The Magic Flute

• 1. Introduction

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  The Magic Flute, known in German as Die Zauberflöte, premiered on the 30th of September 1791 at a suburban Viennese playhouse called the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden. The composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was in the pit that night, conducting the orchestra himself. Two months later, he was dead. This would be his final opera, and somehow, impossibly, it became one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. Why does a fairy tale about a bird-catcher, a magic flute, and a sinister Queen of the Night endure so stubbornly, more than two centuries on? And what was Mozart actually trying to say through the trials, the temples, and the three-chord brass sequences? This documentary follows the opera from the cramped suburban theatre where it first drew immense crowds to the recordings still being made today, asking what made this work so strange, so beloved, and so difficult to pin down.

• 2. A Theatre Troupe and Its Fairy Tales

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  Emanuel Schikaneder had run his theatrical troupe at the Theater auf der Wieden since 1789, and Mozart had been deepening his ties to the company long before a single note of The Magic Flute was written. Mozart was a close friend of the troupe's tenor Benedikt Schack, who would go on to sing the role of Tamino at the premiere. The two men had already collaborated on a 1790 fairy-tale opera called Der Stein der Weisen, The Philosopher's Stone, and Mozart contributed at least the duet "Nun liebes Weibchen" to that project. Der Stein der Weisen employed much the same cast in similar roles to The Magic Flute and can be understood as a rehearsal for the larger work. Schikaneder's libretto drew on a wide range of literary sources. Scholars point to the medieval romance Yvain by Chretien de Troyes, Jean Terrasson's novel Life of Sethos, and Ignaz von Born's essay "On the mysteries of the Egyptians." The earthy character of Papageno, played by Schikaneder himself on premiere night, drew from the Hanswurst tradition of Viennese popular theatre. The work was also indebted to an adaptation of Sophie Seyler's Singspiel Oberon, another fairy-tale piece produced at the same theatre. Schikaneder is sometimes treated as merely Mozart's librettist, but his troupe's accumulated repertoire of comic fairy-tale opera was the soil in which The Magic Flute grew. The opera also contains two apparent references to Antonio Salieri: the Papageno-Papagena duet resembles the Cucuzze cavatina from Salieri's Prima la musica e poi le parole, and Papageno's whistle borrows a motif from Salieri's Concerto for Clavicembalo in B-flat major.

• 3. Orchestral Architecture

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  Charles Rosen once wrote that Die Zauberflöte possesses "the greatest variety of orchestral color that the eighteenth century was to know," and that its lavishness is paradoxically an economy, since each effect is a concentrated dramatic stroke. Mozart scored the work for a substantial ensemble: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets doubling basset horns, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings, and a four-part chorus. For Papageno's magic bells, Mozart called for a stromento d'acciaio, an instrument of steel, that has since been lost to history. Modern scholars believe it was a keyed glockenspiel; today it is typically replaced by a celesta. The overture was composed after the rest of the opera was finished. It opens with a solemn three-chord brass sequence associated with the Priests of the Temple of Wisdom. The number three carries weight throughout the score: three ladies, three boys, three temples. The overture shifts from adagio into a lively fugue in E-flat major, reaches a false ending, reprises the brass sequence, and resumes in E-flat minor before returning to E-flat major. Rosen's specific examples of what makes each moment a single dramatic stroke are telling: Papageno's whistle, the Queen of the Night's coloratura, the bells, Sarastro's trombones, and the farewell in scene 1 for clarinets and pizzicato strings. Each is identifiable from a single bar.

• 4. Trials, Temples, and the Queen's Defeat

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  Prince Tamino enters Act 1 fleeing a serpent in a rough, rocky landscape, and from that first desperate moment the opera sets up a world where nothing is quite what it seems. The Queen of the Night sends him to rescue her daughter Pamina from a man she describes as a powerful, evil demon. That demon turns out to be Sarastro, the high priest of a brotherhood devoted to wisdom, and Tamino gradually discovers that the Queen herself is the true threat. The trial structure that drives Acts 1 and 2 was not arbitrary stagecraft. Tamino and Pamina pass through ordeals of silence, separation, and physical danger, walking unscathed through fire and water protected by the music of the magic flute. Papageno, the opera's comic heart, fails every trial but is rewarded anyway with his ideal companion Papagena, after he nearly hangs himself in despair and is stopped by three boys who remind him he can play his magic bells. The Queen's final assault comes at night outside the temple, where she and her three ladies plot its destruction. Thunder and lightning cast them into eternal night. Sarastro then announces the sun's triumph over the night and the fraudulent power of hypocrites. The text for the finale notes a Baroque chorale prelude at the trial-by-fire scene, inspired by Martin Luther's hymn "Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein." That single detail suggests how far the opera reaches: from Viennese fairy-tale burlesque to the deepest strata of German sacred music, all in the same evening.

