has even been conjectured that he intended making an operatic setting of The Tempest. For this there is not the slightest evidence. Nonetheless, if the characters in Die Zauberflöte are interpreted in the light of Shakespeare’s last play, they make very good sense. Tamino and Pamina are Ferdinand and Miranda, Sarastro is Prospero, Monostatos Caliban, whose master denounces him severely:
Those most lying slave
Whom stripes may not move, not kindness: I have used thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care; and lodged thee
In my own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honor of my child.
And is it a coincidence that Monostatos, like Caliban, is conceived in essentially comic terms?
Die Zauberflöte is Mozart’s profoundest philosophical statement in music, made in the teeth of obstacles that many other composers would have found insuperable. It is not only the theatrical clumsiness and banal versification of the libretto that precludes the easy perfection of Figaro. Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte; there is also the primitive Singspiel convention with its spoken dialogue in place of recitative. The advantage of recitativo secco lies not so much in the continuity it provides between formal numbers (in fact it is the flimsiest of connecting tissue) but in its establishment of artificial convention against which the still greater artificialities of aria and ensemble can expand and flower without making the human drama seem any less real. In the three great Italian comedies, above all in Figaro, we find a self-consistent world whose characters define themselves by contact with each other. In Die Zauberflöte the definition is effected across differences of style and language, sometimes, as in the case of Sarastro, through single isolated phrases. The virtuoso fireworks of opera seria are confined to the Queen of the Night, whose arias raise the hard, tragic glitter of Donna Anna’s in Don Giovanni to a higher power. Papageno, the child of nature, expresses himself in catch Austrian tunes such as one finds in the homelier Singspiele of Dittersdorf and Schenk. Monostatos’s aria carries overtones of the chattering Turkish style (though without Turkish percussion) that we associate with Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The two men in armor speak from the heart of the Lutheran tradition at its most austere. No less striking is the diversity of forms, few of which owe anything to the prevailing Italian manner. Many pieces are simple and strophic with a directness that only the greatest composers can afford. Others evolve with a freedom of design for which one searches in vain for an eighteenth-century precedent. It is possible that the duo-dramas of Benda, which Mozart heard and admired at Mannheim in 1777, and even Haydn’s recitative-opera L’Isola Disabitata may have left their mark on the extraordinary dialogue between Tamino and the priest who converts him, but the result is wholly original. Likewise the main theme of the overture does indeed echo that of the sonata by Clementi that he played in competition with Mozart in 1781, but only for the first two bars. It is the second two with their offbeat accents that stamp the theme with its original character and make possible that organic contrapuntal growth that is the overture’s distinguishing feature. At any rate, it is Clementi’s work that sounds like a pale reminiscence of Mozart’s.
In the years that followed the composer’s death,
Die Zauberflöte continued to grow in popularity. Among its keenest admirers was Beethoven, who not only wrote a delightful set of variation for cello and piano on the duet “Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen,” but in the course of his long battle with his brother’s widow over the guardianship of his nephew Karl repeatedly referred to her as the Queen of the Night and himself (of course) as Sarastro. Thanks to the opera’s example, the “magic” genre enjoyed a fresh boost during the first two decades of the following century, without, however, producing anything more lasting than Joseph Drechsler’s
Bauer als Millionär, whose hit-tune, “Brüderlein fein,” is as well-known to the Austrian of today as is “Home, Sweet Home” to the Anglo-Saxon. In the meantime, Peter von Winter, a composer who would have been far readier than Salieri to poison Mozart, had written an operatic sequel to
Die Zauberflöte in 1798 entitled
Das Labyrinth, nowadays justly forgotten. A far worthier descendant of Mozart’s last opera can be found in Richard Strauss’s
Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919). But perhaps the finest tribute to
Die Zauberflöte cam from that ardent Wagnerite Bernard Shaw, when he declared that Sarastro’s were the only utterances in music worth to be put into the mouth of God.
The late Julian Budden, an internationally renowned musicologist, was a frequent contributor to San Francisco Opera Magazine and the author of a landmark three-volume series, The Operas of Verdi.