Was ist Aufklärung? What is Enlightenment? This seemingly innocuous question, tucked away in a footnote to an essay by an obscure theologian, Johann Friedrich Zöllner, writing in the Berlinische Monatsschrift for December 1783, managed to stimulate the interest of such luminaries as Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Georg Hamann, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Immanuel Kant. It was Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” that remains the most widely known and vigorously debated response to Zöllner’s question. Kant initiates the discussion with this bold challenge: “Sapere aude! [dare to know] Have the courage to use your own understanding!” This, he adds, “is thus the motto of enlightenment.”¹

What Is Enlightenment?

In a certain sense, The Magic Flute may be understood as a playing-out of Kant’s motto, a challenge that is at the core of Tamino’s perilous journey. But the idea of Enlightenment and the complexity of original thought encompassed under its banner demands of us that we examine the deeper questions that it asks: What view of Enlightenment is conveyed in Mozart’s music and Schikaneder’s libretto, and how does this view accord with those strains of thought and expression, of wit and sensibility, that we take to constitute the defining aura of the Enlightenment?

That Zöllner even deemed his innocent question worthy of public debate is in itself instructive, suggesting that an answer was no more evident to its contemporaries than, say, an answer to the question “What is post-modern?” might be to a generation closer in time to our own. Enlightenment: the term itself has, over time, inspired a formidable list of commentary and critique.² There is in the first instance a distinction to be made between the condition of thought that goes by that name and, with the definite article in front of it (The Enlightenment), the historical period that it encompasses. When does it begin, this historical period? When does it end? Isaiah Berlin, with broad brush, writes of the “noble, optimistic, rational doctrine and ideal of the great tradition of the Enlightenment from the Renaissance until the French Revolution, and indeed beyond it, until our own day.” With enviable clarity, Berlin argues for the commonly held notion of the Enlightenment as a new age governed by rational thought, defined as “a logically connected structure of laws and generalizations susceptible of demonstration or verification.”³

And yet, in the midst of the German Enlightenment in the 1770s and 1780s there is manifest, notably in literature and the arts, a grain of thought and expression, of feeling – of sensibility – touching a core of human behavior, that could not be explained in purely rational terms. For Berlin, the authors whose works express and indeed ennoble this aspect of human behavior – such major figures as Herder, Lessing, J. G. Hamann, Goethe – are even perceived as figures of an “anti-Enlightenment,” their formidable contributions to the history of ideas yet recognized without the slightest demur.

To take this narrow view of the Enlightenment as exclusively the domain of reason and scientific enterprise is to misread the vibrancy of a creative imagination, in its spontaneity and wit, born in tension with the alleged certainties of rational thought. To think of the Enlightenment in purely aesthetic terms is to conjure in the mind such iconic literary works as Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Rousseau’s Confessions and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, or the three Da Ponte librettos set by Mozart, to cite only the most widely known, in which the rigors of convention and the rule of reason are challenged in the disposition to know the world as felt experience. In all these works, the irreconcilable conflict between a rational world and the inscrutable fantasy of human creativity is understood as a function of the human condition. It is precisely this ironic view of the world that the historian Hayden White identifies in the writings of Kant, who “apprehended the historical process less as a development from one stage to another in the life of humanity than as merely a conflict, an unresolvable conflict, between eternally opposed principles of human nature: rational on the one hand, irrational on the other.”⁴

Irony, if not in the high-minded sense that White attributes to Kant’s view of the world, is a trope that infiltrates a reading of The Magic Flute in diverse modes. The events, the dramatic unfoldings, the apparent contradictions of its plot are well known, and so too are the seemingly endless interpretations of the symbols, real and imagined, that embellish the opera.⁵ The essence of Enlightenment, however, is to be sought and found less in the staging of those rituals and ceremonies that inspire so much of the music in the opera than in the play of its all-too-human personae – Pamina and Tamino, chiefly – over against these inert, monolithic structures in which they dwell.

A striking instance of this play comes early in the finale to Act 2. The theater is transformed, displaying two massive mountains, a waterfall seen or heard in the one, volcanic flame spewing from the other, an augury of the trials of fire and water about to be undertaken. An iron door is closed at either wing of the stage. Tamino, barefoot, is led onto the stage by two men in black armor. Antiphonal music, strings and trombones answered by the winds, announces their arrival, in C minor. The strings now take up a fugato in a stile antico associated with Bach, against which the Men in Armor intone, cantus-like in octaves (and doubled in the winds and the three trombones), the inscription engraved on the pyramid located above them at center stage. Their tune is a parody of the Lutheran hymn “Ach Gott von Himmel sieh darein.” Significantly, Mozart composes a final phrase that brings tonal closure, even introducing a Neapolitan sixth with its obligatory D-flat into a “phrygian” tune that to eighteenth-century ears would otherwise have seemed to end on the dominant. The chorale tune, it turns out, is one that Mozart encountered as early as 1782, for he employed it as a cantus firmus in an exercise in B minor for string quartet, very likely inspired by its extensive treatment, also in B minor, in Kirnberger’s magisterial theoretical treatise Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik.⁶

More than one critic has been led to wonder why Mozart, composing for an audience of Viennese Catholics, chose to appropriate a Lutheran chorale, and indeed one whose text, pleading God’s pity for wretched humanity, would only contradict the enlightened Masonic themes of the opera – though it is doubtful that Mozart, having come upon the tune among the textless examples in Kirnberger, would have had Luther’s verses in mind.⁷ Perhaps it was an aura that Mozart was after: an ethos, a distance of time and place that this austere music would have invoked.

“Mich schreckt kein Tod” (Death does not frighten me), Tamino bursts out, finding a D-flat, now a dissonant ninth above a dominant, that dismisses the severe tone of the chorale. And it finds Pamina’s ear, offstage. A few bars of music, three simple phrases in the upper strings that modulate to the dominant of F major, choreograph the opening of the massive door that separates them and the silent moment in which Pamina and Tamino finally embrace. A fermata prolongs the moment. Measured time resumes in a less anxious Andante. The two now sing to one another, exchanging a deeply affecting expression of love, their music redolent of another touching moment of reconciliation, the Count’s “Contessa, perdono” in the fourth act finale of Figaro; here, too, its Andante following from a fermata silent with anticipation. In both scenes, the moment is savored, joined in Figaro by all nine characters, in Flute by the two Men in Armor, who sing in a rich quartet with the lovers to “des Tones Macht” (the power of tone).

What follows is indeed a crux of the opera, in more than one sense: a final rite of initiation in the trials by fire and water that will lead Tamino and Pamina to their purification. In the run-up to the moment, Pamina urges Tamino to put in play the magic flute, crafted by her father at a witching hour “from the deepest roots of a thousand-year oak” (anticipating Sieglinde’s narrative in Act 1 of Wagner’s Die Walküre). Tellingly, it is the instrument itself, rich with symbolic and mystical allure, that is given pride of place at this critical juncture, its occult powers attending our protagonists through their trials. Yet, if this ordeal were to have any real meaning as a test of character, as evidence of a maturation of thought, if the true experience of Aufklärung is in the recognition of a process of mind no longer dependent upon mythic superstition, upon unquestioned authority, then it would appear that, at this decisive moment in the opera, an opportunity to embody the genuine experience of a truly enlightened coming of age has been sacrificed in favor of theatrical display. The moment is further tinged with irony, for this instrument, a gift from the Queen of the Night, will now serve to ensure entry into Sarastro’s realm. Here again, the opera traffics in the devices of ritual and ceremony, its principal players manipulated more as puppets than as independent, thinking beings.

What is this music that the flute plays? Whose music? Are we meant to hear in it an improvisation signifying the spontaneity of original thought, of Tamino’s mind in action, or rather a set piece programmed through some coded device penetrating player and instrument? The latter, I should think, to judge from the stiff formality of the thing and its literal repetition during the second trial. It is a drab piece, and yet it is hard to imagine how the circumstance of its performance might have led Mozart to some bolder solution – though perhaps that was precisely his intent: to display the aridity of a music deprived of true imagination. For Edward Dent, the music “has something of the solemnity of the Dead March in [Handel’s] Saul,” an observation that only underscores the dour effect.⁸ The libretto actually calls for an accompaniment of “gedämpfte Pauken” (muffled timpani) and Mozart has the timpanist play only in the silences between the flute’s phrases. No less telling is the accompaniment on the beats: three trombones, two horns, and two clarini. “Otherworldly” is the word that comes to mind, the trombone choir taking its customary role as the voice of the supernatural.

As the initiates emerge, the warmth of the strings embraces them, setting in bold relief that glimpse of the stark, inhospitable world that they, with their flute, have endured. “Ihr Götter, welch ein Augenblick!” (You gods, what a moment!), they calmly sing, more out of relief than in ecstasy. They have, by these lights, achieved Enlightenment.

Monostatos and Blackness

But Enlightenment, in its more human dimension, inhabits the psyches of even the lesser figures of the opera. One character easily misunderstood is the much-maligned Monostatos. Hermann Abert sees through the misunderstanding to a more complex hearing of the aria “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden”: “one of [Mozart’s] most original dramatic character pieces,” writes Abert, in which Monostatos “elevates himself to a character of the first order,” a man, it would follow, whom we must now take seriously. “The aria,” writes Abert, “unfolds with a sensual flickering and tingling that causes the listener’s blood to race through his veins and makes his nerves tingle.” Indeed! But then Abert must evidently convince himself that the lowly Moor is incapable of such eloquence. The opening dotted quarter-note is “brutally ejaculated,” and “the whole shaping of the melody has something disorderly, even chaotic about it. It writhes around the note c′ with dogged savagery, touching on the other degrees of the scale in a fairly primitive order.”⁹ To the contrary: our blood races, our nerves tingle precisely because the edginess of the music captures the anxious thrill at the brink of this moment of forbidden desire. No savagery here, no disorderly chaos.

Before the aria, Monostatos is overcome by the sight of Pamina asleep. “Und welcher Mensch … würde bey so einem Anblick kalt und unempfindlich bleiben? Das Feuer, das in mir glimmt, wird mich noch verzehren.” (What man would remain cold and unfeeling at such a vision? The fire that smolders within me will yet consume me.) His words convey a feeling no less genuine than those expressed in Tamino’s Bildnis aria in Act 1: “dies Etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen, doch fühl ich’s hier wie Feuer brennen; soll die Empfindung Liebe sein?” (This something I can’t quite name, but I feel it here like fire burning. Could this feeling be love?) But, of course, circumstances do not allow us to equate the two. Monostatos, as he himself is all too aware, is black and on that ground alone is disqualified in this society from a relationship with Pamina. “Ist mir denn kein Herz gegeben,” he sings; “bin ich nicht von Fleisch und Blut?” (Was I not given a heart? Am I not of flesh and blood?). We are put in mind of Shylock, and perhaps the allusion is not coincidental.¹⁰ To suggest that Schikaneder and Mozart intended to hint at deeper issues of racial inequity would be to speculate beyond the limits of the evidence. This, too, is an Enlightenment moment, full of contradiction: the genuine human impulse up against the grain of conventional morality. His aria is “to be played and sung as softly as if the music were a great way off,” the libretto instructs, so as not to disturb the slumbering Pamina, even while his cunning music hints at a clandestine intent. In the end, the Queen of the Night rudely interrupts this little fantasy, and we are left only with the memory of a fleeting moment that touches something in us – not unlike Barbarina’s affecting search for that lost pin (Figaro, Act 4, scene 1) and any of those other lesser figures who come to life in Mozart’s music.

The Languages of Enlightenment

Enlightenment: Aufklärung. While the equivalence of the two terms as designators of a generalized concept is beyond dispute, it is yet worth contemplating whether the two words signify cultural domains that are not perfectly synonymous. This is more than a splitting of linguistic hairs. “Language,” as Berlin paraphrases J. G. Hamann’s notion, “is what we think with, not translate into.”¹¹ When Mozart composes with his native German in mind, the music will convey not merely the syntax and prosody of the language but the memes deep-wired in native language and culture.

A telling display of this phenomenon comes in Tamino’s great Bildnis aria. Purged of the conventional trappings of aria – the grand ritornello, the formal repetitions, the virtuosic exploitation of voice and singer all forfeited for an immediacy of expression – the music plays more for the intimacies of cavatina. Setting aside the implausibility of his having, in a matter of moments, fallen madly in love with this miniature portrait of a woman whom he has never seen, the naïvety of Tamino’s response is trumped by a music that fires an unknown yearning, mapping his gradual recognition of a feeling – an Empfindung – that can only be love. But then comes the most remarkable passage. The music, having settled in the key of the dominant, now initiates its return toward the tonic. A pedal tone on the dominant extends for ten bars before resolution, and it is during these ten bars (mm. 34–43) that Tamino probes what are perhaps his first libidinal urges. Schikaneder’s text is worth reading as it is given in the original libretto, here showing the concluding sestet of a poem modeled on the Petrarchan sonnet (though in iambic tetrameter):

That second couplet captures the moment: Tamino wondering what he would do, what he should be expected to do, were she to materialize before him. “Warm and pure”: the fantasy of the erotic touch comes to him in mid-sentence, an intrusion that breaks the syntax as it interrupts the effort to finish the thought. “What would I do,” he can only ask himself. The fit of Mozart’s music, the diction of these stammered thoughts, is so natural that one is tempted to imagine poet and composer working through the prosody together. But it is Mozart’s exquisite translation of Schikaneder’s paratactic construction, and especially at measures 38–44, that deserves close scrutiny:¹³ the heart-stopping harmonic rhythm over the pedal tone at “ich würde – würde,” the poignant D-flat appoggiatura in the first violins at the downbeat of measure 40, and C-flat at measure 41; the eros of the phrase at “warm und rein,” the G-flat giving the voice its warmth; the uptick in harmonic rhythm in the following bar, the bass moving finally from its pedal tone, capturing the climactic outburst at “was würde ich!”

The details of voicing in the orchestra are subtle and complex – and the autograph score displays not a single blemish nor evidence of a second thought. Two moments in particular capture a sense of Mozart’s keen ear for the telling signs of the inner drama. At measure 40 the horns are given a bar of silence, interrupting their offbeat pedal tones. A glance at the autograph score will confirm that this is no oversight.¹⁴ Perhaps Mozart wants Tamino’s heart to miss a beat: he has begun to formulate an answer to this vision of Pamina. And then, when the question is finally asked, there is a full measure (44) of silence. Here again, Mozart is imagining Tamino onstage, not quite ready to answer his own question. He needs a moment – and so do we. The timing is perfect. In what follows Mozart takes a necessary liberty with Schikaneder’s poem, in which “sie voll Entzücken” actually completes the broken sentence, as though it read: “Ich würde [– warm und rein – was würde ich?] sie voll Entzücken an diesen heißen Busen drücken … .” Mozart, however, must make a fresh beginning after the cadential pause at “Was würde ich?” and so the new musical paragraph begins “Ich würde sie voll Entzücken.” The convoluted construction of the poem is altered by Mozart in deference to a stage business that wants a coherent sense of formal closure: Tamino, finally bringing to mind what it would mean to press Pamina to his overheated breast.

Returning to Hamann’s notion of language as the “organ of thought” – “Not only is the entire faculty of thought founded on language … but language is also the center of reason’s misunderstanding with itself”¹⁵ – and recalling Herder’s foundational Essay on the Origin of Language – “Man, placed in the state of reflection which is peculiar to him, with this reflection for the first time given full freedom of action, did invent language”¹⁶ – as defining statements of an Enlightenment ethos, it seems all the more apposite to recognize in Tamino’s Bildnis aria its moving and subtle play with the syntactical nuances of language, poem and music locked in linguistic embrace.

The point is driven home to me by Joseph Kerman’s essay “Translating The Magic Flute,” a donnish critique of a well-known translation of the opera by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. In the Addendum to the essay, the task of putting Tamino’s aria into English is explored. “Mozart’s poem is wretched (in case you hadn’t known),” Kerman avers. “As poetry Auden’s is immensely better.”¹⁷ Here is Auden’s translation of these lines that we’ve been studying:

For Kerman, Auden’s poem fails to meet the declamatory implications of the music. He offers an alternative:

Putting aside the central thesis of Kerman’s essay (written in the 1950s at a time when the translating of opera was a topic of heated debate), it is difficult today to read these translations without feeling that Mozart’s music, as a rehearing of Schikaneder’s language, has been traduced. And we might begin with Kerman’s notion of the “wretchedness” of the poem. Schikaneder’s poem is, pointedly, not a stand-alone sonnet and cannot be judged as though it were. Rather, Schikaneder has in view a dramatic situation: a love-struck Tamino, driven to stammered phrases at the first sight of an image of Pamina. His poem must serve to heighten the moment and afford Mozart the words that will inspire Tamino to sing. The music that he does inspire makes sense only as an expression of these words, in this language. It is the inflection of “würde” in the conditional mood, and the sonorous depth of the word as it is sung, that cannot be translated. In the service of a more elegant poetry, these reformulations by Auden and Kerman lose the isolation of “warm und rein” as a touching disturbance of thought and syntax and only point up the perfect fit of Mozart’s music to Schikaneder’s language.¹⁸

It is precisely this fluent play with syntax that, to my mind, is at the core of Enlightenment thought. There is reason behind it, of course, but language and music give the impression of spontaneous wit, of a mind in motion.

