The opera novice: Mozart’s The Magic Flute

Is there a more crowd-pleasing opera than The Magic Flute, asks Sameer Rahim.

Ekaterina Siurina as Pamina and Charles Castronovo as Tamino in Die Zauberflote at the Royal Opera House
Ekaterina Siurina as Pamina and Charles Castronovo as Tamino in Die Zauberflote at the Royal Opera House Credit: Photo: Mike Hoban

I’ve been listening to a lot of Wagner recently – partly inspired by Nicholas Spice’s recent stimulating essay in the LRB. That was entitled “Is Wagner Bad for Us?” and while I can't answer that question, I do know that a perpetual diet of heavy Teutonic music can leave you yearning for something lighter. So it’s with relief that I turned to Mozart’s pantomime concoction Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), currently playing at the Royal Opera House in David McVicar’s revived production.

Any novices expecting a witty romantic comedy in the vein of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations like Le Nozze di Figaro or Cosi fan tutte will be surprised. The plot of The Magic Flute is more akin to a fairy tale: a noble prince is ordered by the mysterious Queen of the Night to rescue a beautiful princess who has been kidnapped.

The Magic Flute, first performed in 1791 in a suburban Viennese theatre, was called a Singspiel on the playbill. Literally meaning Sing-speak, the form combines spoken dialogue with arias and ensembles, and relies on spectacular visual effects to keep the crowd happy. Interestingly in his letters Mozart referred to it as an opera – he evidently took the piece more seriously than the punters seeing it. He wrote the music to the words of his friend Emanuel Schikaneder, an actor, impresario and fellow enthusiast for the freemasons – a group whose rational ideals had a powerful influence on the opera.

It opens in the thick of action. A serpent is attacking Prince Tamino, the hero, when three ladies appear from nowhere and save him. This scene, like many in the opera, could as easily be played for laughs or as genuinely scary – the music indicates the latter, I think. (David McVicar’s Chinese dragon tries scariness without banishing the comic aspect.) These ladies claim to work for the Queen of the Night, whose daughter Pamina has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro. When Tamino sees her picture he breaks into one of those heart-melting arias (Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön: “This image is enchantingly lovely”) that Mozart seems to have been able to conjure with ease. When we meet the Queen she gives Tamino a magic flute to aid him on his quest.

Tamino’s comic sidekick is the birdcatcher Papageno, whose sweet innocence makes him the most endearing of all the characters or – if he’s played badly – the most annoying. It’s arguable that a successful Magic Flute depends on who’s playing Papageno because especially in the second half he almost supersedes the main plot. This oddity made more sense when you realise that in the original production he was played by the librettist Schikaneder. Mozart seems to have been happy to indulge him – and even join in the fun. In a letter he reports how he liked to sit in the wings and play improvisations on the glockenspiel while his friend was performing.

In a dramatic reversal that seems a touch puzzling (there is a theory that the libretto was throw together in a rush) when Tamino eventually meets the kidnapper Sarastro and his temple-goers, they turn out to be anything but evil. In this production we see the temple’s speaker bathed in an enlightened glow, playing with an instrument that measures the heavens – controlling the Queen of the Night's elemental forces. Sarastro’s music is grave, impressive and, for me, a trifle pompous. The trials he makes Tamino and Pamina undergo – walking through fire etc – before they can marry seem more designed to allow dramatic stage enactment than to be true tests of virtue.

Before then the Queen of the Night returns for the opera’s most famous aria. While ordering her daughter to murder Sarastro she pushes the human voice to breaking point by climbing to the highest of high notes. This isn’t Mozart simply gunning for impressive effects: it’s meant to express anger beyond words. As Julian Rushton writes in the programme here, it is “a direct characterisation of a brilliant but unstable and grasping personality”. Recordings don't do justice to feeling the dangerous physical thrill of those high notes when you're in the theatre. Though she is eventually defeated, her voice echoes into the night.

My enjoyment of The Magic Flute was much enhanced by watching Ingmar Bergman’s marvellous film adaptation. Made for Swedish television in 1975 and filmed as though in a theatre, the whole performance is imbued Bergman's delight in all aspects of Mozart’s opera. As the overture plays the camera focuses on the reactions of different audience members. Some are thoughtful, some smiling and others in tears – perfectly in keeping with the music’s nervous energy, oscillating between sadness and joy. We keep returning to one cherubic girl, whose features resemble that of the child Mozart: she becomes an emblem of our inner child.

The secret of the film – aside from a genuinely charming Papegeno, Hakan Hagegard – is that Bergman presents the comic parts comically and the serious parts seriously. When Pamina and then Papagena, thinking their lovers have abandoned them, contemplate suicide in the second act, the music’s dark edge is made dramatically real. There are also sly jokes: the camera goes backstage during the interval and we see Sarastro reading the sheet music for Parsifal and a boy with a Donald Duck comic. In a nod to Bergman’s iconic scene from The Seventh Seal, Tamino and Pamina play chess.

Few, I believe, would argue that The Magic Flute was Mozart’s greatest opera. It was designed to be a popular hit in a form of theatre whose conventions have dated badly. And yet with such rough unpromising material he manages to evoke both child-like wonder and rational enlightenment – as well the darker pulsations of life. How does he pull it off? Mozart truly is a magician.

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