“The Monstrous Rights of the Present”: Goethe and the Humanity of Die Zauberflöte

Like all useful period labels, “Enlightenment” evokes its opposite. Such terms are useful precisely because opposition generates dialectics and the development of ideas. When the dialectic of Enlightenment and Romanticism got to be too easy, about a generation ago, literary studies turned to what eighteenth-century studies had been happily mining as the dark side of the Enlightenment: its interest in inhuman machines, in the irrational, in monsters, and in boundary crossings of all sorts. With it, of course, has come the inevitable darkening of the Enlightenment’s most famous musical allegory, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Carolyn Abbate has pointed to several dark aspects of twentieth-century readings of the opera; this essay argues that the darkening actually began in the 1790s in Weimar.¹

There’s nothing strange about the time—witnessing the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror would have been enough to darken any intelligent person’s notions of where reason had brought Europe. In fact, the French would soon crush the German resistance to their revolution at Jena (in 1806), just twenty kilometers from Weimar. In the 1790s this ducal residence of some six thousand inhabitants became a major German intellectual center. Its residents were well informed about cultural and political developments in Europe, especially in the major urban centers of Paris, Vienna, and London; and its central point of energy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, had recently returned from almost two years in Italy. Even so, Weimar might seem a strange choice for darkening Mozart’s Enlightenment masterpiece. After all, Goethe and his friends were famous for their “German Classicism,” with its concomitant ideals of restraint, classical form, education of the individual as the basis of society (Bildung), and, above all, humanity. Goethe was an aggressive proponent of the highly refined form of neoclassicism emanating from Paris both before and during the Revolution. He is famous, among many other things, for the play Iphigenie auf Tauris, published in 1779 but actually first staged in 1779, the same year as Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, and indeed similar to it in style and aesthetic ideology: simple, restrained, noble. Yet here was Goethe, at his most intensely neoclassical and antirevolutionary, not only an enthusiastic proponent of Mozart’s German opera, which still carried many signs of its origins in the raucous Viennese Singspiel, but in fact the first important contributor to the darkening of it. The coexistence of prerevolutionary humanism with postrevolutionary gloom is the puzzle addressed here.

To make sense of it, I will examine several texts related to Goethe’s reception of Die Zauberflöte in the 1790s. These are presented not chronologically but rather in the order of their increasing engagement with the opera: first Goethe’s idyll Hermann und Dorothea (1797), then the version of the libretto he used for his staging of the opera beginning in 1794, then his own fragmentary sequel to the opera (begun in 1794, broken off for good in 1800)—a work Goethe scholars generally find so profound that they hardly know what to make of it. The sequel then evokes additional materials that entangled themselves with Goethe’s thinking about Mozart: a fragmentary epic called Die Geheimnisse (The Mysteries), begun 1784, and two well-known French neoclassical paintings by Joseph-Marie Vien that turn out to be major culprits in the darkening of Mozart’s text.

Goethe’s most accessible response to Die Zauberflöte is Hermann und Dorothea, an idyll in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer’s epics. German verse idyll is commonly in this meter, and Goethe elegantly exploited the form to juxtapose his German small-town characters against the epic background of the French Revolution. Hermann, son of the local innkeeper, loves tending his parents’ garden and fields more than flaunting his father’s (relative) wealth. The fashionable girls next door call him “Tamino,” because he has never heard of this popular figure and, as the reader soon realizes, because he is, to quote the Drei Knaben, so “standhaft, duldsam und verschwiegen.” Dorothea is a refugee from the French side of the...