When, in the forlorn sigh at the opening of her aria late in Act 2, Pamina sings “Ach ich fühl’s,” it is as though she were echoing Tamino’s “Ich fühl es, wie dies Götterbild mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt.” What they are feeling is another matter: for Tamino, rapture in the first stirrings of something he will come to recognize as love; for Pamina, uncomprehending despair that her feelings for him seem to be unrequited.¹⁹ To hear the two as though singing to one another across the contrivances of plot in the opera is to apprehend their music as an expression of something greater. When Pamina sings “Sieh Tamino! diese Tränen [fließen Trauter dir allein],” she actually appropriates the intervallic contour and very nearly the pitches of Tamino’s “Ich fühl es.” And there is the quality of the music to contend with. No other music in the opera touches us in quite the same way. And yet the two arias are very different. I am reminded here of the remarkable coupling in the String Quintet in G minor, K. 516, where the profound Adagio ma non troppo in E-flat (played con sordino) – what Abert aptly calls “one of Mozart’s most profoundly heartfelt [innerlichsten] pieces” – is followed directly by another Adagio, now in the key of G minor, its pulsating inner parts and pizzicato bass suggesting an arioso for solo violin, saturated in the gestures of pathos (a foil, as it turns out, for a spirited lieto fine in G major).²⁰

If her aria suggests a similar play with the conventions of pathos, Pamina forces them to extreme ends in the final couplet: “Fühlst du nicht der Liebe Sehnen, so wird Ruh’ im Tode sein!” (If you don’t feel the yearning of love, there will be peace in death!) The chromaticism is intense, the intervallic leaps extreme. But perhaps most striking of all is an epilogue in the orchestra that seems to issue from the troubled mind of the disconsolate Pamina. The incessantly throbbing 6/8 accompaniment is abandoned, and the first violins take up a chromatic variant of the “Sieh Tamino” motive, now driven in a descent across two octaves in a complex run of hemiolas against the meter. The texture is further complicated by the staggered entry of the flute and then the bassoon, both doubling the first violins, joined finally by a new counterpoint in the oboe and second violins. This is not the usual patterning of Mozartean orchestration. The effect is dizzying. What we learn from her final phrases is that Pamina is sufficiently distraught to consider suicide. The increasing complexity of music in the epilogue, its distortion of rhythm, its bending of the Tamino motive, and the gradual amplification of texture all suggest an almost neurotic focus on a Tamino whose silence will drive her to madness.²¹ Indeed, when she appears to the Three Boys at the beginning of the finale, Pamina carries the dagger that she intends to employ in her own death: “halb wahnwitzig” (half mad), she is described in the libretto.

The trials that Pamina must endure, in an ignorance imposed by a powerful and misogynistic social order, arouse our sympathy precisely because they emanate from a well of human feeling. The trials by fire and water, for all the pompous ceremony that frames them, enact a ritual of Enlightenment. Pamina’s ordeal, her decision to use the dagger not in the service of her mother’s command to murder Sarastro but in her own death as an extreme act of despair at what she believes to be the loss of Tamino, is about something else.

The Two Plots

To accept the contradictions, the apparitions, the occult, and Schikaneder’s fabulous mise en scène as the apparatus of fairy-tale – following the lead of others who have written about the opera²² – is to free ourselves of the burden of having to justify the drama as a display of Enlightenment theory, strictly defined. And this allows us to come to terms with those moments in Mozart’s music where the esprit of Enlightenment can be felt: where the music touches a human (and humane) chord in its principal players, as though to contravene the immutable structure of ritual authority and mythic morality.

Indeed, it makes a certain sense to speak of two Enlightenment plots in The Magic Flute. The master plot is the familiar one, a superstructure of hierarchies, of empires pitched in darkness and light, evoking evil and good, a mapping of the journey from the one to the other as a moral and ethical coming of age, an entering into the temple of wisdom. It espouses a program for the achieving of Enlightenment and describes a world governed by its ideas. The other plot, resistant to reductive archetypes, engages the expression of inner feeling, of Empfindung. Here, dramatic action is driven not by an a priori application of extrinsic ideas but by the interplay of human beings in all their imperfections, their misprisions on display, in counterpoint against the grain of the master plot.

Was ist Auflärung? Herr Zöllner’s not-so-innocent question remains. If The Magic Flute, in its master plot, may appear to provide an answer, the wonder of Mozart’s music, its way of getting into the psyche of its singers, throws the question back at us. If there is some merit in apprehending the opera as a playing out of two plots, then perhaps one fragment of the idea of Enlightenment is to be located in a paradoxical reciprocity of the two. Returning finally to Hayden White’s formulation of Kant’s view of an Enlightenment world apprehended as “a conflict, an unresolvable conflict, between eternally opposed principles of human nature,” it is tempting to hear in The Magic Flute a similar opposition of principles. If, in its conclusion, the opera must appear to resolve its conflicts, it is into the deeper currents that underlie those conflicts that Mozart’s seductive music draws us. It is here, in these deeper currents, that a theater for the Enlightenment makes itself felt.

When it comes to exoticism – “the evocation of a place, people or social milieu that is (or is perceived or imagined to be) profoundly different from accepted local norms in its attitudes, customs and morals” – The Magic Flute is possibly the most baffling of all repertory operas.¹ How to make sense of the outlandish coexistence of a Japanese hunting costume (Act 1, scene 1), a Turkish table, gondola, palm forest, and canal (Act 1, scene 9, dialogue), the vaults of a pyramid (Act 2, scene 20), six lions, three probably white male slaves, a man named after a Persian prophet (Sarastro/Zoroaster), another (in feathers) whose name sounds like “parrot” (Papageno), and a villainous black-faced Moor?² Intensifying this mélange, the opera elides exoticism and magic – something far from inevitable in eighteenth-century opera – and it unfolds in a place of the imagination resisting the worldly concreteness of geography and historical time. In an older literature, the eclectic exoticism of the opera was tidied away through a selective emphasis upon Egyptian-Masonic allegory (on which more below). The situation is now quite different thanks to the research of David J. Buch, which reinstates the genre of “fairy-tale” opera as a historical category.³ This does much to anchor the opera in its own time and place. However, there is still foundational work to be done. Buch’s subject was the supernatural, not exoticism; understandably, then, he groups together European fairy tales and those of Middle Eastern origin. The latter shape The Magic Flute in specific ways that can be usefully teased out.

In trying to make sense of this opera, we might turn to Ralph Locke’s handsome two-volume survey of exoticism.⁴ This landmark study offers not only historical perspective but a framework for appraising how music contributes to the characterization “of a remote or alien milieu” – whether or not the music is exoticized.⁵ However, Locke only touches on The Magic Flute. This may be because it speaks less clearly to issues of cross-cultural representation than Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (K. 384; 1782), which he explores in detail. Indeed, The Magic Flute is a problem case if exoticism is taken to involve the representation of actual places, remote in place or time. Arguably, the opera unfolds in a place of the imagination, though one not without some specific historical and cultural points of reference. If it can be located at all, it might be thought of as a picturesque parkland – these were fashionable at the time and often adorned with the rocks, temples, grottos, and even pyramids that appear in the opera – or the make-believe, exotic landscape of an oriental fairy tale. Like those spaces, it is constituted by existing fictions and fantasies, its intertextual web encompassing an ever-expanding range of allusion and debt. (There is always another source for the libretto of The Magic Flute.) For these reasons, the worldly reality of the characters is attenuated. Powerfully archetypical, but not realistic in novelistic terms, they exist primarily as figures of the theater and of theatrical performance. Identification with them is of course possible, and degrees of alterity harden in the course of the story, but the fairy-tale world of the opera, eliding magic and the exotic, differs from the culturally specific setting of Mozart’s earlier “Seraglio” operas – The Abduction and Zaide (K. 344; 1780) – and from the Da Ponte operas, in which critics often celebrate realism and psychological depth.

The sense of free-floating location is enhanced by our never knowing where the characters are from. Tamino, a traveler, first appears in a “Japanese hunting costume.”⁶ No clear model for this garment has been identified. Possibly, Schikaneder was alluding to a seventeenth-century Dutch men’s fashion, inspired by the kimono.⁷ Even if this were true, however, it would not tell us where Tamino himself was from. As for Papageno, he is unable to name the region in which he lives even when asked point-blank by Tamino.

Indeed, Tamino’s urbane questioning initially baffles Papageno. In the first spoken dialogue of the opera, he comes across as an unworldly indigene, unaware of rank, of other lands, and of the strange practice of giving places a name:

Papageno also claims to know nothing of his family and ancestry, a hint that his origins are not entirely human, but also playing into his construction as existing in a state before or outside of civilization:

In this dialogue, Papageno borders on a “noble savage” – a figure of the European imagination long employed to relativize, and to critique, European social norms – here, concerning rank and territorial ownership. As Dorinda Outram observes, the exotic in the eighteenth century could even be home, viewed through the eyes of a foreign visitor.⁹

Locating Exoticism in The Magic Flute

At least three major literary-theatrical traditions of exoticism feed into the libretto of The Magic Flute. Any one of them might have served as the basis of an opera. Taken together, they help create a sense of narrative abundance. The first is “abduction” or “seraglio” opera that shapes Act 1, in which Tamino sets off to rescue Pamina from captivity. The second, which until recently received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, is the initiation of a prince (here, Tamino) into the secret wisdom of Isis and Osiris, a scenario involving ancient Egyptian motifs. The third centers on the magical-exotic adventures of a stock comic character, involving magic wishes and Genii (the Three Boys) – this is Papageno’s adventure, taking place largely in Act 2.

The ingenious combination of these traditions helps account for the twists and turns of the story, the relative independence of its subplots, as well as inconsistencies about the time and place of the fictional world. I begin by tugging at these three strands. In doing so, I highlight the subtle, pervasive influence of The Tales of One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights) on the opera, a collection of Middle Eastern stories that became wildly popular in Europe after their translation into French by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1712.¹⁰ In a final section, I explore what might connect the opera’s dual concerns with the religion of ancient Egypt and with nature, the realms of Sarastro and Papageno, or, to write things small, with hieroglyphs and birdsong. I suggest these dual realms offer the audience a potentially transformative encounter with the archaic, the “original,” and the divinely revealed. Adapting a rubric from Srinivas Aravamudan, I call this type of encounter “enlightened Orientalism,” a utopian mode linking the moral ideals of the late eighteenth century to an exemplary, imaginary “Orient.”¹¹

Abduction Opera

The first act of The Magic Flute is shaped by the “abduction” plot. This had developed in the court theater of the Ancien Régime, in part because France then enjoyed close diplomatic ties with the Islamic Ottoman Empire.¹² It appeared fully formed as early as Rameau’s entrée “The Generous Turk” in the Parisian opera ballet Les Indes galantes of 1735.¹³ Abduction opera was particularly favored, from the middle of the century, in the predominantly Catholic Habsburg Empire, where it spoke to a history of territorial and religious conflict – but also diplomacy and trade – with the Ottoman Empire. Typically, the plot involved a Christian woman held captive in a sultan’s polyamorous harem.¹⁴ In an act of gallant heroism, her European sweetheart comes to rescue her, but their escape is foiled. Facing death, they take leave of each other, only to receive unexpected pardon and freedom from the wise and beneficent sultan.

Undoubtedly, the image of the Turk occasioned anxious fantasies of political despotism, sexual excess, and violence, at one level offering an antithesis to the rhetorical ideals of the European Enlightenment. These thrillingly transgressive associations form a background of expectation for abduction operas. They also attach to Ottoman characters of low social status – such as Mozart’s most enduring pantomime villain Osmin in The Abduction. In the (un)expected denouement, however, these negative associations are banished by the sultan’s largesse, which provides a morally didactic coup de théâtre. The sense of looking beyond cultural and religious differences to discover a transcendent or universal morality is part of the enlightened orientalism of such works (and was epitomized by Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance [1763] and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s five-act drama Nathan the Wise [1779]). In the arts, at least, displays of religious hatred were out of fashion. There were other expedients, too. It was not wise, in court-sponsored opera, to present unflattering images of rulers, whatever their background.

The conventions of abduction opera are summoned, but also transformed, near the beginning of Act 1 of The Magic Flute as Tamino sets off heroically to rescue Pamina from her captivity at the hands of an Eastern-sounding patriarch and presumed villain, Sarastro. The Queen of the Night sets him on this mistaken course when – in one of many acts of nested storytelling in the opera – she relays through the Three Ladies the tale of Pamina’s “abduction by a powerful, evil demon”:

In this scene, both the technique of telling a story within the story and the reference to an “evil demon” show the influence of the Thousand and One Nights (henceforth Nights), a “household title” of the eighteenth century, whose influence on German-language theater is only now coming to light.¹⁵ Locke, emphasizing its importance as a repository of motifs, notes the prominence of “sultans, harems, harem guards, slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, [and] summary executions.”¹⁶ Pushing Locke’s observation a bit further, the Nights brokered the enduring marriage of the supernatural and the exotic.

Tamino, who seems already to know about operatic abduction plots, falls instantly in love. He indulges in an ardent aria of erotic sensibility (Act 1, scene 4, “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön”), in which – recalling Belmonte’s parallel aria (“O wie ängstlich”) in The Abduction (Act 1, scene 5) – he reports forensically on the sensations of love and imagines an ecstatic union with his beloved. He sets off to rescue Pamina, arriving like a valiant knight at the boundary of Sarastro’s realm. There, he is rebuffed by the voice of a guard (Act 1, scene 15), just as Belmonte was barred entry to Pasha Selim’s estate by Osmin (The Abduction, Act 1, scene 2).

It turns out that an escape attempt is already in progress – Papageno has beaten him to it. As Papageno and Pamina take flight, Sarastro arrives to the sound of a triumphal chorus with trumpets and drums (Act 1, scene 18) – “Long live Sarastro!” This follows abduction conventions – Pasha Selim is also celebrated as a ruler by a stage chorus at a parallel moment of The Abduction (Act 1, scene 6). From this point, principal motifs of abduction opera are much compressed, but faithfully reproduced. Pamina and Tamino are brought before Sarastro; Monostatos gleefully anticipates his reward and their punishment (cf. The Abduction, Act 3, scene 5), but instead he is reprimanded for his viciousness (cf. The Abduction, Act 3, scene 6). Sarastro hints that he had hoped to receive Pamina’s love, but grants her freedom to love Tamino (cf. The Abduction, Act 3, scene 9).

While abduction operas typically conclude at this point, The Magic Flute uses Sarastro’s beneficence as a starting point for the rest of the drama, acting as a doorway into his Egyptian realm of sacred wisdom. At this point, Sarastro sheds his association with the Ottoman sultan of abduction opera. The implied confrontation of Christianity and Islam gives way to the discovery of a more ancient, spiritual system hidden behind the curtain of Act 2. A stage direction evokes the startling change of scenery as the curtain rises:

Abduction motifs do not completely disappear in Act 2, however. Instead, they are displaced onto Monostatos, through whom they are also given considerable complexity. The fact that Sarastro keeps slaves and uses Monostatos – a Mohr – to oversee them (and to keep tabs on the captured Pamina) is consistent with the harem fictions of the Nights, though admittedly not with Mozart’s The Abduction. Correspondingly, and perhaps in the absence of any established musical codes for characters of specifically African identity, Mozart employed a subtle version of his alla turca style for Monostatos’s notorious aria “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden.” He does not employ Janissary percussion (the bass drum, triangle, and cymbals used in The Abduction), but retains the piccolo – also used in The Abduction for “Turkish music” – and melodic fingerprints, including the arabesques that turn in semiquavers around the tonic and dominant pitches.

However, Schikaneder complicated Monostatos’s characterization with some antiracist, and even antislavery, motifs. Already, back in Act 1, scene 12, a relativistic perspective is introduced. When Papageno and Monostatos first catch sight of each other’s strange appearance they simultaneously beg for mercy, in a stuttering duet, each believing the other to be the devil incarnate. In the following dialogue, however, Papageno begins to reflect: “Aren’t I foolish, to get so frightened? There are black birds in the world, so why not black people.” In the first strophe of his aria “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden” (Act 2, scene 7), Monostatos takes this further, questioning prejudice against his complexion, asserting the universality of his desire for love, and – implicitly – milking the audience for sympathy:

This sentiment, if not the actual words, recalls the then famous slogan of the British and American campaigns for the abolition of slavery – “Am I not a man and a brother” – an epithet that Josiah Wedgewood incorporated in his antislavery medallion of 1787. Mozart’s choice of a neutral, C major march rhythm in this aria avoids lending Monostatos the radical alterity that the dramatic situation imparts to him as Pamina’s potential rapist. He is kept safely at a distance by pianissimo and lontano performance directions. Messages about Monostatos are thus extremely mixed.

Racism and misogyny collide. Immediately before this aria, Monostatos’s rues that, as a black man, he is not allowed to love a white woman. However, this moment of enlightened critical reflection (it sounds like a soundbite from Voltaire or Lessing) is undercut by the fact that Pamina detests his unsolicited attentions and that Monostatos is justifying a crime he has not yet successfully committed. In a nocturnal garden, signifying folly and desire, he spies on Pamina, who sleeps in a bower of flowers:

Monostatos’s reference to a “fire” within him parallels Tamino’s love-struck reaction to Pamina’s portrait (Act 1, scene 4). Both men experience “fire” as they gaze at Pamina, who is rendered passive by portraiture and by sleep. Adding further complexity, this type of romantic desire overtakes both men involuntarily. In binding them to Pamina, it resembles the bonds of servitude, on the one hand, and Papageno’s magic music, on the other – this, too, acts invisibly and at a distance. In these ways, slavery is elaborated metaphorically, becoming part of the poetics of the opera, rather than a subject of critique.

