Synopsis

The Magic Flute

Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Librettists: Emanuel Schikaneder, J.D. McClatchy (translator)

Three ladies in the service of the Queen of the Night save the fainting Prince Tamino from a serpent (“A serpent! A monster!”). When they leave to tell the queen, the bird catcher Papageno bounces in and boasts to Tamino that it was he who killed the creature (“I’m Papageno”). The ladies return to give Tamino a portrait of the queen’s daughter, Pamina, who they say is enslaved by the evil Sarastro, and they padlock Papageno’s mouth for lying. Tamino falls in love with Pamina’s face in the portrait (“This portrait’s beauty”). The queen, appearing in a burst of thunder, is grieving over the loss of her daughter; she charges Tamino with Pamina’s rescue (“My fate is grief”). The ladies give a magic flute to Tamino and silver bells to Papageno to ensure their safety, appointing three spirits to guide them (“Hm! hm! hm! hm!”).

Sarastro’s slave Monostatos pursues Pamina (“You will not dare escape”) but is frightened away by the feather-covered Papageno, who tells Pamina that Tamino loves her and intends to save her. Led by the three spirits to the Temple of Sarastro, Tamino is advised by a high priest that it is the queen, not Sarastro, who is evil. Hearing that Pamina is safe, Tamino charms the animals with his flute, then rushes to follow the sound of Papageno’s pipes. Monostatos and his cohorts chase Papageno and Pamina but are left helpless by Papageno’s magic bells. Sarastro, entering in great ceremony (“Long life to Sarastro”), promises Pamina eventual freedom and punishes Monostatos. Pamina is enchanted by a glimpse of Tamino, who is led into the temple with Papageno.

Sarastro tells his priests that Tamino will undergo initiation rites (“O Isis and Osiris”). Monostatos tries to kiss the sleeping Pamina (“Men were born to be great lovers”). He is discovered by the Queen of the Night, who dismisses him. She gives her daughter a dagger with which to murder Sarastro (“Here in my heart, Hell’s bitterness”).

The weeping Pamina is confronted and consoled by Sarastro (“Within our sacred temple”). Tamino and Papageno are told by a priest that they must remain silent and refrain from eating, a vow that Papageno immediately breaks when he takes a glass of water from a flirtatious old lady. The old lady vanishes when he asks her name. The three spirits appear to guide Tamino through the rest of his journey and to tell Papageno to be quiet. Tamino remains silent even when Pamina appears, which breaks her heart since she cannot understand his reticence (“Now my heart is filled with sadness”).

The priests inform Tamino that he has only two more trials to complete his initiation (“Why, beloved, must we part?”). Papageno longs for a cuddly wife but settles for the old lady. When he promises to be faithful she turns into a young Papagena but soon disappears.

After many dangers, Pamina and Tamino are reunited and face the ordeals of water and fire protected by the magic flute.

Papageno is saved from attempted suicide by the spirits who remind him that if he uses his magic bells he will find true happiness. When he does, Papagena appears and the two plan for the future and move into a bird’s nest
(“Pa-pa-pa…”). The Queen of the Night, her three ladies, and Monostatos attack the temple but are defeated and banished. Sarastro joins Pamina and Tamino as the people hail Isis, Osiris, and the triumph of courage, virtue, and wisdom.

Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

Performance notes by J Gates

In The Magic Flute, Mozart and his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, created a veritable miracle. In the context of a joyous smile, they tell us through a musical narrative the nature of things. It is a cosmology, which posits that the essence of life lies is the energy of opposing forces, in a dialectical tension between night and day, woman and man, nature and culture, emotion and reason, odd numbers and even numbers, fire and water, etc. The true sensation is that it is completely unprejudiced and impartial; it is Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but without the philosopher’s polemic tone and biting cynicism.
In the beginning The Magic Flute shows the Queen of the Night, a sorrow-riven mother, telling a young prince, Tamino, that her only child, Pamina, has been abducted by the magic of an evil sorcerer, Sarastro. Tamino embarks on a noble mission to rescue Pamina, but before he goes very far, he encounters a wise old oracle who tells him that he has been deceived, that only the purest of virtues lay in Sarastro’s actions, that the Queen of the Night is nothing more than a power-hungry shrew whose motives are to selfishly rule the universe. So it would seem the battle lines are now clear -a classic struggle between good and evil. But wait... at a second glance, something seems askew. It soon becomes evident that Sarastro is a slave holder and that he has his slaves beaten. The relativity of good and bad pervades the work. Monostatos is obviously pathological in his notions of love. But he is a slave, beaten and closed out from any social interaction (as is evident in his name, “mono” “statos”). Now, it seems to me that we all know if you beat a dog and chain him up, you can alter his normal behavior and make him mean. I believe people react no differently. So where is the evil then, in the beaten (literal or figurative) being or the perpetrator of the cruelty?

By the end of the opera, Tamino has succeeded in all of the trials Sarastro has put before him, and he has won unity with Pamina, but to me he seems strangely sullen in this victory. In contrast, Papageno, Tamino’s earthy sidekick, cannot achieve the lofty spiritual actualization that Tamino has won, but when all is said and done, Papageno and his new-found love, Papagena, appear to me to be the happiest of all. What does this say of the visceral and the spiritual, if happiness is an indication of enlightenment?
 
Indeed, The Magic Flute confounds our need to stamp a seal of good or evil on the perceived dualities of the order of our existence, but when I view it as an impartial ontological paradigm of all that exists, I can only be astounded by the utter thorough soundness, clarity and efficiency with which this work expresses what are nearly uimpeakably complicated concepts of our being - and to top it off, it does it with a smile.