#260.  MAGIC.   Is there any noise anywhere in the world, any sounds and sweet airs so lyric-glorious, as those of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte--The Magic Flute?  In Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a fad going for “magic” operas, so Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, raided fairy tales, Egyptian mythology, and a frame of Masonic numerology and moral adages to come up with the opera’s moonstruck and kitchen-sink storyline.  Richard Wagner complained of Mozart’s way of decorating silly or mediocre stories with sublime music; but in The Magic Flute, the orchestral richness and the seraphic voice-writing give reality and startling life to the stylized emotions of the tale.  The characters experience fear and rage and confusion and, finally, joy and resolution, but express them more beautifully than we ever can in our daily voices.  They speak with the tongues of men and angels.

      Perhaps the opera being something of a family affair allowed Mozart to rescue this human warmth from the last months of his illness (he only lived for two months after the opera’s debut). The lead male role was written for a friend, the coloratura acrobatics of the Queen of the Night for his sister-in-law; Schickaneder sang the role of the opera’s wonderful groundling, Papageno.  (When Papageno sees Papagena for the first time he’s so flummoxed it takes him a dozen tries just to say her name, and she mimics him in one of the most wonderful of all duets—stuttering beatified.) The sing-spiel format—music mixed with spoken dialogue, as in our musicals—and the range of characterizations allowed him some elbow room to mix a folksong ease in with the formalities of the temple scenes.  These and the hodge-podge nature of the story have attracted artists and designers of all stripes to The Magic Flute. Marc Chagall, David Hockney and Maurice Sendak all worked on productions.  Ingmar Bergman filmed it in 1975, sung in Swedish on a sound stage built to approximate the theatre in which the opera was originally produced; Kenneth Branagh filmed it in 2006, sung in English (Stephen Fry did the translation) and set in a stylized World War One*.  In 2015 the British theatre group 1927 produced a stage version in which the actors interacted with elaborate animation: the Queen of the Night was a gigantic spider, Papageno looked like Buster Keaton; Sarastro arrived on an animated pink elephant.  From the 1791 original staging you can go, apparently, just about anywhere you want to go.

       But if you don’t live near the great opera theatres, you can of course just stay home with your stereo.  I was first introduced to The Magic Flute in the seventies, when a friend and I were coordinating our record purchasing to plump up our opera collections.  From a cheapie recording I went on to the beautiful version on Deutsche Grammaphon, conducted by Karl Böhm. Evelyn Lear, Fritz Wunderlich and Dietrich Fischer-Direskau are in splendid voice, and Roberta Peters sings the Queen of the Night’s death-defying trills with incredible definition and exactness.  I’m sure you can still find it. I’ve been listening to this recording again the last few days, and more than once had those moments when my pleasure in the voices spilled over and raised me to tears. Tove Jansson once described one of her characters walking in the rain, “so happy it almost hurt.”  I know what she meant.

A good piece with video about the 1927 group production is https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/fXGCmwDCZCY2sSxsRWLYVd/kaleidoscopera-animating-mozarts-the-magic-flute      And on Youtube “Masonic Symbology in Mozart’s Magic Flute,” from Histoire Musique is a quick and comprehensible explication of its subject.

*Non-traditional setting is a pet thing for Branagh: his film of Much Ado is set in the Italian countryside, his Hamlet is a nineteenth-century Europe, his As You Like It in imperial Japan.  Both his film of The Magic Flute and Bergman’s are currently available for free on Youtube