The Mysteries of Isis and Osiris

A second major strand of exoticism involves Prince Tamino’s journey of spiritual development, culminating in his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris within an ancient Egyptian pyramid. This venerable literary topos preceded the rise in the nineteenth century of an archaeological, forensically documentary Egyptology. That mode was spurred by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and Syria (1798–1801), the rediscovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799, and deciphering of hieroglyphs in 1822, and involved the accumulation of positivistic knowledge – facts – but also an increasing sense of alienation. Paradoxically, ancient Egypt became more “remote and alien” as more was discovered about it. Edward Said detected this imperialist objectification in the stage sets of Verdi’s Aida, but saw in Mozart’s The Magic Flute an earlier, enlightened mode of sympathetic and cosmopolitan identification.¹⁷ Only a detailed history of staging and iconography could speak to the influence of the pharaonic turn on later stagings of Mozart’s opera, but Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s designs from 1815, drawing on the Description of Egypt (1809–21) produced by Napoleon’s large contingent of scholars, are generally regarded as landmarks in this process.¹⁸

In Vienna in 1791, ideas about, feelings for, and uses of ancient Egypt were based on Classical sources, Biblical narratives, and literary fiction. References to Egyptian wise men and magicians in the Old Testament (e.g., Exodus 7:11) suggested that the Egyptians received divine wisdom through direct revelation. According to Acts 7:22, this knowledge was transmitted to the Israelites: “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds.” This wisdom was bound up with the practice of magic (in a way that now seems counterintuitive). When pharaonic priests test Moses and Aaron, they transform Egyptian staffs into snakes (Exodus 5:7) – an ambivalent image that resonates with the opening of The Magic Flute.

There were several major Classical sources for the Mysteries of Isis available to an educated elite in Vienna in 1791. Audiences did not need to read the classics, however, to get the gist because these canonical sources were widely diffused through historical writing, fiction, and household encyclopedias. In the genealogy of The Magic Flute, the most important of these was book 11 of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, written in Latin in the second century AD, also known, in English, as The Golden Ass. It was a landmark because it was the first novel to fictionalize initiation into the Mysteries of Isis as part of a hero’s story of adventure and development. Lucius has dabbled with magic and inadvertently turned himself into an ass. He is eventually released from that humbling state when Isis appears to him in a dream, declaring:

As in The Magic Flute, the actual wisdom of Isis is never disclosed, emphasis falling instead upon an initiatory ritual (in Lucius’s words) “performed as a rite of voluntary death and salvation attained by prayer” – a direct corollary of Tamino and Pamina’s trial in Act 2, scene 28, in which courage, love, and music substitute for prayer.²⁰ Like Tamino, Lucius does not eat or drink during his initiation (a motif of self-abnegation comically ignored by Papageno). Students of The Magic Flute will notice Apuleius’s reference to a palm tree with golden leaves and to a procession in which the initiated carry insignia (cf. the stage direction at the beginning of Act 2). Also bearing directly on the opera are Isis’s references (in the quotation from Apuleius above) to ceremony, ancient doctrine, the sun, and the elements. The fact that Isis appears to Lucius in a dream is evocative of the second act of the opera, which is unveiled like an alternative reality and involves an almost hypnogogic slowing of time during the Procession of the Priests and Sarastro’s aria “O Isis und Osiris.”

Apuleius’s Metamorphoses shaped two texts often mentioned as sources for The Magic Flute: Jean Terrasson’s novel Sethos, published in French in 1731 – ostensibly as the translation of an ancient Greek manuscript – and Ignaz von Born’s essay “Über die Mysterien der Ägypter” (On the Mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians), published in Vienna in the Freemasons’ periodical Journal für Freymaurer in 1784. Peter Branscombe highlights “numerous similarities” between Sethos and Schikaneder’s libretto, via the German translation of the novel by Matthiaus Claudius (1777–78). Among them are the words of the two men in black armor in Act 2, scene 28, which are drawn directly from Sethos, and the Priests’ singing of hymns to Isis and Osiris. He also shows that in describing Tamino’s trials, Schikaneder probably drew vocabulary directly from Born’s essay: “‘Verschwiegenheit’ (‘discretion’), the phrase ‘rein und lauter’ (‘clean and pure’) … and ‘Heiligthum’ (‘sanctuary’) and ‘Fremdling’ (‘stranger’).”²¹

In publishing his essay, Born employed a sleight of hand. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a branch of German-speaking Masonry had taken Sethos to heart as an authentic representation of the Egyptian cult of Isis and used it as a template to develop its own rituals of initiation.²² Perhaps these Masons even half-believed Terrasson’s claim to be translating an ancient manuscript. In an act of faux naïveté, Born used Sethos and Classical sources – including Apuleius – to suggest a continuous tradition between the ancient Egyptian mysteries and Freemasonry. This was entirely circular logic in the service of the prestige and imaginary lineage of a beleaguered, secret fraternity.

Born’s argument subsequently fostered a reading of The Magic Flute as a secret handshake. This involved a fine leap of logic: if Schikaneder could be shown to have drawn on Born’s essay, then the opera could be shown to be both “about” Freemasonry and a celebration of it. An alternative, more cautious perspective is that the self-mythologizing and theatrical rituals recently developed in Viennese Freemasonry helped give Schikaneder the idea for some scenes in Act 2 – without those scenes necessarily being “about” Freemasonry. That is, Freemasonry offered source materials, inspiration, even a mediating step for Schikaneder’s staging of initiation into the Wisdom of Isis, but it did not “own” that subject. To read the entire opera as Masonic allegory involves tidying away many inconvenient questions: Are the opera’s high-moral ideals not eighteenth-century commonplaces (“Wisdom,” “Nature,” and “Reason”)? Why does Sarastro keep slaves? Why does a hereditary prince end up on top? Why write Pamina into the story?

The sound-world Mozart created for Sarastro’s realm also frustrates the essentialism of Masonic readings. Sarastro’s aria (No. 10) is a prayer offered to Isis and Osiris for the protection of Pamina and Tamino. As an adagio bass aria with chorus, it is an extremely unusual type of piece. This alone is sufficient to impute a sense of difference to the music, without the need for any quasi-ethnomusicological evocation of ancient Egyptian (or Masonic) music specifically. The inclusion of three trombones – instruments strongly associated with the operatic underworld and the voices of spirits – situates Sarastro’s voice between the human and divine, life and death. The low vocal register, the omission of violins, flutes, and oboes, the quiet dynamic, and the richness of divided legato violas convey subterranean sensations. When the all-male choir enters in measure 25, the melody finds itself in the higher of the two bass parts (bass 2), covered by repeated notes in the two tenor parts above – an eerie, sepulchral effect. The character is mysterious, hovering between light and dark. Sarastro’s initially poised, diatonic melody is disturbed by a chromatic turn as he refers to “danger” (mm. 21–22), even though at this point the music is modulating, optimistically, to the dominant. Then the tone darkens with modulations to minor keys – including a pictorial plunge in unisons to the tonic minor for a reference to the “grave” (m. 35). In these ways, Mozart conveys the danger of Tamino’s impending trial (described below).

Papageno’s Wishes

A third theatrical tradition of exoticism that shaped The Magic Flute concerns Papageno. It involved the exotic-magical adventures of a stock comic character, loveably idiotic and sometimes mischievous. Buch’s survey of operatic supernaturalism suggests this scenario developed early in the eighteenth century, in improvised Italian comedy, the commedia dell’arte, and from there entered French comic opera (opéra comique). The trigger, again, was Galland’s French edition of the Nights.²³ Though the chronology and transmission are not entirely clear – much comic theater was semi-improvised, by traveling troupes, and the music rarely survives – this tradition was apparently adapted in Vienna, under the headings of Zauberkomödie, Zauberlustspiel, and Mährchen. This is the repertoire that incurred Leopold Mozart’s disapproval during the family’s sojourn in Vienna in 1767–68 as (implicitly) unenlightened, fostering superstition, and failing to instruct: “the Viennese, generally speaking, do not care to see serious and sensible performances, have little or no idea of them, and only want to see foolish stuff, dances, devils, ghosts, magic, clowns … witches and apparitions.”²⁴

Papageno’s adventure takes a specific form, however, one not observed to date and drawn from the Nights: it unfolds as a series of wishes granted by Genii (here “the Three Boys,” who, though named as such within the libretto, are listed as “drei Genien” in the dramatis personae). A well-known example of this type of adventure is “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.” Aladdin’s wishes are for safety and freedom (he finds himself imprisoned underground by a sorcerer), for food (he and his mother are poor and hungry), and for a bride (specifically the sultan’s daughter). He gains these through magic objects (a ring and a lamp) that contain genii, released when the object is rubbed. They present themselves to Aladdin as “slaves” and exist only to do his bidding. He is not particularly deserving of his good fortune – destiny thrusts it upon him.

Without suggesting dependence on this story specifically, it is notable that Papageno is also a somewhat unlikely recipient of good fortune, magically arranged. When we first meet him, he sings of his happiness, but reveals his desire for a wife. He is given a box of magic bells by the Three Ladies – supernatural beings – which he uses to make this wish and others come true. During his attempt to escape with Pamina from Sarastro’s palace (Act 1, scene 17), he uses the bells to make venomous Monostatos dance offstage – in this way (like Aladdin) he ensures his safety. Later, in Act 2, scene 16, when he and Tamino find themselves alone in Sarastro’s palace, the Three Genii bring Papageno not only his bells but a table laid with food and drink (“ein schöner gedeckter Tisch”). Rather unheroically, he tucks in, praising the cook and the wine cellar. In Act 2, scene 22, he finds himself frightened and alone, when a voice (“the Speaker”) informs him that he has failed the trial – but that he can grant him a wish:

This dialogue leads directly into Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” (Act 2, scene 22), which, in context, conveys his wish for a sweetheart or wife. (Clearly, it took a glass of wine for this wish to come out.) In this aria he plays his magic bells with increasing virtuosity on each strophic repetition. That form, involving three stanzas, is apt to convey the classic threefold repetition of wishes in fairy tales. Meanwhile, the two-tempo structure – which sees Papageno lurch repeatedly from a relatively sedate Andante in 2/4 meter into an Allegro in 6/8 – suggests his mounting, if intoxicated, desire. As soon as the song is over, his sweetheart appears as if by magic, albeit in disguise as an amorous aged woman. Less than enthusiastic, he promises to be faithful – at least (he whispers) until someone prettier comes along.

His trials are not yet over. In adapting the formula of the wish from the Nights, Schikaneder introduced an enlightened element of moral development – Papageno must prove himself worthy of his wishes coming true, or at least pay for his weaknesses. When we next meet up with him, he is suicidal (Act 2, scene 29). His potential bride was whisked away by the forces of magic because his promise to her was not truly meant. Theatrically, he threatens to hang himself – by now perhaps anticipating the Genii will come to his aid. Just in time, they do, reminding him to use his magic bells. He does, uttering a wish between virtuosic bursts on his glockenspiel:

With the literalness that characterizes the magic wish of the Nights, the Three Boys bring Papagena from the sky. Implicitly, Papageno has learned his lesson.

Birdsong and Hieroglyphs

From this outline of three main strands of exoticism in The Magic Flute, it is evident that the opera, like the Nights, contains many stories.²⁵ There are more that might be drawn out. Sometimes they are miniatures, told in the strophic lyrics of arias – as when Papageno fantasizes about catching young women in cages and trading them for sugar; sometimes they are fleeting moments of narrative, as when Pamina discloses that her father carved the flute in a “magic hour” from a thousand-year oak, or when Monostatos secures from the Queen of the Night a promise that Pamina will be his when they bring down the realm of Sarastro. Sometimes (again, as in the Nights) they are abandoned mid-course, like Tamino’s plan to rescue Pamina from Sarastro and return her to the Queen of the Night. Amid this exuberance, or narrative excess, two realms stand in perplexing disconnect: the spiritual wisdom of ancient Egyptian mysteries and Papageno’s habitus – the realm of nature. However, they are united, conceptually, as archaic, ancestral places – realms of hieroglyphs and birdsong.

Hieroglyphs appeared in the frontispiece to the published libretto of the opera and are strongly implied in its description of Tamino’s purifying trial (Act 2, scene 28). (See Figure 4.9 earlier in this volume.) This trial is undertaken as a condition of his initiation but also, in another sense, as part of it. The libretto describes a rocky landscape with two mountains, stage left and right. One, shrouded in dark mist, contains a noisy waterfall; the other, back-lit with hell-red fire, houses spitting flames. Sombre, archaic music is heard, evoking an atmosphere of labyrinthine grief. Two men in black suits of armor – I imagine them like medieval knights in princely coats of arms – lead Tamino to a towering pyramid center stage. It is inscribed with an illuminated script which is “read” aloud to Tamino by the Armored Men but is surely what they sing: “Whoever wanders this path of woes, is purified by fire, water, air, and earth.”²⁶ Their melody, a Lutheran chorale tune, is from another time and place – an exotic relic that Mozart dug out from a treatise on counterpoint published twenty years before by the Bach student Johann Kirnberger. The script on the pyramid is presumably in hieroglyphs. A German inscription on the pyramid would be rather incongruous, and Prince Tamino would hardly need that to be read aloud by knights from a bygone age.

Declaring that this vale of tears holds no fear for him, Tamino is rewarded by reunion with Pamina. They will wander the dark path together. (The libretto is of little help here, and with the original costumes and sets lost, we have to imagine how this would have been staged.) The royal couple are shored up by their virtuous love and by Tamino’s piping of his magic flute, carved (Pamina discloses) from “a thousand-year oak.” For this oldfangled instrument, worthy of Methuselah, Mozart provided a generic march tune: a venerable type of piece that Johann Friedrich Sulzer (writing in the early 1770s) related back to the earliest uses of “measured tones … to support the body’s strength in physical ordeals.”²⁷ As they emerge from darkness into blinding light, Tamino and Pamina exclaim, “You Gods, what a moment! We are granted the happiness of Isis.” This sublime moment of illumination suggests the revelation of transcendental spiritual knowledge, the cult of Isis and Osiris melding with the biblical narrative of creation in one of the Enlightenment’s favorite motifs: fiat lux (“Let there be light!”).

This mind’s-eye reconstruction suggests that ancient Egypt in The Magic Flute is not (only) a place marked by alterity but (also) belongs to a fantasy of origins, continuity, and rebirth. Initiated into an archaic – but ongoing – legacy, Tamino is spiritually reborn. His future path, and the social order he will rule over, are transformed by the experience of this remote time and place. Within the fictional world at least, this exotic locale has a transfiguring effect, catalyzing historical progress and social transformation.

This encounter writes into the opera, or inscribes, a theory of art that possessed broad period currency. As David Wellbery puts it brilliantly, if elliptically, in a study of Lessing’s Laocoon (1767), “the Enlightenment attributes to art the capacity to renew the life of culture by reactivating its most archaic mechanisms.”²⁸ While Lessing’s archaic was Greek antiquity, The Magic Flute displaces classicism with fantasies of ancient Egypt and (semiwild) nature. These are twinned, and subtly but differently exoticized, within the fiction. They are captured in my title’s allusion to birdsong and hieroglyphs, which are styled, within the opera, as divine, original, and possessing (re)generative power.

Though excluded from the Mysteries of Isis, Papageno is also a figure about origins – especially musical ones.²⁹ He both is and is not exotic. We know what he looked like, because Schikaneder included a picture of himself playing the part in the libretto sold at the earliest performances in the Theater auf der Wieden (Figure 4.2 earlier in this volume). And quite a look it is! With a headdress of feathers and a bird whistle that looks like a panpipe, he has a remote resemblance to older iconography of North American first peoples. In another early illustration he is shown playing a hammered dulcimer slung from his neck in the manner of a “Hungarian-Gypsy” (Romany) musician.³⁰ However, living alone on the edge of a forest – in a straw hut, he tells the inquisitive Tamino – he belongs more to a type of hypothetical savage imagined by Enlightenment theorists in their library-bound explorations of mankind in the state of nature. Such a figure existed at the vanishing point of the rustic, the exotic, and the antique, providing a way of imagining human nature before it was shaped by diverse local customs and manners. As Dorinda Outram notes, for most of the eighteenth century, the opposite of culture was not another culture but nature.³¹

It is in this context that we can hear his bird whistle and his own chirpy singing as allusions to the origins of music. Just as hieroglyphs were often regarded as “holy writing,” even as a divine gift containing original spiritual wisdom, so divinely created birdsong had long been cited as the origin of music – not least by the same Jesuit priest, Anthansius Kircher, who wrote prolifically (if erroneously) about ancient Egypt.

There were newer theories, too, but the idea that mankind learned music from the birds was just too alluring to put aside entirely. Papageno, himself named after and resembling a tropical bird, reactivates or alludes to this theory. He is clearly the opera’s natural musician. The libretto and music occasionally suggest he is not only a bird-catcher but a birdman. When Tamino first encounters Papageno, he doubts he is fully human:

Much later, in his love duet with Papagena (Act 2, scene 29, finale, “Pa-Pa-Pa”), Papageno regresses from words to a single syllable, and from melody to beating, repeated notes. His melody comes to resemble that of a bird breaking into song. Comically mimetic, and probably accompanied by a feathery mating dance, this extraordinary number, coming close to the end of the opera, intensifies covertly avian features of Papageno’s earlier music (magical and otherwise). Rhythmically mechanical, involving melodic gestures of outrageous simplicity, intensely repetitive – and yet utterly magical – the parrots’ duet unlocks a theory of musical origins that spills out from this number into the opera as a whole. Arguably, even the Queen of the Night is touched by this stylized birdsong in the repeated notes and arpeggios of her coloratura in “Der Hölle Rache.”³²

In his two solo arias (“Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” and “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen”) Papageno’s idiom is an ingenious, Mozartian fantasy of aboriginal music. Both numbers are strophic lieder, an aria type that was common for socially lowly characters in comic opera, and which (like that Lutheran chorale melody in Tamino’s trial) was said to suit the musically untutored. Both of Papageno’s arias belong to established types of lied – the first is a working song (which tells us his occupation and is sung as he goes about it); the second is a drinking song (which he sings with a large cup of wine in his hand, and it keeps spilling over from an Andante in duple meter to a rushing – specifically hunting – 6/8).³³ Both lieder are based on the rhythmic and melodic profile of the contredanse – a rustic, stamping, line dance – employ pastoral keys (G major and F major, respectively), and employ prominent open, perfect fifths between bass and melody. In “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” these extend into another pastoral fingerprint, the horn-fifth figure (m. 4), highlighted by a pair of orchestral horns. Extremely catchy and distinctive, these songs also possess that “impression of the familiar” that the composer-critic Schulz, inspired by Herder’s celebration of old vernacular poetry, equated with the German Volkslied (literally, people’s song).³⁴ Both of Papageno’s lieder can be heard as stage songs – as if he were singing them to himself – even though the libretto does not make this completely explicit. Heard in this way, they tap into a period idealization of orality, which came to the fore in Herder’s preface to his Volkslieder of 1779. The fact that Papageno’s magic music appears improvised – in “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” each strophic repetition occasions ever more fantastical variations of the same material – also ties in with the aesthetic premium placed upon natural spontaneity.

