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.