Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theatre (review)

Dr. Johnson's oft-quoted description of eighteenth-century Italian opera as "an exotic and irrational entertainment" was just a throwaway remark in his Life of Hughes, one of his biographical sketches of English poets written between 1777 and 1781. For his famous dictionary, Johnson instead borrowed the more reasonable definition of the genre from Dryden's preface to Albion and Albanus (1685): "a poetical tale or fiction, represented by vocal and instrumental musick, adorned with scenes, machines, and dancing." There is plenty to unpick here: "poetical," "represented," "adorned," as well as the status of that "or" separating "tale" and "fiction." But it is the "exotic and irrational"—and the suspicions and delights they arouse—that have animated the history of opera since it emerged in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. The chief problem, of course, is the "vocal and instrumental musick" that throws out of the window traditional dramatic canons of verisimilitude.

This may not be too much of an issue for the seventeenth century, when the Baroque pursuit of the marvelous meshed with one of opera's chief functions, princely glorification: Louis XIV could plausibly be represented as a magnificent Apollo dispensing mythical benefits to his subjects. David Buch is somewhat more anxious about the continuation of the trend in the so-called Enlightenment, when magical operas, ballets, pantomimes, and other such forms of theatrical entertainment held sway over a stage that should in principle have known better. One might reasonably ask (although Buch does not) just how "enlightened" was the Enlightenment outside a few narrow intellectual circles. There is also a very large body of scholarship on magic, witchcraft, and the supernatural in eighteenth-century Europe well known to readers of this journal if not always, it seems, to Buch. Thus, he also sidelines a crucial question: to what extent do these magical operas partake of broader political (philosophical, religious, etc.) discourses to reinforce or subvert predominant ideologies and practices?

Buch's project began as an attempt to identify the roots of Mozart's "magic" opera, Die Zauberflöte, first performed in Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden on September 30, 1791. He ended up digging further and further back through French, Italian, and German theater to produce a comprehensive survey (save for England) of eighteenth-century musical excursions into the supernatural. This is a remarkable achievement hampered only by the fact that the sheer vastness of the repertory—hundreds of operas and related works are mentioned or listed—allows for only the briefest characterization of pieces the vast majority of which have no currency on the modern stage. It is hard to know what to take away from this whirlwind tour other than a stock series of musical tropes for magical moments (flutes figure prominently), and some sense of how musical shock and awe—the search for what the French called the terrible—in the eighteenth century might have developed (as Buch rightly notes) into Romantic notions of the sublime.

Buch covers well the multiple sources of these fictions, ranging from myth through contes des fées and similar archetypes to romance epic filtered by way of Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, although he could have made the point that Ariosto's and Tasso's exotic Others—the devilish pagans occupying a Jerusalem awaiting liberation from the crusaders—were still a very real threat at the gates of Europe. But it is clear that the fiendish Armidas, brave Rolands, and wise (or not) Zoroasters that helped populate the supernatural worlds of eighteenth-century theater often served to vindicate opera as a musico-dramatic genre save where the philosophes on the one hand (Rousseau), and the comic realists on the other (Goldoni), sought to bring it under rational control. More interesting, however, is the question of how to distinguish music representing the supernatural from the music tout court...