As an art of strophic repetition, and variation, Papageno’s magic music reaches back to birdsong. Activating or, more cautiously, alluding to “archaic” beliefs about music and natural magic (music’s power to influence people and things), this stage music offers a (fictional) glimpse of the art before its scientific and aesthetic rationalization. The “renewal” (in Wellbery’s sense) this offers is the re-enchantment of music – an art that had officially shed much of its metaphysical and magical power in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the intellectual contexts of scientific rationalism and the aesthetic doctrine of mimesis (according to which music could imitate or represent the magical but not be it). Similarities between the magic music of the opera and the rest of the score – highlighted by Buch in an incisive analysis – can be explained in many ways, but potentially they re-enchant the music of the opera as a whole. The timing, in 1791, is tantalizing, as music was soon to be returned to metaphysics (a sort of philosophical supernatural) by German romantic aesthetics. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s landmark Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar was published only six years later.

Conclusion

Why The Magic Flute drew upon, but also overthrew, the abduction plot is intriguing, but unknowable. In terms of dramatic effect, it adds surprise and wonder to the encounter with ancient Egyptian motifs in Act 2. Those motifs, far from serving the putatively liberal philosophy of Freemasonry, end up reaffirming the rights of a hereditary prince to a position of leadership – implicitly to the sovereignty for which he was destined by birth. While it is too easy to draw direct links between operatic plots and political contexts, it is difficult not to recognize a counterrevolutionary element in the Egyptian turn of The Magic Flute. In 1791, Austria was winding up to war against the forces of an expansionist French Republic in defense of the Ancien Régime. Though Austria did not officially declare war on the French Republic until 1792, it had already acted militarily in January 1791 to reinstate the rule of the hereditary bishops of Liege, ousted by the Revolution of 1789. Then, in July of 1791, Austria committed to join Prussia in defending the monarchic government of Louis XVI in the so-called Declaration of Pillnitz. By September 30, 1791, when the opera premiered, Louis XVI and his family, foiled in their attempted flight, were under arrest and France had a new Republican constitution. As an argument in favor of enlightened but absolute monarchy, as a celebration of sovereignty, The Magic Flute was of this moment.

The abandonment of the abduction plot, at least in Tamino’s story, may also reflect the opera’s political-military context. The image of a beneficent sultan was probably untimely in 1791 when Austria was once more at war with the Ottoman Empire (the Austro-Turkish war ran from 1788 to 1791). Mozart, who from the end of 1787 was employed as royal chamber composer, supplied a bellicose and patriotic song, the “Lied beim Auszug in das Feld” (K. 552; August 11, 1788), intending to whip up support for this unpopular conflict.³⁵ In this context, perhaps, the opera was dragged by the seat of its Turkish trousers into another, less politically sensitive, pre-Islamic realm. These observations about the opera’s military contexts are not central to this chapter, but they are important to understanding the immediate context in which it was conceived, performed, and understood.

To conclude, in this chapter I have offered an archaeology of the opera’s diverse exoticism in a study of its poetics, not its politics. In doing so, I have come to realize that the exoticism of The Magic Flute – which, by standard definition, constructs an “alien” world, “remote” in time, place, and cultural norms from Vienna in 1791 – is itself rendered all the more exotic by the passage of time. The Magic Flute constructs the remote and alien in ways that are remote from (admittedly unstable) twenty-first-century cultural norms. For this reason, exoticism is not contained within the opera’s fictional world, but informs all encounters with The Magic Flute today. The canonization of this opera, its status as a monument and masterwork, fosters the falsely proprietorial sensation that it belongs to us and is about us.

In its original form, however, it is lost to us. We must bring it forth through research, acts of the imagination, and – possibly revisionist – performance. Not only are the original sets and costumes lost; it was produced for a stage quite unlike that of modern opera houses. Narrow and deep, the stage was capable of near instantaneous transformations of scene via a rope-and-pulley technology that sent backdrops scuttling back and forth. One scene, with all its furniture, could be prepared behind another, and then revealed, in seconds. The effect was integral to the opera’s fairy-tale and exotic character. With trap doors and aerial machinery, characters could appear and vanish, as if by magic. On modern stages, these sensational effects are impossible, creating a mismatch between the theatrical fiction and its mode of representation. Anglophone and other non-German-speaking students of the opera face additional losses. The German dialogue, which reveals so much about the characters’ identities, is often abbreviated in performance; nor is it readily available, in full, in translation. Engaging historically with The Magic Flute involves a conjuring act or, to use an orientalist metaphor, a magic lamp through which the opera is constituted, in the mind’s eye and ear, as at once familiar and strange, an exotic experience of something that is not simply there.

Fans of detective stories will remember that in both Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and A. Conan Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips” the difficulty confronting Poirot and Holmes is not one of too few suspects or too few clues, but too many. The Magic Flute has for much of its history posed a similar problem to those who have investigated the possible sources of its plot, characters, and meaning.

Several contributing factors spring immediately to mind. Information about the origins and gestation of the project remains unusually murky. Further, unlike the court-sanctioned operas that preceded it in Mozart’s career, The Magic Flute made its initial home in a theatrical environment to which historians of opera have devoted relatively little attention. The collaboration with Schikaneder was also an unusual one for Mozart in that he was working with not just a librettist but also the commissioner of the work, the director of the theater where it was to be performed, and a principal in its first cast. But most of all, the text that Mozart’s music brought to life grew out of no single, identifiable source.

Although our training has historically equipped musicologists to deal with musical sources rather than literary texts and their sources, we of course know that operas begin not as musical scores but as literary narratives, and that where those narratives come from and how they are shaped and reshaped for the musical stage is as much a part of an opera’s pedigree as its musical genesis. This should be especially apparent for a work like The Magic Flute, destined as it was for a particular kind of musical stage, one on which words are not poesia fatta per musica but a combination of the spoken and sung delivered by actor-singers trained and practiced in, theatrically speaking, a bilingual tradition.

From the very beginning, efforts to identify the sources of The Magic Flute found themselves entangled in problems of interpretation, more often than not instigated by the well-nigh irresistible urge to uncover some hidden meaning beneath its motley, child-friendly surface. Ideally, historians of any art form should try to distinguish work-to-interpretation issues from source-to-work problems. In reality, however, they are always intermingling. For Mozart’s earlier operas (Così fan tutte appears to be a notable exception) the presence of a single, clearly identifiable model helps regulate inquiry into both how a work came to be and what it has come to mean. The absence of a single-source model for The Magic Flute, however, opened to a tribe of hunter-gatherers a potentially limitless store of possible antecedents. Interest at first centered on fairy tales and other magic operas, but later, as the opera grew in stature, the stockpile expanded to include plays by Shakespeare and Calderón, the Bildungsroman, and legends from Classical antiquity.

How, then, does one go about assessing the wide array of candidates that over time have been scattered across the literature on The Magic Flute as models, or influences, or in some degree consanguine ancestors? It may prove useful to take as a point of departure the work of two writers, in fact both Germanists rather than musicologists by training, who have attempted a more or less systematic inventory while keeping at bay the legacy of legends and misinformation concerning the opera’s genesis and authorship. Peter Branscombe’s inaugural chapter in his Cambridge Opera Handbook, “The Sources,” singles out seven literary antecedents drawn from a variety of genres: epic, novel, play, essay, and opera (both heroic and comic).¹ These he orders not by weight but by date, from the twelfth-century French romance Yvain, to Kasper der Fagottist, an exact Viennese contemporary of Mozart’s opera. Egon Komorzynski chose a different path in his biography of Schikaneder, whom he spent half a century defending from calumny and disparagement.² He orders his sources following what he imagines to have been the creative stages that led to the finished opera.

Choosing his words carefully, Branscombe strives for an evenhanded, impartial evaluation. The relevance of the Arthurian Yvain, previously absent from the literature on The Magic Flute, he limits to the opera’s opening scene, for whose origins “no satisfactory explanation has so far been offered.”³ He lavishes greatest attention on the French novel Sethos (1731), identifying both parallels and outright borrowings. Branscombe notes some “resemblances” in Tobias von Gebler’s tragedy Thamos, König in Ägypten (1773, itself much indebted to Sethos), but after only a single paragraph on the play he turns his attention to Mozart’s incidental music as the more significant link. Next, he notes a few “verbal echoes” in Schikaneder’s text from Ignaz von Born’s essay on the mysteries of the Egyptians (1784), but he reserves discussion of Freemasonry as an influence for a separate chapter on the opera’s “intellectual background.” In 1856 Otto Jahn had declared that Schikaneder’s play began life as in essence a dramatization of “Lulu, oder Die Zauberflöte,” a Märchen from Wieland’s three-volume collection Dschinnistan (1787–89). Although Jahn’s assertion maintained uncritical currency for the next century, Branscombe finds the story’s importance exaggerated and, moreover, has little to say about the significance of the other tales in the collection, which many have found an important fund of motifs and features. He puts more stock in Carl Ludwig Giesecke’s (unacknowledged) adaptation of Sophie Seyler’s Hüon und Amande for Paul Wranitzky as Oberon, given its premiere under Schikaneder’s direction in 1789. Branscombe not only hears “literary echoes” of this work in The Magic Flute but also finds common dramatic situations. (Edward Dent, too, had singled it out as an “obvious” model.⁴) Another contemporary Viennese magic opera, however, Perinet’s farrago Kaspar der Fagottist, produced by Schikaneder’s rival Marinelli while he and Mozart labored on their own opera, and which gave rise to the notorious “plot reversal” thesis, Branscombe dismisses curtly as “probably not a material influence.”

Earlier, Komorzynski had also canvassed many of these antecedents, but his analysis bristles with the biases and distortions that Branscombe had been at pains to avoid. First, the fifty years separating the two editions of his biography of Schikaneder had only deepened Komorzynski’s atrabilious exasperation and disgust with Otto Jahn’s many “falsehoods” disparaging Schikaneder and promoting Giesecke as the true author of The Magic Flute. Second, he rejected out of hand Jahn’s warm advocacy of “Lulu” as model and instead declared, with even greater enthusiasm and considerably less evidence, that Gebler’s Thamos was the opera’s “main foundation.” Komorzynski seems to have been seduced by the loftier dramatic pedigree of Gebler’s heroic plot, coupled with a more general urge to restore Schikaneder’s literary credentials, which Jahn and Dent had denied him and invested instead in “Professor” Giesecke. But in pairing up successive scenes in The Magic Flute with this “main foundation,” Komorzynski can adduce little beyond the priestly scenes in Act 2 and the similarity of the names Thamos and Tamino to support his leading candidate.

Both Branscombe and Komorzynski confine their source surveys to literary works and treat separately other social and cultural influences on the opera. The most familiar and most discussed of these is of course Freemasonry. Outside Vienna a few forays proposing or suggesting Masonic associations had already appeared in the 1790s, but it was again Jahn who gave Freemasonry property rights to a decisive share in the opera’s character and meaning. Serious study of Freemasonry as a hidden allegory, however, began only with Paul Nettl in 1932, ratified in Jacques Chailley’s elaborate scene-by-scene exegesis in 1968.⁵

The Masonic allegory enjoyed steady, if not exclusive, hermeneutic favor until 2004, when David Buch mounted a spirited attack on Masonic and other esoteric and cryptic readings of the opera, which in his view had eclipsed or obscured its indebtedness to popular traditions.⁶ Having studied in detail European fairy-tale literature, Schikaneder’s earlier stage works, and the repertoires of Vienna’s suburban theaters, Buch concludes that a great many of the purportedly Masonic elements in The Magic Flute, as well as other striking features of the libretto, could as readily have been found by Schikaneder in these contemporaneous sources (plot reversal, rejection of Monostatos, the trial scene, misogyny, the Three Genii, and thwarted suicides). Buch’s larger aim, however, was not simply to debunk the excesses of Masonic readings but to sketch, in both its literary and musical dimensions, the lineaments of a new Viennese genre, the eighteenth-century “fairy-tale opera.”

Earlier, Stefan Kunze had rejected this designation: “[The opera’s] world of images is related to the fairy tale,” he wrote in 1982, “but the work itself is no ‘fairy-tale opera.’”⁷ Kunze called it instead “a drama of education” (“ein Erziehungsdrama”). Instruction as a tenet of theatrical representation is of course as old as theater itself, but the trials and spiritual growth Tamino and Pamina undergo had no precedent in Mozart’s earlier operas – nor in Schikaneder’s, for that matter. Their trials also bear only fleeting resemblance to those found in eighteenth-century literary antecedents like Rousseau’s Émile or Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

What kind of an opera did Schikaneder and Mozart themselves think they were writing? Mozart’s personal catalogue called The Magic Flute simply “a German opera” (“eine teutsche Oper”), and Schikaneder’s published libretto carried the designation “eine große Oper” (a grand opera) – a term neither man had used before and which most probably was prompted by the production’s lavish visual effects and considerable musical ambitions. Something on this order was apparently what struck Salieri and the singer Cavalieri when they attended a performance as Mozart’s guests: “You cannot believe,” Mozart wrote to Constanze, “how agreeable they both were, – how greatly not only my music but the libretto and everything taken together pleased them. They both said it was an opera worthy to be performed at the grandest festivity before the grandest monarch.”⁸

Beyond being told to expect something grand, those at the premiere who carried a copy of Schikaneder’s published text into the theater would have found little additional help in its cast list. From top to bottom, the characters are listed by name and nothing else – no descriptor to suggest role type, occupation, or relationship to each other. Kunze’s strained attempt to subsume the seven principals under the traditional eighteenth-century system of role types only serves to highlight how little The Magic Flute relies on familiar theatrical conventions. One could argue, and with more than a little justification, that many of the most memorable characters in Mozart’s earlier Viennese operas also defy categorization as mere role types (Osmin, the Countess, Don Giovanni, and Fiordiligi come immediately to mind). But even here the associations and parallels occasionally proposed by commentators between the cast of The Magic Flute and figures from other Mozart operas (Monostatos – Osmin, Sarastro – Don Alfonso, Pamina – Ilia) fail to capture any real continuity with the past.

Still and all, if the characters do not conform to traditional role types, their actions may yet conform to a familiar plot type. But here, too, the opera frustrates expectations. Of Northrop Frye’s four narrative categories (Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Satire), Romance is the only one that comes close to the opera’s unusual plotline.⁹ According to Frye, a Romance narrative, typically chivalric, is most fully realized in “the successful quest,” which has three stages: perilous journey (agon), crucial struggle (pathos), and exaltation of the hero (anagnorisis). A good deal of torsion is needed to twist the plot of The Magic Flute and its protagonist into conformity with this scheme. Its crypto-Egyptian setting, unlike the one traversed by Giesecke’s knight-errant in Oberon, is anything but medieval, and a protagonist whose first line is “Help!” and whose first onstage act is to faint is anything but chivalric. Similarly, Frye’s description of the hero of a Romance as “a central character who never develops” works for Hüon in Oberon but not for Tamino. Though, in the literal sense, the opera’s protagonist¹⁰ Tamino as hero emerges only slowly. In fact, once the Queen has sent him on his quest to rescue her daughter, we lose track of his adventures for a while and involve ourselves instead with the perils besetting Pamina and Papageno. Tamino’s “crucial struggle” in his confrontation with the Priest in the Act 1 finale pits him against not the dark antagonist Frye prescribes but his benighted self, and the exaltation he receives at the end of the opera is not for him alone as its hero but for the couple (“euch Geweihten”) of which he forms a part.

Taken together, the poor fit in The Magic Flute of traditional plot types and role types, as well as its marked deviations from Mozart’s earlier operas and from the fare in its own day at Vienna’s suburban theaters, together with the slow but spectacular growth in enthusiasm for the new work, all reinforce the perception of the opera as something new and unexpected. To see Mozart’s last opera as not a culminating but an exploratory work should also put to rest much of the accumulated nonsense about the opera’s conception and creation: that Schikaneder tapped Mozart for a popular work to save him from bankruptcy, for instance, or that its plot was changed in desperation over its similarity to a rival work, or that it was a defensive action to “save the Craft.”¹¹

Mozarteans have in fact shown little inclination to celebrate The Magic Flute as the culminating masterpiece of his operatic career, but prefer to see it instead as the dawn of what would have been a new chapter in that career. Some Austro-German writers go even further in proclaiming it the gateway work that inaugurated and inspired nineteenth-century German Romantic opera. Kunze, who declares it “a manifesto of a new, higher, and elevated humanity,” draws comparisons throughout his chapter on the opera not with other Viennese magic operas, about which he seems to have known little, but with the music of Beethoven and Wagner.¹²

While the atypicality of The Magic Flute opened a wide field for its exegetes, what seems puzzling is the need felt by many of them to stake a claim to sole proprietorship of the work’s meaning and to put down other claimants. It may be worth considering whether their different readings are necessarily at odds with each other. For example, to acknowledge the currency of some of the opera’s features in popular sources does not invalidate their Masonic associations, and initiation into esoteric rituals ought to enrich rather than obscure connections to the idea of a drama of education.

In his book The Genesis of Secrecy Frank Kermode explored the implications for literary divination of works that invite both popular and esoteric interpretations.¹³ He pointed in particular to a passage in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus tells his disciples why he preaches in parables. Somewhat surprisingly, Jesus tells them that he does so not to reveal spiritual truths but instead to hide them from “those on the outside … so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may hear but not understand.” Only to his disciples, to the initiates, are such mysteries to be disclosed.

