‘Night into Day’: Patterns of Symbolism in Mozart's The Magic Flute

P.G. BAKER 'Night into Day': Patterns of Symbolism in Mozart's The Magic Flute I Mozart's last opera, The Magic Flute (Die ZauberfWte), is still the most misunderstood of all his works, largely because of its deceptive, fairytale simplicity, its curious mixture of folk comedy and high seriousness. Generations of opera lovers have thought of the opera as merely an entertaining spectacle of magic and fanciful diversion, all but ignoring its serious core, the magnificent drama of regeneration and initiation. Even the most sophisticated operaphiles have generally shown themselves content to regard the symbolic and sober aspects of the opera as mere intrusions or mistakes on the part of The Magic Flute's controversial librettist, Emmanuel Schikaneder. Much of the confusion surrounding the degree of seriousness in The Magic Flute may be attributed to the flamboyant Schikaneder, whose buffoonery as the first Papageno was enough to irritate even Mozart. For years it was also believed that the so-called inconsistency of plot - that is, the transformation of the Queen of the Night and the redirected quest of the hero - was the product of carelessness, of drastic revisions on Schikaneder's part when faced at midpoint with a rival opera on a similar subject. Of course all such theories are sadly inadequate, for by that time Mozart had finished most of the music for his new opera; and not even Mozart, prolific genius that he was, could have revised his material so extensively at such short notice. What we are really confronted with in The MagiC Flute is a deliberate reshaping on the part ofSchikaneder and Mozart of traditional folk lore and fantastische Geschichte into an entirely new form. Between them they stood a fairy-tale on its end and left to posterity one of the most enigmatic, though fascinating, operas ever written. 1 The action of The Magic Flute embraces four separate levels of existence , which provide the underlying foundation for the quest and initiation of the hero and his bride. At the summit we find the sun itself, radiant and eternal, and also the music of the spheres which the music of Tamino's flute approximates at a human level. Directly beneath the empire of the great sun itself, its apex touching the sun, is the kingdom of Sarastro. As his name (derived from Zoroaster) suggests, Sarastro is high priest of the kingdom of the sun. His kingdom is one·of human nature realized, in which, as in Spenser's realm of 'faerie,' man has risen above the cycles of nature and his original fall to recapture the paradisal vision, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1979/80 0042~0247/80/0100-0095$ol -5010 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS and to reassume his pristine place of perfection. In the comic vision this realm of perfection is symbolized by the Garden or the Temple, and it is no accident that both are present in the upper sun kingdom of Sarastro. Below this realm of human nature realized is the sphere of fallen operations in which the 'mesh of good and evil' (as Hawthorne called it) is the natural condition of a fallen world of man. It is in this realm of fallen human nature that Tamino finds himself in the opening scene of the opera, pursued by a serpent of archetypal significance. Consequently he is offered a moral dialectic: he may rise above this realm of humans surrounded and alienated by a hostile or indifferent world of nature; or he may sink beneath this third level to the infernal realm, one of 'ewige Nacht.' At the conclusion of the opera, appropriately, the misguided Queen and her attendant furies are hurled into this lower world. In Dante's and Spenser's poetic cosmos the third level of existence, the realm of fallen human activity, comes closest to the poets' own times, the world of their contemporaries, whether it be the faction-divided Florence of 1300 or the Tudor-governed England of '590. Similarly the third level of The MagicFlute approaches the Vienna of Mozart's day, glancing in Masonic terms at the composer's own milieu. Much of the opera has been interpreted allegOrically, with varied...