Die Zauberflöte: Oper und Mysterium (review)

252 Book Reviews successfully promoted the English ballad stanza (the so-called Chevy Chase stanza) that remained a standard German verse form well into the twentieth century. Numerous Anacreontic poems, romances, verse fables, idylls, adaptations from Horace and from Minnesang, didactic and epigrammatic poetry and much more are included in this edition. Hettche provides the best known of Gleim's collections in full and a representative selection of poems from the remaining ones, all in the original orthography. He also includes Gleim's verse adaptations of two contemporary dramas: Lessing's Philotas and Klopstock's Der Tod Adams. The choices are thoughtful and informed. Throughout his life Gleim urgently fostered contacts with other German writers, reaching far beyond his own generation and the Halberstadt environs to create a network of cordial exchange. Portions of Gleim's extensive correspondence have been published over the years. Letters to and from Boie, Heinse, Herder, J. G. Jacobi, Karsch, Ewald von Kleist, Klopstock, Lange, Lessing, Ramler, Uz.Voss are among those in print, some in full critical editions, others in excerpted or more informal presentation. Here Hettche has selected the correspondence between Gleim and Bürger to represent the activity so vital to Gleim's wellbeing ; one of the letters is previously unpublished.The engaging correspondence underscores, in particular, Gleim's continuing attention to younger poets and his well-intentioned hopes to provide real assistance to them. The greatest value of the collection is the pleasure of easy and attractive access to Gleim's earliest poetry, upon which his reputation was founded, and the opportunity to sample broadly from his later writings. Goethe scholars might also find special interest in his 1797 response to the Xenien. In his sixty-six answering poems Kraft und Schnelle des alten Peleus, Gleim does not refrain from attack: "Des Thüringer Waldes hochborstige Faunen,/ Nicht mächtig ihrer bösen Launen,/ Sind eingebrochen ins Thal / Der stillen Musen!" Accompanied by notes and commentary, additional excerpts from Gleim's extensive correspondence, an afterword, annotated index and bibliography, the volume will undoubtedly serve as an important working edition for scholars for the next decades. But the more casual reader will also use it.The range and number of texts far exceeds Jürgen Stenzel's 1969 Reclam edition of Gleim's poems, regretably out of print. In short, like Hettche's critical edition of Hölty's works, also published by Wallstein Verlag, the volume makes a serious contribution to the study of German poetry and it addresses a very real gap in eighteenth-century studies. University of California, Irvine Meredith Lee Jan Assmann, Die Zauberflöte: Oper und Mysterium. Munich: Hanser, 2005. 384 pp., with 38 illustrations and numerous musicological examples. First-time viewers of Mozart's Zauberflöte most likely experience the same consternation as Prince Tamino when their initial expectations of a conventional "knight in shining armor" rescue of Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, from the clutches of the (purportedly) evil sorcerer Sarastro are confounded . Thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Jacques Chailley (The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera [Paris, 1968; English translation by Herbert Weinstock, New York: Knopf, 1971 ]), a critical consensus has emerged that sees in the plot of Die Zauberflöte not only the triumph of light over darkness, reason over superstition that is a main goal of the European Enlightenment, but also specific Goethe Yearbook 253 elements of Masonic ritual. In this regard,Tamino becomes a candidate for initiation in a Secret Society who needs to be disabused of his pre-conceptions of Sarastro and his fellow priests in the Temple of Wisdom. What, then, does the most recent book of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann add to the already immense literature on Die Zauberflöte? The answer is contained within its short, but appropriately cryptic subtitle, which refers to the Hellenistic Mystery Religions that Freemasons like Ignaz von Born—the prototype for Sarastro—believed were derived from Egyptian religious rites performed in the interiors of the pyramids. Assmann reminds his readers that, as of 1791, the Rosetta Stone had not yet been found and deciphered and that the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphs was still wholly a matter...