Kermode labeled the different interpretations made available to outsiders and insiders as, respectively, “carnal” and “spiritual.” As one of the high priests of academia, he naturally favored the latter and saw a direct parallel to them in the dissection, divination, and deconstruction of narrative texts that goes on in university seminar rooms. An even greater authority had much earlier voiced a similar distinction between popular and esoteric readings and applied it specifically to Schikaneder’s libretto. Toward the end of his long life, Goethe, talking to Eckermann about his forthcoming Faust II, speculated that the “unwashed” will no doubt be content to take pleasure in what they see, whereas “the higher meaning will not escape the initiate, as is the case with The Magic Flute and other things.”¹⁴

Practically from its inception, the special nature of The Magic Flute has inspired a steady stream of deep dives into a seemingly bottomless pool of hidden meanings. In addition to the perennial Masonic explorations, an assortment of allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic, mystical, numerological, and archetypal constructions continue to bear out Jocelyn Godwin’s twin observations that all great symbolic works of art engender a variety of interpretations and that, in the case of The Magic Flute in particular, its exegetes “all find the libretto sensible, consistent, and full of meaning.”¹⁵ Franz Grasberger goes even further: for him the opera is every inch a Symbolstück whose plot simply cannot be taken at face value.¹⁶

For those who view The Magic Flute as a kind of parable enshrouded in esoteric lore, it follows almost of necessity that insiders’ interpretations based on such lore will be deeper, higher, and more spiritual than ones discerned by “those on the outside.” Gernot Gruber has suggested a different analytic division, one that avoids the bias that the insider-outsider model enjoins.¹⁷ Interpretations in one group, which he labels causal-historical, ground themselves in the opera’s cultural-political world; those in a second, metahistorical group dispense with this limitation in favor of the abstract, the mythic, or the universally human.

The first thing we might notice is that hidden meanings can fall into the first as readily as the second of Gruber’s categories. In the opera’s early years, for example, writers in the Francophile Rhineland took the Queen of the Night as a cipher for the Ancien Régime, while those in conservative Austria saw her realm as a coded depiction of the Revolution’s Jacobin rabble. The second thing to notice is that for much of the opera’s reception history these and similar causal-historical readings predominated. In 1923 Emil Blümml inventoried a spate of such “Ausdeutungen,” many of them political allegories and all of them fitting comfortably in Gruber’s causal-historical track.¹⁸ Metahistorical in(ter)ventions, on the other hand, have grown ascendant in our postmodern age. This shift brought with it a turn from interpretations that favor allegory to explorations that rely on the symbol and the archetype.

Archetypes differ from causal-historical categories like role types and plot types precisely in their metahistorical character. One sees this immediately in the case of Papageno. Jahn’s biography had labeled him causal-historically as a “Hanswurst,” a clown figure indispensable to Viennese popular theater, an ascription repeated in 1920 by Hermann Abert in his revision of Jahn’s work. Some recent writers see Papageno instead as an instance of the “wild man” archetype, familiar in German folklore but, as Ehrhard Bahr has noticed, almost entirely absent from eighteenth-century German literature.¹⁹ Godwin has applied the concept of the archetype developed by Carl Jung with enthusiasm to the other principal roles in The Magic Flute (Tamino–anima, Pamina–animus, Monostatos–shadow, Sarastro–sage, Queen of the Night–devouring mother). He concedes that, unlike allegorical interpretations, Jungian archetypes “cannot have been in the creators’ minds,” but they nonetheless find their justification in Jung’s collective unconscious. Further, he implies that the opera’s second act inevitably demands of its interpreters some such hermeneutic tool. “The historical-allegorical interpretations may explain the characters and the basic plot, but if that were all, the opera might as well end as soon as Tamino’s loyalties are transferred to Sarastro at the end of Act 1.”²⁰

Archetypes, while they may liberate the interpreter from the constraints of history (and of whatever may have been in the authorial mind), remain types, and pretty rigid ones at that. Other interpreters have preferred to approach the opera armed with the more flexible arsenal furnished by the symbol. Here, The Magic Flute offers no end of low-hanging fruit. In harvesting this bounty, one master trope has outdone all others – the conflict between day and night, light and darkness, and between their personification in Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. The danger in deployments of this trope has lain in construing its oppositions in extreme or even absolute terms. Grasberger, for example, describes Sarastro as “the completely spiritualized man, in his way as unreal as the Queen of the Night is uncanny.”²¹ For Chailley, theirs is an irreconcilable conflict between two worlds, masculine and feminine. Alfons Rosenberg does Chailley one better: for him, they are locked in the mother of all wars, “the primeval battle between the powers of light and darkness,” which he traces back to Babylonian and biblical creation myths.²²

Night and day, light and darkness, are what cultural anthropologists like to call complementary opposites: together, they comprise a whole, but not a higher-order one. That achievement is left to the new initiates, Pamina and Tamino. As the embodiment of “Schönheit und Weisheit” (in the words of the final chorus), they hold out at the opera’s end a utopian promise. The opera, however, leaves identifying what this might be to its exegetes.

In the theater, of course, utopianism is bad for business, and both Goethe’s attempted sequel and Schikaneder’s own “Part Two,” Das Labyrinth, paint a dark future for the young couple, in which the Queen and her minions return to resume the “primeval battle.” Several recent writers have turned instead to the original engagement and to calling into question its tropological self-evidence. This has required some creative engineering. Jessica Waldoff, for example, amalgamates the opera’s master trope with the quest archetype. Sarastro and the Queen necessarily recede into the background as the opera’s “dominant metaphor” transmutes from a standoff to a journey, from the intractable opposition of Night and Day to “the move from darkness to light.”²³ That this is Tamino’s journey she emphasizes with a liberty she takes in translating his cry at the very heart of the drama:

Word order suggests that the second verse of this couplet should read in English: “When will the light find my eye?” Waldoff, however, does greater justice to Tamino’s quest by translating it poetically as “When will my eyes find the light?” She also stresses that, although the “high-minded theme” of The Magic Flute is a quest for knowledge (rather than for a damsel in distress), historically and ideologically the opera is a post-Enlightenment work in which the enlightenment Tamino seeks is to be spelled with a lower-case “e.” By this orthographic change, Waldoff effectively relocates the concept of enlightenment from its eighteenth-century cultural-historical acceptation to Gruber’s metahistorical category and its orientation toward the universally human.

Another strand of recent scholarship dealing with the opera and its symbols revisits Sarastro, and especially the Queen, in order to wrest them from their traditional roles as simple hypostatizations of the two poles of its master trope and to explore each of them instead as complex and, indeed, contradictory individuals.

Petra Fischer, in her essay “The Rehabilitation of Sensual Nature,” warns that the night–day dichotomy is insufficient as an interpretation of either the opera itself or the Queen and Sarastro.²⁴ As a topos, darkness-and-light is not as simple as black-and-white. Like Kunze, she rejects the Märchenoper designation, under which the opera’s master trope reduces to the unnuanced good–evil antinomy of fairy tales. The stories in Dschinnistan, to look no further, ask us to accept without explanation the assignment of good and evil to their characters. In The Magic Flute, however, the Queen is not immediately and existentially evil. She has a back story. Her earlier marriage suggests that the opera’s two opposing spheres were once united but have since degenerated and reached a point of imbalance that she and Sarastro are incapable of righting. The eponymous magic flute itself becomes of interest in Fischer’s interpretation: unlike Oberon’s horn and similar magic instruments in other operas, it has an origin separate from its donor, in the prelapsarian world of Pamina’s father. Pamina, in fact, is for Fischer the key to the “rehabilitation” in the title of her essay, for it is she who tells Tamino the story of the flute’s origin, and who must undergo her own trials (more severe than Tamino’s, because more real) before the world she remembers can emerge once more. The joint initiation of Tamino and Pamina, then, suggests not so much a restoration of an old order, which few in 1791 would have thought feasible, as something akin to Miranda’s “brave new world.”

If commentators have often idealized Pamina as a child of nature, they have just as often cast her mother as the embodiment of Unnatur, as a being so consumed by her power struggle with Sarastro that she is willing to suborn even that most natural of bonds, between mother and child, to bring about his destruction. In her revisionist portrait of the Queen, Kristi Brown-Montesano has argued against taking Sarastro and the Queen as simple avatars of the opera’s master trope, for where there is no real parity of power there can be no real dualism. Despite the advance publicity of Papageno and the Three Ladies, the Queen gives only the appearance of a powerful absolute potentate. Beneath this exterior roils an inner mother-ruler conflict.²⁵ Mozart’s memorable music for her, in consequence, amounts to little more than a sham display of power, masking her inability to take matters into her own hands. Brown-Montesano pleads for the restoration in Act 2 of the full spoken dialogue between mother and daughter preceding “Der Hölle Rache,” routinely cut or even eliminated from performances and recordings and the only instance where the Queen admits her powerlessness: “Dear child,” she tells Pamina, “your mother can no longer protect you. All my power was buried with your father.”

Alfred Einstein once wrote: “Never did Mozart write ‘for eternity,’ and it is precisely for that reason that much of what he wrote is for eternity.”²⁶ As a proposition this makes little sense, a point we can demonstrate easily enough by simply substituting another composer of the day for Mozart. (“Never did Dittersdorf write ‘for eternity,’ and it is precisely for that reason that much of what he wrote is for eternity.”) In terms of our present discussion, though, what Einstein seems to have done is to draw a metahistorical conclusion from a causal-historical premise. This conflating of Gruber’s two categories invites us to consider whether they may, like the many interpretations they subsume, complement rather than compete with each other. The trick is to expand and integrate rather than reduce and eliminate. That may not be an especially welcome prospect for those who must decide how to stage the opera. Like Poirot and Holmes, they will face not too few options but too many. Happily, those who write about this provocative work need contend with no similar perplexity. For, as a member in particularly good standing of Godwin’s “great symbolic works of art,” The Magic Flute will no doubt continue to attract mutually enriching, multidimensional readings of its plot, characters, and meaning.

For most of The Magic Flute’s history, its representation of women went unquestioned. Now, however, this aspect of the work is widely regarded as problematic. With its foregrounding of Sarastro’s temple and his order, the worldview represented on the stage is largely that of a brotherhood of men who espouse highly objectionable views of women. At the temple gates a Priest instructs Tamino: “So a woman has beguiled you? A woman does little, talks much” (Act 1, scene 15).¹ As the trial of silence commences, Tamino and Papageno are warned by the Priests in their duet (No. 11): “Beware of women’s tricks; this is the first duty of the Brotherhood” (Act 2, scene 3). Tamino learns quickly from his new mentors, instructing Papageno in the Act 2 quintet: “She [the Queen] is a woman, and has a woman’s mind.” Meanwhile, Sarastro advises Pamina: “A man must lead your hearts, for without his guidance every woman tends to step out of her natural sphere” (Act 1, scene 18). These and other statements are framed in general terms, but they complicate the opera’s portrayal of its female characters, especially Pamina and the Queen of the Night.

Often in modern productions these and other misogynistic lines are altered, mistranslated in the supertitles, or left out. The opera’s representation of women, however, is not created by the sung and spoken text alone. To the contrary, it also depends on the events of the plot and the way the conflict at the heart of it is dramatized and resolved. The opera sets the rule of men, led by Sarastro, against the rights of a woman, the Queen. The forces of light vs. dark, truth vs. falsehood, and knowledge vs. ignorance are all aligned in the opera as male vs. female. By the end of the opera, a powerful woman and her entourage – consisting of her Three Ladies and the Moor, Monostatos – have joined forces to fight an established order of “wise” men. The opera’s “happy” ending is thus achieved (at least in part) by the exclusion of “others” who threaten the temple.

These basic elements of character and plot are difficult to alter or reconceive in performance. Directors have nonetheless tried to do so. Ingmar Bergman, for example, in his 1975 film The Magic Flute, transformed Sarastro into the Queen’s estranged husband and Pamina’s father, thus creating a personal reason for the Queen’s resentment. He thereby reduced a clash of worlds to a family conflict. Increasingly in modern productions, the Queen is made to look less human and more otherworldly or cartoonish. Julie Taymor created a truly extraordinary Queen for the Metropolitan Opera House (2004): she appears larger than life through the use of multiple wing-like extensions to her costume operated by puppeteers. Barrie Kosky’s Queen for the Komische Oper Berlin (2012) is conceived as a giant animated spider who appears, literally, to trap Tamino and Pamina in her web. It is not uncommon to see the Queen in a costume inspired – at least in part – by one of Disney’s evil queens, making her appear more two-dimensional. But do such changes to the text or the costumes change the role misogyny plays in the story? Does a more cardboard or cartoonish characterization of the Queen – or Monostatos, for that matter – make it easier to accept the opera’s celebratory ending from which they are excluded?

How, then, should we understand the opera’s representation of women? Attempting to answer this question may help us to better understand and appreciate both Pamina and the Queen. It may also allow us to reconcile the opera’s problematic attitudes toward gender with its dramatization of Enlightenment themes. To begin, we might compare the opera’s representation of women to its assumptions about how they behave.

Gender as Perspective

It has become a commonplace in recent decades that “gender” is a cultural concept rather than a “natural” or biological one. In an essay that explores the role of gender in literary and cultural analysis, Myra Jehlen writes:

The representation of women in The Magic Flute depends on both a text and a context in which “character traits are not autonomous qualities but functions and ways of relating.” Gender is performed on stage within a clearly established context and frame of reference, one that has changed dramatically in the wider world since the opera was first conceived and produced. For this reason, gender is an aspect of the work that complicates modern readings and performances of the opera.

Lest it be thought that gender is a subject more important to us moderns than it was to those in the eighteenth century, it is worth noting how concerned contemporary writers were with shaping the education, behavior, inclinations, habits, morals – the very identity – of young persons of both sexes. Take, for example, Rousseau’s Émile, which addresses the education and development of both his hero (a natural man brought up away from the corruption of society) and his intended wife, Sophie. “The man,” he writes, “should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance.”³ Book V is devoted to Sophie, who “must possess all those characters of her sex which are required to enable her to play her part in the physical and moral order.”⁴ The influence of Rousseau’s Émile can hardly be overstated. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft challenges Émile and its author repeatedly. “The private or public virtue of woman is very problematical,” she writes, “for Rousseau, and a numerous list of male writers, insist that she should all her life be subjected to a severe restraint.”⁵

The differences between the sexes, though not a new topic, were now widely studied in the eighteenth century, and a growing body of medical and other writings attempted to establish these differences as biological and observable. In The Enlightenment, Dorinda Outram explains: “Women were increasingly defined as closer to ‘nature’ than were men, as well as being more determined by ‘nature’, meaning anatomy and physiology. … Equally the notion that women are closer to nature than men included … the claim that because of their physical ‘nature’ they were emotional, credulous, and incapable of objective reasoning.”⁶ Central to this view, as G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, was a gendered understanding of the nerves: “not only were women’s nerves interpreted as more delicate and more susceptible than men’s, but women’s ability to operate their nerves by acts of will … was seriously questioned.”⁷ Kant, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, makes exactly this point: “The content of woman’s great science, rather, is humankind … . Her philosophy is not to reason, but to sense.”⁸ In his final chapter he associates the terms of his title with the natural qualities of the two genders: “one expects that a person of either sex brings both [the beautiful and the noble] together, in such a way that all the other merits of a woman should unite solely to enhance the character of the beautiful, which is the proper reference point; and … among the masculine qualities the sublime clearly stands out as the criterion of his kind.”⁹

The cultural context for understanding gender roles is not merely one in which the opera was conceived, it is located in the opera itself. The opera’s statements on gendered behavior may be understood as part of the moral didacticism that Martin Nedbal associates with the goals of German national theater.¹⁰ Just as the opera lays out its tenets concerning the behavior of women, it lays out clear guidelines for the behavior of men. As the Three Boys lead Tamino to the temple gates, they instruct him: “Be steadfast, patient, and discreet – be mindful of this, in short, be a man” (Act 1, scene 15). Tamino tells Papageno: “A wise man considers and does not heed what the common rabble says” (Act 2, scene 5). In the Act 2 quintet, all moralize together: “A man is strong in spirit; he thinks before he speaks.” At one point, when Papageno is told “Be a man!” he replies, “I wish I were a girl!” (Act 2, scene 2).

To understand the opera’s representation of gender, we do not need to be fully versed in contemporary views of the subject. The opera constructs gender roles as it unfolds through its use of situations and language. To use Jehlen’s phrase, “actions define actors.” Women, the opera tells us, require the guidance of wise men: with it, they have great potential for virtue and love; without this guidance, they are likely to gossip, beguile, and mislead. Nevertheless, Schikaneder and Mozart’s strikingly vivid characterizations of Pamina and the Queen complicate many of the opera’s patriarchal assumptions and raise important questions about gender and power.

Pamina as an Idealized Image

As a heroine of the sentimental genres, Pamina is characterized by her virtue, her capacity for feeling, and her ability to arouse pathos in others. Her goodness and courage prove not only that she is destined for Tamino but that she is his match in both temperament and character. In Act 2, Tamino, Pamina, and the two Armored Men sing, “A woman who does not fear night and death is worthy and will be initiated” (scene 28). The implication is clear: Pamina, who has already faced “night” (despair) and “death” (suicide), is such a woman. She is transformed from a maiden in need of rescue into a seeker of Enlightenment. While she achieves an extraordinary destiny, she does so without contravening period expectations. For this reason, Pamina’s virtue is ultimately rewarded with the man of her heart and initiation into the temple.