• 5. Freemasonry and Enlightenment

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  Schikaneder and Mozart were both Freemasons, as was Ignaz Alberti, the engraver and printer of the first libretto. The opera's Masonic scaffolding is extensive. The number three recurs constantly: three ladies, three boys, three temples, three-chord brass sequences. The ordeals of initiation map onto Masonic ritual. Sarastro's brotherhood worships Isis and Osiris, and the opera's concluding image of the sun triumphing over the night belongs to Masonic symbolic vocabulary. Some scholars argue the Masonic influence is exaggerated; others see it as the opera's structural spine. The opera is also understood as an expression of Enlightenment philosophy and has been read as an argument for enlightened absolutism. The Queen of the Night has attracted multiple political interpretations. Some see her as a figure of dangerous obscurantism. Others read her as a representation of Empress Maria Theresa, who banned Freemasonry from Austria. A third reading identifies her with the Roman Catholic Church, which was and remains strongly anti-Masonic. None of these interpretations is definitive, and all of them have been staged. What the source material is clear about is that the central theme of the work is not love alone, but the process of becoming a better person by overcoming trials. Scholars repeatedly draw a parallel to Wagner's Parsifal on this point. That parallel, a comparison the libretto did not invite but history has confirmed, shows where the opera's ambition actually points.

• 6. The Premiere and Its Afterlife

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  Mozart's sister-in-law Josepha Hofer sang the Queen of the Night at the premiere, and Mozart's letters to his wife Constanze document his almost giddy pleasure at the opera's reception. On the 7th of October 1791 he wrote to Constanze, who was in Baden, that the house was "as full as ever" and listed the numbers that had to be encored. He noted that "what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval." He went to hear his opera almost every night, bringing friends and relatives. The opera celebrated its hundredth performance in November 1792. Mozart died on the 5th of December 1791 and did not live to see it. The work spread from Vienna first to Lemberg on the 21st of September 1792, then to Prague, then made what one account describes as a triumphal progress through Germany's opera houses great and small. By the early nineteenth century it had reached essentially all the countries of Europe where opera was performed. Earlier performances were often of heavily altered or in some cases mutilated versions. The scholar Peter Branscombe documents this pattern, and the composer Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith is associated with some of the most extreme reworkings. Productions of the past century have tended toward greater fidelity to Mozart's music, though faithful staging of the original explicit stage directions remains rare. On the 28th of December 1791, three and a half weeks after Mozart's death, his widow Constanze offered to send a manuscript score to the electoral court in Bonn. Nikolaus Simrock published this text as the first full-score edition in Bonn in 1814, claiming it accorded with Mozart's own wishes, a claim he made in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on the 13th of September 1815.

• 7. On Record

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  The first known recording of The Magic Flute's overture was issued around 1903 by the Victor Talking Machine Company, performed by the Victor Grand Concert Band. The first complete recording came from a live performance at the 1937 Salzburg Festival, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera. That recording was not officially released until many years after the performance itself. The first studio recording followed closely: Sir Thomas Beecham conducted the Berlin Philharmonic to complete it in 1938. Both historic recordings have been reissued on LP and compact disc. The critic Pauline Kael, writing in the 1970s, described the opera as making a special claim on one's affections because its libretto is, in her words, "high camp" and a "peerlessly silly masterpiece: sublimely lucid music arising out of a parodistic fairy tale that celebrates in all seriousness the exalted brotherhood of the Freemasons." Kael's phrase "sublimely lucid music" points to the permanent tension in the work: the music resolves what the drama deliberately leaves open. Toscanini's 1937 Salzburg performance, recorded before most of the world had access to The Magic Flute in any medium, was a document of a living tradition. That the first studio recording followed a year later in Berlin, with Beecham at the podium, marks how quickly the opera was moving from repertory fixture to recorded heritage.