(De)Translating Mozart: The Magic Flute in 1909 Paris

Once upon a time, there was a young fisherman who lived on the bank of the Nile River. He was in love with the beautiful girl next door. The happy couple made plans to marry, but one night the fisherman serenaded his fiancée with his panpipe. This fateful little bit of night music attracted the attention of a voluptuous nocturnal deity, a queen who became enamored of the fisherman and whisked him off to her magical realm for a night of wanton pleasure. In the cold light of day, the fisherman realized his mistake and begged his fiancée for forgiveness. Unfortunately, his night with the queen had corrupted his spirit, requiring him to undergo a ritual purification at a distant temple. Along the way, the intrepid fisherman met a charming bird catcher (and his fiancée) and learned that his beloved had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. After a series of trials and with the assistance of the benevolent high priest of Isis, the young fisherman rescued the maiden and was finally purged of his corruption, and all was again well for the young lovers.

This is the plot that late nineteenth-century French audiences associated with Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Penned in 1865 by Charles Nuitter and Alexandre Beaumont for a production at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris, the loose adaptation of Emanuel Schikaneder’s original libretto was an immediate success. Critics and audiences alike extolled Mozart’s music as a model of clarity and simplicity, and the libretto appealed to a generation of operagoers who had grown accustomed to the convoluted plots and spectacles of grand opéra. Gustave Bertrand’s review in Le ménestrel was typical in this regard, lauding the Théâtre-Lyrique’s Léon Carvalho as a “faithful and devoted restorer of Gluck, Weber, and Mozart.”¹ Bertrand derided Schikaneder’s original libretto at length, concluding that “the new appropriation is as apt and agreeable as possible; we only wish that Nuitter and Beaumont would further strengthen their dialogue.”² The dismissal of Schikaneder extended to the published version of the French libretto, which does not even mention him; the title page reads La Flûte enchantée: Opéra fantastique en quatre actes et sept tableaux par MM. Nuitter et Beaumont, Musique de Mozart.³ Critics and audiences were both satisfied with this new version of the opera, and it seemed that France finally had its definitive version of The Magic Flute.

This version was as much a cultural translation as a linguistic one. The peculiar idioms of the Singspiel—and The Magic Flute is perhaps more peculiar than most—were made intelligible through translating not only the libretto but the entire opera; the plot became as French as the text. David Levin has pointed out (regarding Peter Sellars’s 1988 staging of Le nozze di Figaro) that translation often “aims to erase difference by transporting a text from a source language to a target language. From this point of view, the most successful translation is one in which the temporal and referential gaps [. . .] are rendered invisible.”⁴ Such was presumably the goal sought by Nuitter and Beaumont in their version of The Magic Flute: a production that minimized the cultural and chronological distance between composer and audience, essentially remaking Mozart into a French Romantic composer.

Despite this contemporary orientation, their remaking was billed as acceptably “faithful” to Mozart’s (if not Schikaneder’s) original work, and the final product came off as substantially closer to the original Zauberflöte than the first French productions. In 1801 a version of the opera entitled Les mystères d’Isis had appeared at the Opéra, with a plot that bore only a superficial resemblance to Schikaneder’s original and a score that contained, in addition to most, but not all, of the numbers in The Magic Flute, a potpourri of selections from Mozart’s other operas as well as some music by Haydn. Les mystères was fairly successful and continued to be performed until 1827—which, according to fin-de-siècle...