Pamina’s first appearance in Act 1 is not in person, but as a portrait that the Three Ladies present to Tamino. The stage directions describe what happens next: “Tamino, from the moment he received the portrait, has been absorbed in it; his love increases, as if he were deaf to all these exchanges.” Tamino does not notice the exit of the Three Ladies, nor that Papageno remains behind. He then sings his aria “Dies Bildnis,” during which the portrait’s effect continues to take hold. The key is arguably significant – E-flat, the key of the overture, the upcoming duet about the power of love, “Bei Männern,” and “Heiligtum.” Schikaneder and Mozart deliberately focus attention on the male gaze rather than on its object. We are invited to see the loveliness that transfixes Tamino through his eyes.

Mozart creates a sense of affective immediacy by having Tamino begin without any preamble from the orchestra. His melody opens with a leap of a sixth (“This image is enchantingly fair”), an interval often used to characterize statements of love, which here suggests the sudden blossoming of affection. The interval is repeated in the second line a step lower and again on the repetition of “mein Herz” (my heart) in line 4. His growing affection is confirmed in line 3 – “Ich fühl’ es” (I feel it) – emphasized by an appoggiatura on the key word “fühl’,” and then repeated. Tamino is not merely gazing at the portrait but is deeply affected by it. In the second verse, he describes the sensation he feels (“burning like fire”) and asks if it can be love. Mozart poses the question with a pregnant pause on the dominant of the new key (m. 25). Tamino then answers “Ja, ja, die Liebe ist’s allein” (Yes, yes, it can only be love) and confirms the arrival in B-flat. The effect could hardly be more convincing if he had actually met Pamina.

This portrait (an image) is one of the opera’s most important representations. Its transformative effect on Tamino is not merely a necessary plot spring; it leads to a second representation (the aria), an unfolding of the first, that reveals the naturalness and spontaneity of emotional life. In creating this scene, Schikaneder and Mozart depicted a conception of the relationship of beholder and artwork that was new in the eighteenth century. Tamino’s rapt attention is a version of the “absorption” Michael Fried discusses in his Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Theatricality in the Age of Diderot.¹¹ Tamino’s ability to see Pamina – to imagine he is with her, to develop strong feelings for her, to envision their future life together – only from gazing at her portrait illustrates something the French critic Denis Diderot claimed was true about the paintings of Greuze and others: that they could inspire sensation and feeling in the beholder, blurring the distinction between the world of the canvas and the real world. Such portraits and other paintings were valued for their ability to absorb the beholder (stopping the beholder motionless before a painting and inspiring a profound sense of connection with the painting’s subject) and to represent absorption (creating the illusion of a world in the painting in which its subjects are completely overwhelmed by feeling and separated from the beholder’s gaze). Tamino’s aria demonstrates both qualities of absorption: he is consumed by the portrait, which inspires in him an attachment to a woman he has never met; at the same time, his aria offers a representation of absorption as it unfolds for us on stage as if we (and Papageno) were not there to witness it.

Through her portrait, Pamina embodies the ideals of womanhood that the culture of sensibility has ascribed to the sentimental heroine: beauty, virtue, immediacy of feeling, and the ability to inspire and ennoble those around her. Later in Act 1, Papageno, who uses the portrait to identify Pamina, refers to her more than once as “Fräuleinbild,” not letting us forget that she is both maiden and image. “Fräuleinbild” is a clever wordplay on the term “Frauenbild,” which indicated in the eighteenth century both woman and the image of woman (potentially an idealized image).¹²

Pamina as “Virtue in Distress”

When the Three Ladies return after Tamino’s reverie with the portrait, they tell him that Pamina has been abducted. The First Lady reassures Tamino, however, on the point of her virtue: “In spite of all pain innocence suffers, she remains true to herself.” One of the most familiar representations in the literature of sensibility, G. J. Barker-Benfield tells us, “is the figure of ‘virtue in distress,’ the virtue a woman’s, her distress caused by a man.”¹³ Pamina’s abduction, which merges elements from the sentimental genres with various other sources, had many precedents in literature and opera by 1791. The most important of these was the vogue for “exotic” operas, including Mozart’s own Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782). In such stories, a young girl of European origin has been abducted or is being held against her will in a distant land where she is threatened by unwanted male attention. At a time when patriarchal power could not be challenged directly, the suffering heroine – “virtue in distress” – inspired sympathy and admiration in others. Both in literature and on the operatic stage, she asserted a certain moral power – to lead by example.

The details of Pamina’s abduction and her attempts to preserve her virtue are essential to Schikaneder’s and Mozart’s development of her character. We learn from the Three Slaves (Act 1, scene 9) that Pamina has escaped from Monostatos – “just at the moment when he thought himself the victor.” They root for Pamina, describe Monostatos as their tormentor, and anticipate with delight how events will lead to his being punished by Sarastro. In the next scene, however, Monostatos (from offstage) orders the Slaves to bring chains. They respond with dismay:

The Slaves demonstrate how the sentimental heroine inspires pity and sympathy in others, and this sets the scene for Pamina’s entrance as “virtue in distress,” newly recaptured by Monostatos. Her first words in the ensuing trio (No. 6) are “Oh, what torment! What pain!” Threatened by Monostatos, she asks to die. In chains, Pamina faints at the end of the ensemble.

In Act 2, a similar episode occurs in scene 7. Monostatos discovers Pamina sleeping in a garden. Alone and unobserved, he describes his passion for her as a fire that smolders within him. He longs to kiss her, and in his aria “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden” he resolves to steal the kiss. As it happens, Monostatos is prevented by the arrival of the Queen. After the Queen’s exit, he threatens Pamina again: she must submit to him or die. Pamina refuses and asks for mercy: “No! … spare me … I have given my heart to the youth.” She is saved this time by the arrival of Sarastro (scene 11).

These events are salacious. The entire plot strand is titillating, and the authors know it will succeed from Die Entführung and other “exotic” operas of the period. Leaving aside important questions – why Sarastro would expose Pamina to Monostatos’s unwanted attention and threats, and why Schikaneder and Mozart chose to make their aggressor a dark-skinned Moor – it is clear that Monostatos’s attempts to violate Pamina place her virtue at risk, test her fidelity and courage, and allow us to observe her suffering and distress.

Onto this abduction narrative, however, Schikaneder and Mozart have grafted another type of sentimental plot – that of abandonment. In Act 2, scene 8, Pamina is told that she must kill Sarastro and take the all-powerful sevenfold circle of the sun (Sonnenkreis), or she will be abandoned by her mother. The Queen does not mince words: “Be cast off and abandoned forever.” This places Pamina in the situation of many sentimental heroines who either have no family to protect them (Richardson’s Pamela) or have been treated badly by family members (Richardson’s Clarissa). Later, in Act 2, scene 18, when Tamino will not speak to her, Pamina believes that he, too, has abandoned her.

In musical terms, there is surely no more affecting moment in the opera than Pamina’s devastating G-minor lament “Ach ich fühl’s.” Hearing Tamino’s flute, Pamina discovers Tamino and Papageno in a hall where they are undergoing the trials of silence, but her beloved, remembering the Speaker’s instructions, refuses to speak to her. Believing herself forsaken, Pamina exclaims, “Oh, this is worse than injury – worse than death!”

Pamina’s aria unfolds in 6/8 over a consistent rhythmic accompaniment in the strings that alludes to the siciliano. Her melody has sometimes been called songlike, presumably because it tends toward the “natural” and avoids operatic display, but it should be noted that it does not follow any regular structure or form, allowing her a very expressive style of singing. Both text and music depict Pamina’s sense of loss. Her first antecedent phrase outlines two descents: a fifth (“Ach ich fühl’s”) and a fourth (“es ist vershwunden”). Extended use of dissonant suspensions and appoggiaturas create anguish and the impression of profound despair and weeping. Love’s longing (“der Liebe Sehnen”), the central image of the second verse, permeates the chromatic writing there, ushering in a chain of diminished seventh sonorities to problematize the phrase “then I will find rest [Ruh] in death” (mm. 24–26). On repeating these words at measure 30, Mozart recasts in the minor a melody associated with the words “meinem Herzen” (my heart) in the first verse, effectively bringing the abandoned heart to a darker place. Pamina’s grief is intensified by other chromatic strategies as well: the presence of the Neapolitan at measure 32 on the word “Ruh,” and leaps of a diminished seventh depicting “love’s longing” at measures 24, 27, and 29. In measure 34, Pamina leaps an octave and a diminished fifth from g′′ to c-sharp′ – it is the largest leap in the aria and appropriately articulates the leap she makes in her thoughts: to find rest in death.

Tamino’s presence – in silence – is essential to the visual and scenic tableau. At the crucial moment when Pamina addresses Tamino directly – “Sieh, Tamino” – he turns away from her. At the aria’s end, he allows her to leave the stage, heartbroken, without attempting to stop her. Pamina, not knowing the reason for his silence, experiences it as rejection. This effect is crucial to the opera’s representation of abandonment.

The opera’s exploration of “virtue in distress” reaches its culmination when Pamina attempts to take her own life in a climactic scene in the Act 2 finale. She enters the garden “half out of her wits,” holding the dagger the Queen intended for Sarastro. Text and music offer a vivid demonstration of how the sentimental heroine could lose herself – mind and body – to despair. As Janet Todd explains, “a susceptible organism could easily become erratic and deranged.”¹⁴ The heightened sensibility cherished in the period was also a mark of vulnerability to nervous disorders, hysteria, and madness. A shock of passion or disappointment could quickly overwhelm a sensitive constitution. At the same time, such madness could be cured if the cause of the despair is removed. (Lorenzi and Paisiello’s Nina, which reached Vienna in 1790, engaged the sympathy of audiences across Europe with this exact narrative.)¹⁵

When Pamina enters at measure 45, the signs of despair and disorder are obvious in the music: the minor mode (C minor, which then modulates quickly to F minor and then to G minor), the pervading use of chromaticism, the offbeat agitato figure in the strings, the presence of the lament figure, and the emphasis on diminished seventh sonorities and awkward leaps in the vocal line. When the Three Boys attempt to intervene in A-flat (m. 63), Pamina responds with her reason for despair – that she has been abandoned. At the crucial moment, just before she attempts suicide, she addresses Tamino: “False youth, farewell! See, Pamina dies for you.” Her exclamation is marked here by a rising chromatic line (as she reverses the lament figure), now powerfully supported by the low strings and winds. The textual reference attempts to collapse past and present. Pamina recalls the moment in her aria when she addressed Tamino but he did not respond to her – the moment that first confirmed her feelings of abandonment and set her on her present course. (To some, it may even appear that her vocal line expands the interjection of the flute and oboe in the aria.) We are reminded of her words at the end of her aria that she would find peace in death.¹⁶

Pamina can be restored to her senses only by reassurance that things are not as they seem. As she raises the dagger, the Three Boys take action. Mozart dramatizes the conflicting realities of his characters with a harmonic juxtaposition: Pamina’s attempt to stab herself cadences in G minor (see the vocal line in mm. 92–93); the Boys interrupt her (“stopping her arm”), deflecting her intended cadence to E-flat (a key already associated with Tamino and love in this opera). In what follows, they restore Pamina to her right mind by reassuring her that Tamino loves her (“for he loves you alone”).

Schikaneder and Mozart have marked their heroine with a highly sensitive body, on which the spontaneous signs of emotional life may readily be observed. Pamina’s abduction, abandonment, and even her thoughts of suicide allow her to emerge as the quintessential sentimental heroine who overcomes danger and despair to be united with her beloved Tamino. Their triumph together in the trials offers a compelling representation of female empowerment.

The Queen as Mother

Like Pamina, the Queen is represented with deliberate reference to behaviors and ways of being associated with her gender. But while Pamina embraces the roles of loving daughter and future wife, the Queen is clearly unwilling to be defined by the socially constructed roles of mother and widow. She vividly recalls her husband’s dying instruction – that she “submit to the guidance of wise men” (Act 2, scene 8) – and rejects it. She will not give up her ambition to rule in her husband’s place. When the Queen threatens her daughter, it becomes clear that she places ambition above any sense of maternal duty or affection. The Queen is, in fact, the only dark and vengeful mother ever to appear in Mozart’s operas.

To put the Queen in context, it is important to note that the figure of the mother on the eighteenth-century operatic stage is relatively rare. Only three other mothers appear in Mozart’s operas and all play sympathetic roles: Venus assures the happy marriage of her son Ascanio in Ascanio in Alba; Paneta, believed dead, returns to unite her daughter Celidora with her beloved in the unfinished L’oca del Cairo; Marcellina is happily reunited with her son Figaro (and his father Bartolo) in The Marriage of Figaro. Mary Hunter concludes in her important study The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna that “mothers are almost entirely absent” from the repertory she surveyed, finding only four in a group of 450–500 characters.¹⁷ Families and households are headed up onstage by fathers, uncles, or guardians. From the perspective of social hierarchy, mothers were unnecessary to these stories since both lineage and property were passed through the male line. But the real reasons for their absence are probably more complex, as Hunter suggests: “The characteristic absence of a female figure with any real claim to authority also allows the image of an ‘ideal’ male-headed hierarchy to appear unimpeded.”¹⁸ Operas follow tendencies observable elsewhere in the period. In eighteenth-century novels, for example, mothers are largely absent. As Ruth Perry explains in her Novel Relations, “maternal absence was more poignant for heroines for they were more vulnerable to the designs of libertine men or the avarice of relatives.”¹⁹ The absent mother was virtually a precondition of the gothic novel. In the best-known fairy tales, too, the natal mother is generally absent, often replaced by a wicked stepmother. Monstrous mothers (including substitute mothers), Marilyn Farcus suggests, “locate the challenges and obstacles to ‘good’ motherhood that society and culture refuse to acknowledge.”²⁰

The representation of the Queen as a mother is vital to her character. She is not merely a woman seeking power or vengeance, like Electra in Idomeneo or Vitellia in La clemenza di Tito. She is something far more inconceivable to the eighteenth-century mind: a natal mother willing to betray her daughter to achieve power. In many stories, it is precisely the substitution of a wicked stepmother or other female figure for the birth mother that makes this manipulation of the child possible. In The Magic Flute, however, the natural mother is herself the monstrous mother. This contradiction, which lies at the heart of the story, is an important aspect of her character that has not been fully appreciated and explored.

Even before the Queen appears in Act 1, heralded by thunder and illuminated by the stars in the night sky, motherhood is already essential. The Three Ladies have informed Tamino that she is the mother of the “royal daughter” he adores. In her recitative and aria “O zittre nicht … Zum Leiden” the Queen addresses Tamino as her son and speaks of his ability to console her mother’s heart. In the aria’s Andante she describes her situation in sentimental terms, emphasizing her grief: “I am destined to suffer, for I miss my daughter, because of her all my happiness was lost … .” The music reflects her distress compellingly with its turn to G minor and use of chromaticism, and, as it continues, with agitated figures in the orchestra and the lament figure in the vocal line to underscore her detailed account of Pamina’s abduction. In the Allegro moderato she addresses Tamino as a mother: “You will be my daughter’s savior.” The emotions associated with motherhood were increasingly celebrated as “naturally feminine” during the eighteenth century. John Brown, in his On the Female Character and Education (1765), claimed that a woman’s affection for her husband and children was “the first Duty of her Life, the very Purpose of her Being.”²¹ Beth Tobin has shown how the celebration of women as mothers and wives in magazines such as the Lady’s Magazine (which was enormously popular from the mid-1780s to the end of the century) helped to develop the concept of an idealized domesticity that pervaded the late eighteenth century.²²

Tamino has no reason to doubt the Queen’s representation of herself. He tells the Priest in the Act 1 finale that Sarastro is a “fiend” and a “tyrant.” When asked to explain his statements, he says they have been “proven by an unhappy woman, oppressed by grief and misery.” Significantly, it is in this context that the Priest says “So a woman has beguiled you? A woman does little, talks much. Young man, do you believe in wagging tongues?” We may well ask why this statement – so clearly aimed at one particular woman and the threat she poses to Sarastro’s temple – is framed in general terms. The Queen’s title – Königin der Nacht – may also have indicated to contemporary audiences that she was not what she seemed. Jane K. Brown makes this point, citing the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, which defines “Nachtkönig/in” as someone who cleans latrines. Relevant instances of the term occur in eighteenth-century Viennese theater, one involving the clown Hanswurst.²³

It is not until later in the opera that we have the opportunity to observe the Queen interacting with her daughter. In her dialogue with Pamina in Act 2, scene 8, the Queen recounts the tale of how her husband, before his death, had insisted that the sevenfold circle of the sun was destined for the initiates: “Sarastro will manage it in a manly way, as I have until now. And now, not another word; do not attempt to inquire into matters that are incomprehensible to the female mind. Your duty and that of your daughter is to submit to the guidance of wise men.” Focused on her desire for power and vengeance, the Queen offers no maternal support or affection. She is deaf to her daughter’s entreaties of “Dear Mother,” deaf to her request for protection, deaf to her affection for Tamino. In her second aria, “Der Hölle Rache,” the Queen wields motherhood as a weapon; Pamina must either murder Sarastro or be abandoned by her own mother. The Queen is revealed here not merely as a “bad” mother but as a danger to the social and moral order. The exact danger she poses is unwittingly confirmed by a textual echo, for it is she who embodies the danger of which the Priests warned. Her words “Death and despair [Tod und Verzweiflung] flame all around me!” appear to breathe life into the warning the Priests gave Tamino and Papageno in Act 2, scene 3: “Many a wise man let himself be taken in … death and despair [Tod und Verzweiflung] were his reward.”

