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

Abstract

Mozart's last opera, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflote), 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 Th e Magic Flute is a deliberate reshaping on the part of Schikaneder 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.