Music

“I have this moment returned from the opera, which was full as ever... What always gives me most pleasure is the silent approval. You can see how this opera is becoming more and more popular…”
Mozart writing to his wife Constanze, 7-8 October 1791

When it was first performed in 1791 Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute was a revelation of musical originality and diversity for an unsuspecting Viennese audience. They discovered a new form of German musical theatre which was an inspired marriage of lowbrow popular entertainment combined with high drama of the calibre which was usually only considered suitable for the refined tastes of nobility and the court. Mozart’s first audiences were beguiled and at times confused by the narrative, the stylistic counterpoint and the contradictions inherent in the opera’s story. It is these elements, however, which continue to challenge and fascinate contemporary audiences more than two centuries later.

The Magic Flute was originally conceived as a popular piece of musical entertainment which was specifically written to be performed in the Theater auf der Wieden, a temporary theatre located in Vienna’s suburbs. The actor / manager Emanuel Schikaneder had taken a lease on the building and needed a popular work which his troupe could perform. He wanted a work which would make the most of the theatre’s facilities for special stage effects, such as multiple trapdoors, wires for flying actors and props. It is very likely that Schikaneder, who also wrote the libretto, included contributions from his company. Mozart then transformed the fairytale format of the libretto, not least by choosing to write the opera as a German singspiel which meant that he was not restricted by the form and convention of his previous Italian Da Ponte trilogy (Le nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni). The resulting opera deftly blends narrative and music in an extraordinary combination of rare simplicity and great complexity expressed with an exhilarating freedom which has ensured that The Magic Flute remains fresh and innovative to this day.

While The Magic Flute is not as strong on characterisation as the Da Ponte operas, Mozart’s attention in telling the story was focused on issues which didn’t necessarily need three dimensional characters for their propagation. For him it was the narrative and the journey which his characters embarked upon which were of greater significance. As a half-allegorical and half-farcical entertainment the narrative can be understood on many different levels; at its most straightforward it tells the story of a young man and woman’s progress (Tamino and Pamina) from the darkness of ignorance to the light of understanding through the trials of experience, whilst contrasting this with the comic failure to progress to self-realisation of another young man (Papageno). It begins in darkness in the realm of the evil Queen of the Night and ends in glorious illumination, through the benign enlightenment demonstrated by Sarastro and his followers. It is against the grandeur of this solemn progress that the comic, almost slapstick, subplot of Papageno’s “progress,” that of the earthy, material man, is also played out. Schikaneder and Mozart had undoubtedly wanted their work to appeal to a popular audience who would be easily engaged by comic theatricalities and flamboyant stage effects. The resulting experience would have been similar to the contemporary tradition of British pantomime, still popular today.

Much has been written about the story’s references to the symbolism and rituals of Freemasonry, the brotherhood which Mozart belonged to in the last years of his life. To this day it is a secret society which meets for the purpose of pursuing truth and “enlightenment” through charity, humanity, tolerance, and brotherly love, themes which are articulated in The Magic Flute. If however, you strip the opera of its Masonic veneer, the story still retains its symbolic symmetries and contrasts: light and dark, sun and moon, male and female, fire and water; gold and silver, which find expression in the plot and characters.

But more than any analysis of its narrative, it is the music Mozart composed for The Magic Flute which provides the constant “magic” of the opera. And whilst breaking with convention by adopting a singspiel format of popular German theatre, he still paid homage to some of his own musical heroes, notably: Bach, Handel and Gluck, all of whose influences his audiences would easily have recognized.

For a two act opera to be so self-contained within a two and a half hour time frame Mozart’s other great innovation was his economy of style. Aware that the boisterous audiences of the popular theatre would not have been so indulgent of the overblown Italian arias and recitative favoured in Viennese court circles, Mozart contained his music within a concise framework, his technical proficiency and flair enabling him to work through an elaborate drama at a breathtaking pace, in which narrative and musical harmony are so effortlessly matched.