Spectacularly difficult coloratura passages in both of the Queen’s arias have become emblematic of her role. It is necessary therefore to consider exactly how the nature of her operatic speech affects or shades what she says and how that speech participates in the construction of her character. No other character in the opera sings in the same bravura style, demonstrating extraordinary range (up to the f′′′ above high c′′′), agility, and power.²⁴ The most striking coloratura passage of Act 1 appears near the end of her aria as the Queen promises Tamino: “And when I see you victorious, then will she be yours forever.” Thirteen measures of vocalise elaborate the word “then” (dann) and two measures – including a leap up to high f′′′ – highlight the word “forever” (ewig). There can be no question about the power of this musical speech, which is astonishing, magical, and transcendent. It is also persuasive. The Queen deploys her vocal power with particular attention to the sense of the words: her vocalise suspends the flow of words precisely on dann and ewig to illustrate the magical forever that will be achieved only at the point when Tamino is rewarded. Tamino’s reaction confirms both that he is astonished (“Was it real, what I saw? Or do my senses beguile me?”) and persuaded (“Protect my arm, steel my courage”).

In her second aria, the Queen employs many musical devices associated with revenge, including extraordinary passages of coloratura, in an effort to persuade her daughter to murder Sarastro. Lengthy melismatic vocalises occur on two words (indicated in italics) to emphasize the crucial warnings of each verse. “If Sarastro does not feel death’s pain by your hand, then you are my daughter nevermore [nimmermehr]”; “Be abandoned forever, let be destroyed all the bonds [Bande] of nature.” The Queen’s menacing passagework powerfully hints at the duration of nimmermehr with two long vocalises that suspend normal operatic speech. In the second verse, an even longer melismatic passage quite literally illustrates the promised destruction of family ties by splitting the word and severing the larger phrase “bonds of nature.” The effect is terrifying. But, in the end, apparently, it is not persuasive. Pamina, to whom this aria is addressed, will not murder Sarastro. At the level of the plot, the Queen’s vocal power fails.

Is there, however, a level on which the Queen’s vocal power succeeds? Writing about the Queen, Carolyn Abbate asks whether we hear the character or the singer at moments of vocal astonishment, suggesting that her Act 2 aria be read “as oscillating between drama – the angry tirade by the character – and voice-object that comes to the fore precisely in the melismatic vocalises.”²⁵ For Abbate, the Queen as a character ceases to exist: “the locus of voice is now not a character, not human, and somehow not present.” Not all who hear the Queen’s vocal feats will respond in the same way, of course, but the sheer vocal power and brilliance of the singer in performance may break the fourth wall to have an effect that lies outside the circumference of the drama. This possibility, in turn, has complicated the way commentators and audiences have understood her role within the drama. Some commentators have returned to her first aria to find evidence of deception. Some have viewed her coloratura as evidence of hysteria. Many have complained that the Queen’s appearance as ostensibly good in Act 1 is an inconsistency in the plot. Whether acknowledged or not, the Queen’s coloratura has played a vital role in these debates. In the first aria, it is a rhetorical strategy that perfectly aligns with Tamino’s feelings and the goals of the plot. In the second aria, however, the Queen’s spectacular melismatic passages stand in direct opposition to Pamina’s innermost feelings and the goals of the plot. Abbate’s observation that we may dissociate the character in the story from the singer on the stage explains the special thrill audiences experience on hearing the Queen sing, especially in Act 2. The Queen’s vocal power overwhelms and dominates, whether or not it succeeds as a rhetorical strategy.

In 1979 Catherine Clément offered what is perhaps still the most radical feminist reading of this opera when she described it as “women’s undoing.”²⁶ “The winning world,” she writes, is not the world of the Queen; it is “the other one, the father’s, the men’s world.” Clément’s strident view follows Bergman’s version of the story rather than Schikaneder and Mozart’s, but her larger point – that the Queen reflects the culture’s oppressive attitude toward women – influenced a generation of scholars. The Queen, she insists, “does not make sense.” She is a “madwoman, cut off from everyone else”; her coloratura, a “babbling language” of rage and tenderness, a “losing song.” Abbate, as we have seen, focuses on the Queen’s singing to challenge traditional ways of understanding her role. In her important chapter “Magic Flute, Nocturnal Sun,” she considers a variety of precedents for understanding the Queen as a “female king” whose masculine aspirations “reflect deep cultural anxieties about female rule.” The Queen’s voice, Abbate argues, “becomes an object of intense desire, and her arias an occasion for celebration: the winning song.”²⁷ Kristi Brown-Montesano suggests that the Queen’s command of the night sky associates her with the sublime (as it was understood in the period), but that her gender posed a problem. As a result, the Queen might be thought an embodiment of the “Female Sublime” or “Bad Sublime.” The Queen threatens the brotherhood because she “manifests both the beautiful and the sublime, upsetting the sexual assumptions that informed these categories for Enlightenment thinkers.”²⁸ These and other feminist readings contextualize, reinterpret, and even vindicate the Queen.

For my part, I am happy to let the Queen be the villain. It is enough for me that she is a glorious villain. With just over twelve minutes on stage, she steals the show. And it is clear that her dark, starry kingdom is a necessary counterpart to Sarastro’s temples of Wisdom, Reason, and Nature. Of what value would the pursuit of Enlightenment be if it were not contrasted and clarified by an imposing, mysterious veil of darkness? For many, the Queen is the most memorable role in the opera. She is an archetypal character who represents the potential darkness, chaos, and unpredictability of human behavior. She overwhelms all in her presence with the forceful persuasion of visual and vocal spectacle. She is not merely aloft in the night sky; she is able to roam freely in the underground passages beneath the temple. She is a formidable danger, difficult to defeat. She represents the threat of disorder, vengeance, deception, and hypocrisy. Even when she has disappeared from view, she might return at any moment – and she does, in two sequels.²⁹

Focusing on the role gender identity plays in the characterization of the Queen makes it possible for us to better understand the role misogyny plays in the opera as a whole. On the one hand, misogyny is not required to condemn the Queen. As a “bad” mother, her behavior is neither natural to, nor typical of, women; it contradicts the deepest instincts of human nature. On the other hand, misogyny is pervasive and fundamental. To sense its magnitude, we must look beyond the Priests’ generalizing comments to the structure of the plot and the representation of its characters. While the mother chooses power and position over the “natural” affection of the domestic sphere, the daughter is entirely motivated by an innate affection for others that furthers the domestic goals of eighteenth-century society. Women like the Queen, who refused to embrace their socially constructed gender roles, were dangerous. They threatened the very social, moral, and ethical beliefs upon which society was built and functioned.

Conclusion

To return to my earlier question: How, then, should we understand the opera’s representation of women? Both mother and daughter are defined by their actions. Pamina, a sentimental heroine whose exemplary behavior is appropriate to the period, is rewarded by the events of the plot. Her mother is not. The reasons for this are many, as I have tried to suggest. The Queen has a role to play by resisting the status quo. She is unhappy with the opera’s social and moral worldview; she refuses to align herself with its objectives and goals. She clearly articulates her reasons for doing so. As a result, the opera’s final scene excludes her. It also excludes others – the Three Ladies, Monostatos, Papageno, and Papagena. For modern audiences, this can be disturbing.

Concentrating on what disturbs us, however, may help us to reconcile the opera’s representation of women with its dramatization of Enlightenment themes. Like all artworks that have been thought to reflect a universal human experience, The Magic Flute is limited by the circumstances of its creation and first performance. And yet, there is a “we” in the opera that attempts to capture a sense of the universal that many still cherish. It is the “we” of the opera’s maxims: a testament to the potential of humankind from which, arguably, no one is excluded – at least in theory. This is analogous to the “We the people” at the start of the U.S. Constitution, which in 1787 embraced only some men and no women at all, and remains aspirational even today. This Enlightenment vision has persisted with the opera and drives attempts to resolve “problems” such as the opera’s misogyny. Often these matters have been understood as inconsistences. But Enlightenment thinkers were more comfortable with inconsistency and unresolved difficulties than we are. This is fundamental to the concept of enlightenment. “If it is asked,” Kant writes in 1784, “‘Do we now live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is ‘No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’”³⁰

I would suggest that these inconsistencies and contradictions are central to understanding The Magic Flute both in Mozart’s day and in ours. Perhaps the opera’s comments about women and men, and about its Black man and its birdman, are best understood as part of its engagement of a broader question – what it means to be human – in an age of enlightenment. Many characters in the opera are given opportunities, including Tamino, Pamina, the Queen, Papageno, and Monostatos. But are they given equal opportunity and a level playing field? In the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, we understand the failings of the Enlightenment period so well partly because we are still dealing with them, just as we are still struggling to live in a more perfect world. In my view, this makes the dramatic contradictions and complexities of The Magic Flute more relevant on a modern stage.

They called him “the Shakespeare of music.” For some early critics, it was because of Mozart’s grasp of the “magnificent” and “terrifying.”¹ For others, it was his deft mixture of tragedy and comedy in the operas, particularly Don Giovanni.² One defended Mozart’s “Bizarrerien” by claiming that, like Shakespeare, Mozart had “a certain indifference to the old rules of art. … Shakespeare drew criticism for his astonishing situations, Mozart for his astonishing modulations.”³ And, perhaps most famously, E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote of Mozart in 1821: “Fiery imagination, deeply felt humour, and extravagant abundance of ideas pointed this Shakespeare of music in the direction he had to follow.”⁴

The connections between Mozart and Shakespeare were biographical as well as critical, particularly when it came to The Magic Flute. While in London on their European tour, Leopold copied into his travel diary – in careful English – Lorenzo’s famous speech on Orpheus and the power of music from The Merchant of Venice, prefiguring Tamino’s taming of the wild animals in Act 1, scene 15.⁵ The Magic Flute’s librettist Schikaneder was a renowned Shakespearean actor, whose productions Mozart may well have seen during his troupe’s Salzburg sojourns.⁶ And Christoph Martin Wieland, the German poet who published Dschinnistan (1786–89), the fairy-tale collection from which Mozart and Schikaneder drew many elements of The Magic Flute, was also among the first to translate Shakespeare’s plays into German. Wieland’s own 1780 poem based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon, König der Elfen (a copy of which was in Mozart’s library at his death), had been a huge success at the Theater auf der Wieden in 1789, in a Singspiel adaptation starring many of the same singers who would later create the leading roles in The Magic Flute.⁷

Beyond the biographical and intertextual connections between the two artists, Mozart and Shakespeare each stand as a colossus of art, a one-man canon. Through them and in invoking them, many of us long to see ourselves at our most transcendent, our most timeless, our most brilliant, and our most humane. Yet they each cast a long shadow, particularly in an age increasingly wary of heroes and universals. The dissonances – and, perhaps more uncomfortably, the enduring similarities – between the racial and other norms and stereotypes enshrined in Shakespeare’s and Mozart’s works, and the structural racism and other civil rights indignities and injustices of our own time, are becoming increasingly tangible in the wake of the social justice turn in the humanities and performing arts.

Monostatos is the most blatantly racialized of the outcasts populating what is often claimed as Mozart’s most universal, and universally appealing, opera. According to Operabase, The Magic Flute was the most frequently performed opera worldwide in the 2020/2021, 2021/2022, and 2022/2023 seasons, and since 2004/2005 it has never dipped below the top five.⁸ Furthermore, for at least the last fifty years or so, it has been commonly used to introduce English- and German-speaking children to both Mozart and opera as a genre, whether in television programs, children’s books, or family-friendly productions. To judge from publicity materials for the longstanding productions at the Vienna and Salzburg Marionette Theaters and Die Zauberflöte für Kinder at the Vienna State Opera (which sees some 7,000 schoolchildren attend each year), entire generations of Austrians are being raised to take the character Monostatos – and his portrayal by white tenors in blackface – for granted.⁹

In 2005, Malcolm Cole offered the first study of Monostatos in terms of the racial ideologies of Mozart’s day. Cole argued that the character, whose name translates to “standing alone,” is “a composite of that host of negative traits – physical, mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual – commonly associated with the Black ‘Other’ (and not only in the eighteenth century).”¹⁰ Other commentaries have followed from scholars and theater practitioners such as Derek Scott, Nasser Al-Taee, Steffen Lösel, and Kira Thurman.¹¹ Historians including Uta Sadji, Peter Martin, Barbara Riesche, and Wendy Sutherland have surveyed the long tradition of African characters and stereotypes in eighteenth-century German literature, theater, and visual culture.¹² And yet, discourses of race are still largely absent from Mozart scholarship.¹³

In performance, however, the anti-Black racism of Monostatos has long been painfully familiar to Black singers. American tenor Charles Holland, who had left the United States for Europe in 1949, reluctantly agreed to sing Monostatos for the Paris Opéra in 1954 in exchange for the role of Nadir in The Pearl Fishers at the Opéra Comique (Holland was the first Black singer to appear on that stage). Holland had initially refused to sing Monostatos, his colleague George Shirley later recalled, because it was “a role he considered an embarrassment to the race.”¹⁴ In 1959, Austrian critics scoffed at Leontyne Price’s casting as Pamina in her Vienna State Opera debut, dismissing a “dark-skinned Pamina” as unrealistic (conveniently ignoring the far less “realistic” nature of Monostatos in blackface).¹⁵ Such debates about race and opera casting are by no means resolved over half a century later, as the controversies over the 2015 Metropolitan Opera’s decision to end blackface in Otello productions and Anna Netrebko’s defiant use of blackface in Aida make plain.¹⁶ Even as predominantly white companies have begun to cast across and beyond “the color line,” it is not only Monostatos that has caused harm for Black singers. Bass Kenneth Kellogg, who has sung Sarastro in several Magic Flute productions, has recalled the way he cringes whenever he utters Sarastro’s line from Act 2, scene 11 sizing up Monostatos: “I know your soul is as black as your face.” Kellogg wonders whether it need be an integral part of The Magic Flute for Monostatos to be a person of color, contrasting it with Verdi’s Otello, where “the dramatic tension of the entire opera” is racial tension.¹⁷ Yet, as Black Shakespearean actors in the Othello tradition have commented for generations, the dramaturgical centrality of race is nevertheless embodied in a dehumanized protagonist.¹⁸

Kellogg’s comparison to Verdi’s Shakespeare adaptation suggests one model for grappling with the troubling history of a Singspiel like The Magic Flute: Shakespeare studies. Scholars working at the intersections of premodern critical race theory, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies, and performance studies have for decades considered how what Kim Hall calls “race thinking” permeates Shakespeare’s texts, contexts, and audiences, as well as productions and interpretations in our own time.¹⁹ Already in 1996, Margo Hendricks described the “shaping fantasy” of race in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, training her critical-historicist lens on the nameless, voiceless “Indian boy” of the play and directorial interventions on his “culturally predetermined orientalism.”²⁰ Ronald Takaki has shown how Shakespeare’s audience would have understood The Tempest in terms of contemporary English invasions of Ireland and incursions into the New World, with Caliban’s “racialized savagery” serving to prop up the dispossession of land and enslavement of bodies in settler-colonialist scenarios remarkably similar to Prospero’s.²¹ Examinations of race and race thinking in Shakespeare extend beyond the so-called “race plays”: as Hall has argued, “Any discussion of race must deconstruct whiteness and not focus just on minoritized people.”²² What is now often abbreviated (and circulated in social media) under the hashtag #ShakeRace works to make the often obscured power structures undergirded by whiteness in Shakespeare visible.²³ Similar power structures bind Monostatos to the non-Black characters with whom he interacts – Papageno, Pamina, Tamino, the Queen, and Sarastro – and to the fundamental whiteness of Enlightenment itself that the Singspiel apotheosizes. Monostatos’s blackness, whether framed as threatening, laughable, or pitiful, contains traces of Othello, Caliban, Shylock, and Aaron (who in Titus Andronicus speaks a line remarkably similar to Sarastro’s: “Aaron will have his soul black like his face”).

In this essay, I consider how we might address the legacies of race and racism in The Magic Flute, and what opportunities there might be to re-envision the Singspiel if we consider parallels in the Shakespeare repertory and #ShakeRace studies. What kind of freedom or flexibility might we have to adapt, translate, appropriate, and “unsettle” The Magic Flute in scholarship, performance, and pedagogy by taking our cue from experimental approaches to Shakespeare?²⁴ Mozart, like Shakespeare, is a towering icon of the “universal” in Western art with global reach, yet one whose meanings are constantly being made and remade in specific places. As we revisit Monostatos’s meanings in his own time, and in several key moments in The Magic Flute’s performance history, we might ask, with the global Shakespeare scholar Alexa Alice Joubin, “What values and ideas does [Mozart’s] cultural work sustain or undermine?”²⁵

Monostatos and The Magic Flute’s Race Problem

Constructed out of a range of orientalist and anti-Black tropes, Monostatos has among his closest literary antecedents a number of so-called “Moors” and enslaved characters in Wieland’s Dschinnistan.²⁶ He was written for Joseph Nouseul, a member of Schikaneder’s troupe known for his comic grotesques and villains.²⁷ A 1783 guide to actors of the day criticized Nouseul as artificial and overwrought, his performances “a perpetual grimace.”²⁸ If this was still true in 1791, Schikaneder may well have written to Nouseul’s type. As with Osmin’s relationship to Bassa Selim in Mozart’s other “exotic” Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Monostatos is middle management in Sarastro’s slave economy, an overseer yet with little power of his own. Osmin and Monostatos may even represent the outsourcing and disavowal of Enlightenment colonial violence: as Ritchie Robertson writes, “In Die Entführung Bassa Selim proves to be noble and generous, and sends the captives home, while all the threats of torture are blamed on his servant Osmin (anticipating the division of responsibility between Sarastro and Monostatos in The Magic Flute).”²⁹

Monostatos is a foil to all of the Singspiel’s main characters: he is made foolish in his encounters with Papageno, attempts to capture Tamino, serves and plots against Sarastro, and ends up a would-be co-conspirator with the Queen of the Night. Above all, however, he represents a persistent sexual threat to Pamina, and the contrast in their skin color is fetishized. Papageno describes Pamina as “whiter than chalk,” just before remarking of Monostatos, “There are black birds in the world, why not black men too? (an ostensibly neutral observation that is later undercut by Sarastro’s aforementioned line in Act 2, scene 11, “I know your soul is as black as your face”).”³⁰

The gender, racial, and moral binaries between Pamina and Monostatos were reinforced in a volume of Die Rheinische Musen (Mannheim, 1795), where they were the only figures from the Singspiel to be shown in sequential theater costume engravings (Figures 16.1 and 16.2). When viewed in succession, these two images create a composite scene that could well have recalled for readers the Act 5, scene 2 murder of Desdemona from Shakespeare’s Othello. The murder scene was a popular one for illustrations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of Othello, “keeping alive the image of a besieged, white femininity so crucial to the production of the black man as a ‘savage.’”³¹ Like Othello, Monostatos is repeatedly referred to as “the Moor” – he even claims the label himself. But his characterization also overlaps with that of Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest, a popular text for German translation and adaptation in the 1790s.³² Both the Prospero-Miranda-Caliban triangle and the Sarastro-Pamina-Monostatos triangle stage a confrontation between a racialized character and a white supremacy that is split into male power and female vulnerability. Like Caliban, but also Shylock and even Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Monostatos is at once a threat and an object of mockery and scorn, a figure of alterity at first exploited, then punished or shunned, by the protagonists. The audience is meant to fear Monostatos, to laugh at his folly and punishment, and to rejoice at his defeat and expulsion. In this way, Monostatos falls somewhere between Shakespeare’s comic antagonists and his tragic hero Othello.

Figure 16.1 Image of Pamina from Die Rheinische Musen (Mannheim, 1795).

Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Figure 16.2 Image of Monostatos from Die Rheinische Musen (Mannheim, 1795).

Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

In Schikaneder’s original libretto, Monostatos has the most lines of spoken dialogue save only for Papageno. Yet in most modern productions of The Magic Flute, much of Monostatos’s spoken dialogue is omitted or drastically reduced – especially Act 1, scene 9, in which three Sklaven discuss him in his absence. While these characters’ racial-ethnic identity is not named, they describe Monostatos as “schwarzer Monostatos” and “der Mohr,” suggesting that they do not share his racialization.³³ They cheer the fact that Pamina has briefly escaped Monostatos’s attempted assault, so that when she enters in Act 1, scene 11, the audience will already have judged Monostatos – a judgment confirmed when Pamina calls him Barbar.

The dehumanization of Monostatos and those he oversees is thematized in the use of the Singspiel’s magic instruments. First, Tamino enchants the wild animals of the realm with his flute (in Act 1, scene 15), and then immediately thereafter Papageno enchants Monostatos and his Sklaven with his glockenspiel (in Act 1, scene 17). Mozart’s audience was surely meant to notice the parallels between these two scenes; indeed, both the animals and the Sklaven might well have been (and frequently continue to be) portrayed by the same rank-and-file company members. This familiar elision of blackness and animality finds visual representation in a colored engraving from the ca. 1794 series by artist Joseph Schaffer, sold as individual prints and later published in the Brno Allgemeines europäisches Journal in 1795 (see Figure 4.4 earlier in this volume).³⁴ The obscure, ape-like figures (though the description accompanying the image identifies them as “animals of various kinds”) typify a process of “bestialization and thingification” that Zakiyyah Iman Jackson describes as “imagining black people as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero.”³⁵ The presence of these faceless dark beings surrounding Tamino as he plays at the gates of Reason, Wisdom, and Nature acts as a foil in every way: in their physicality and their anonymity, they are the antithesis of the Enlightenment prince.

Whether based on an actual production or on a fanciful interpretation of the published libretto, Schaffer’s costumed men are literally “things of darkness,” the phrase with which Prospero describes Caliban in Act 5, scene 1 of The Tempest. As Kim Hall writes in her pathbreaking book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, “Caliban functions as a ‘thing of darkness’ against which a European social order is tested and proved.”³⁶ The Magic Flute is a similar proving ground for European whiteness, with Monostatos and the wild animals equally subdued by Papageno, Tamino, and their instruments of control.

Monostatos’s lone aria, the Act 2, scene 7 “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden” (Everyone feels the joys of love), is the crux of his racialized, gendered, and sexualized outsider status. In Schikaneder’s printed libretto it is preceded by an extended monologue (frequently cut in modern productions) in which Monostatos rationalizes his actions and gives voice to his desire for Pamina. While his passion continues to dominate the text once Monostatos breaks into song, Mozart undercuts any noble sentiment with nervously pattering sixteenth notes at a galloping allegro tempo. Alla turca gestures cement Monostatos’s difference from any other singing character in the Singspiel – while also suggesting an affinity with Die Entführung’s Osmin and his Act 1, scene 3 litany of violent fantasies, “Erst geköpft, dann gehangen” (First beheaded, then hanged).³⁷ In fact, Monostatos’s lines frequently unfold as breathless, Osmin-like lists (“schnäbelt, tändelt, herzet, küßt”). In a final denial of sentiment, “Alles fühlt” unfolds at a sempre pianissimo dynamic, reinforced in the score and libretto with the highly specific stage direction “Everything is sung and played as quietly as if the music were a long way away.” Even the music, in other words, is distanced, Monostatos’s voice furtive.

In “Alles fühlt” Monostatos comments candidly on the double standard he experiences because of his race. “I must forego love, / Because a black man is ugly,” he observes ruefully, repeating the second line; later he avows “A white one has conquered me!” Some have read the aria as Monostatos’s plea for common humanity: his repeated line in verse 1 “Am I not made of flesh and blood?” is a kind of counterpart, as Derek Scott has noted, to Shylock’s line from The Merchant of Venice “If you prick us, do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”³⁸ But while Monostatos is marginally more sympathetic than a character like Osmin, as Al-Taee points out, his status as a racialized scapegoat cannot be explained away by reading “Alles fühlt” as racial critique.³⁹ Nor do I hear in Mozart’s music what Cole describes as “a breath of understanding and sympathy” imparted to the character.⁴⁰ Rather, Monostatos’s spoken and sung lines convey mainly deviousness, lust, and cowardice, and at the Singspiel’s end he is consigned to eternal night together with his co-conspirators, thwarted in their efforts to unseat Sarastro (in another echo of Caliban’s fate at the end of The Tempest).

Interventions, Reclamations, and Refusals in Performance

As a character rooted in blackface and racism, Monostatos has been all too easy to appropriate for explicitly racist productions, as in 1941 at the “Salzburg War Festival,” which was rebranded by the Nazis as a morale booster for wounded soldiers on the 150th anniversary of both Mozart’s death and the premiere of The Magic Flute.⁴¹ In a puff piece on this “model staging” in the Salzburger Volksblatt, Otto Kunz declared that The Magic Flute, “the loveliest of all musical fairy tales, is today the common property of mankind.”⁴² The sole image chosen to accompany the article, however, was the scene where Monostatos looms over the sleeping Pamina during “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden.” The familiar racist trope of the Black man as sexual aggressor, already cemented in The Magic Flute’s visual tradition over a century earlier, was here weaponized as an instrument of Nazi propaganda. The Volksblatt saw no contradiction in juxtaposing such racist fearmongering alongside the article’s claim that The Magic Flute represented Mozart’s “highest hymn to humanity.”⁴³ Similarly, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt rhapsodized over this production: “Is it not this eternality [Ewigkeit] behind whose banner we have rallied in this war: the eternality of the nation and of the nobility it claims as its own: its genius?” Lauding the wounded soldiers who filled the seats at the Felsenreitschule, the critic went so far as to posit Mozart as their standard-bearer, fantasizing that the soldiers “listen to the genius for whom they are fighting.”⁴⁴

Other productions, however, have contested the racial legacy of The Magic Flute. In the following two examples – one an early nineteenth-century parody, the other an early twenty-first-century intercultural adaptation – lines of influence with Shakespeare suggest ways to understand theatrical negotiations between universality and particularity, between the specifics of the time and place in which a play or opera was originally created and performed, and the new meanings and values to which that piece can be put.

A number of parodies and sequels emerged in the years immediately following The Magic Flute’s premiere.⁴⁵ In 1818 a new one was produced at the Theater in der Leopoldstadt, a suburban theater in competition with the Theater an der Wien, which had just opened its own revival of Mozart’s Singspiel. Die travestirte Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute Travestied) was written by Leopoldstadt playwright Karl Meisl, with new music by Wenzel Müller, the troupe’s resident composer (the score appears to be lost).⁴⁶ It was one of a number of satirical Lokalstücke that reimagined Shakespeare, myths, and popular Singspiele in the world of contemporary Vienna.⁴⁷ The Queen of the Night is now a procuress, the widow of a waste-removal contractor (“Frau von Putzweg” translates to “Mrs. Clean-Way”).⁴⁸ Sarastro is a gambler and glutton; Papageno is a farmhand named Wastl; and the action takes place against the backdrop of the bustling streets, coffee houses, and taverns of the Wieden district and Prater.⁴⁹

Surrounded by all these burlesques on the original characters, Monostatos is sympathetic, if reduced; he is now nameless, just “Ein Mohr,” and is identified only as Sarastro’s valet. His solo “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden” has all but disappeared; the first few lines are absorbed into a quodlibet sung not by him but by Wastl. No longer is he an overseer or sexual predator; and his racialization, far from being presented as “proof” of his villainy, is rather a plight that seems designed to elicit audience empathy. In his first scene, Pamina enters shouting at him, ordering him to leave her alone. His reply is far gentler than any of his dialogue in Schikaneder’s original Magic Flute libretto: “Do not be so cruel, gracious maiden,” he says. “If only you could see into my heart, how tenderly it beats for you.”⁵⁰ In response, Pamina doubles down on the insults, threatening to order another beating from Sarastro if, in her cruel words, “such a black Moor dares to come near a dazzling white skin like mine! If you come near me, it’s just like a fly falling into a cup of milk.” To these slurs, Monostatos replies not with threats but with a rueful account of his own efforts to “wash out” his blackness. For three months, he says, he had soaked himself in bleach, only to find – and to be reminded by the washerfolk – that “one cannot wash a Moor white.”⁵¹ The Moor gives up on wooing Pamina and exits, after which she ponders aloud that she cannot be angry that a Moor adores her, for “the more colorful [bunter] the crowd of lovers, the more it honors a girl.”

On one level, making Monostatos into a nonthreatening, even endearing, figure is just another way for Meisl and Müller to turn the original Magic Flute on its head. But it is more than just an inversion played for laughs. “The Moor” gives voice to his suffering, he is not cast out of the Prater society, and at the end of the Singspiel it is he who introduces the closing chorus, a cynical indictment of “modern marriage” that compares it to a ride on a merry-go-round. This suggests that Meisl had confidence that audiences would welcome a sympathetic Moor. This might have been due to the actor – we do not know who played the Moor, but it may well have been Johann Sartory, who had starred in another popular Singspiel that had already been in the repertoire of the Theater in der Leopoldstadt for years: Othello, der Mohr in Wien (Othello, the Moor in Vienna). This parody, with text by Ferdinand Kringsteiner and music by Ignaz Schuster, premiered in 1806 and was a favorite at the Theater in der Leopoldstadt, revived every year through 1814 and 1819–1823.⁵² Othello, der Mohr in Wien, in turn, was a parody of the popular Othello, der Mohr von Venedig, a traditional adaptation of Shakespeare’s play from Wieland’s translation, which had premiered at the Burgtheater in 1785 and was revived in 1787 and 1790, and thereafter each year from 1800 through 1806.⁵³ If Sartory had played the Moor in Die travestirte Zauberflöte, it would have heightened the intertextual associations with his star turn in Othello, der Mohr in Wien. Like Die travestirte Zauberflöte, Kringsteiner’s Othello transposes the action of Shakespeare’s original play to contemporary Vienna, and while it too ends happily, it includes several explicit racist epithets. Desdemona’s father, bewailing her upcoming marriage to Othello, complains, “If only the Moor were not so black!” to which Desdemona replies, “Dear father – he will bleach himself yet.”⁵⁴ The father replies with a slur speculating about the skin color of his future grandchildren. These references to skin whitening – already a major cosmetics industry since the seventeenth century – echo the moral connotations long imputed by Europeans to dark and fair skin, as well as accounts of multiracial populations in the colonies and colorism in discourses of scientific racism.⁵⁵

More recent productions of The Magic Flute, particularly by directors from predominantly English-speaking countries, have confronted the troubling implications of Monostatos and his casting in new ways. Some attempt to minimize the racism of the original libretto by substituting Monostatos’s racialization with another visual signifier of monstrosity. The “flabby, fake pot belly,” leather straps, and heels of Julie Taymor’s popular Metropolitan Opera production (the 2007 revival) arguably trade one category of stereotypes for another; and while Australian director Barrie Kosky and the UK-based performance group 1927’s silent-film staging for the Komische Oper Berlin (2012) reimagined Monostatos as F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, they retained the problematic visual signifier of black hands on a white body for “Alles fühlt.”⁵⁶ Yet, these and other interventions are themselves often subject to backlash from critics who see them as either taking the easy way out or threatening the integrity of the piece.⁵⁷ Revisionist approaches, particularly those that take more liberties with Schikaneder’s text and even Mozart’s music, can achieve new kinds of integrity, as Sheila Boniface Davies and J. Q. Davies write of Isango Portobello’s multilingual and musically eclectic Magic Flute, Impempe Yomlingo (2007). The Cape Town company’s act of translation and transposition, they argue, “underscores the transformative elements of the story on one hand, while enacting a politics of cultural and aesthetic reform on the other.”⁵⁸

Another such production is by Madeline Sayet, an American director who works in both opera and Shakespeare. Sayet is a member of the Mohegan Tribe, founder of the Native Shakespeare Ensemble at Amerinda, and executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. Her production of The Magic Flute was for the Glimmerglass Festival’s fortieth anniversary season in 2015. She and her librettist Kelley Rourke set out to re-envision Schikaneder and Mozart’s tale by incorporating elements of Mohegan and other Native storytelling traditions – what Shakespeare scholars would call “intercultural” or “diasporic” Mozart.⁵⁹ Sayet was particularly concerned with how to represent Monostatos because of her experiences with Indigenous stereotyping in theater. As she puts it, “Whether it’s blackface, yellowface, or redface, we are not costumes for you to put on.”⁶⁰ Her solution was to construe Monostatos as a trapper, an outsider figure who represents white encroachment, exploitation, and interference. Sayet’s Monostatos is also a policer of boundaries: when he presents Tamino to Sarastro in the Act 1 finale, he proclaims, “You see how I protect the order. / A trespasser has breached your borders. / Good thing you have a guard like me.”⁶¹ Sarastro’s response echoes the threat in Schikaneder’s original, while stopping short of carrying out the original punishment: “Oh yes, I know you very well. / Be grateful I don’t have you flogged.” As mentioned before of other productions, most of Monostatos’s lines are omitted or replaced, from his monologue before “Alles fühlt” to his closing bargain with the Queen for Pamina. Rourke and Sayet also omit Sarastro’s line about Monostatos’s soul. Finally, the Glimmerglass production demonstrates that recuperative casting does not exist in a vacuum, nor does it apply only to the minoritized characters. While Monostatos was portrayed by a white singer, tenor Nicholas Nestorak, the casting of nonwhite singers in the roles of Tamino, Pamina, the Queen of the Night, and Sarastro made it easier for Monostatos’s presence to avoid reinscribing a racist ideology.⁶² As Sayet commented on the production, “I saw a world that reflected the one we live in, and the one I will continue to grow in: not the past, but the future.”⁶³

Sayet recently participated in a virtual seminar series hosted by New York’s Red Bull Theater, Exploring Othello in 2020, in which a cohort of actors, directors, playwrights, and scholars offered a four-part table-read of Othello, wrestling with the play and its legacies as artists of color. She affirmed the fact that Shakespeare’s play is “not neutral,” observing that Shakespeare has often been used “as a weapon of white supremacy.”⁶⁴ Sayet’s deep ambivalence about canonicity and white supremacy have found expression in other interventions, such as her production of The Tempest, which, in her words, considers “what would happen if Caliban could get his language back.”⁶⁵ Inverting the character hierarchy is another strategy of Shakespeare appropriation that has found a place in literary and theatrical works such as Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), Susan Gayle Todd’s Sycorax (2010), and Toni Morrison’s Desdemonda (2011). Sayet confessed an impulse toward this approach when first developing the Glimmerglass Magic Flute: “In my guts I wished I could scrap Magic Flute and make a show just about Monostatos.”⁶⁶

Perhaps the most extreme strategy of resistance would be the refusal of performance altogether. Whether temporary or permanent, individual or collective, such a move immediately prompts questions about canonicity and the obligations of performance as opposed to scholarship. It can seem blasphemous to suggest that we retire such a beloved work from our contemporary operatic museum – although canons are dynamic, and there are plenty of other un- and underperformed operas by Mozart and his contemporaries. At the very least, opera companies, directors, conductors, and audiences must be prepared to ask what the next Magic Flute production will offer besides cozy familiarity and guaranteed ticket sales.

Here again, we may look to Shakespeare studies for a model. At that same Exploring Othello seminar series, moderator Ayanna Thompson – author of the introduction to the new Arden edition of the play and a founding member of the ShakeRace and RaceB4Race networks – suggested it might be time for a “performance hiatus” on Othello.⁶⁷ She hastened to add, and has said elsewhere, that plays like Othello should still be read, taught, and discussed, but that it is irresponsible to stage them “until we get to a different place in our society about what we can talk about, what we can face.”⁶⁸ If leading figures in Shakespeare studies can advocate for a temporary performance hiatus for Othello, alongside radical reimaginings of its text, surely we can at least contemplate the same for The Magic Flute. Ultimately, as with so many other enduring works, the mirror that The Magic Flute holds up to us reflects that which we aspire to be, and also that which we are reluctant to admit we are – the violence embedded in the ideal. As Mozart scholars at the intersection of past history and present performance, we would do well to consider, in the words of Hall, how we might “undo and redo the scripts that we have inherited.”⁶⁹