Opera Philadelphia's "Magic Flute' (1st review)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hadn't been feeling well, but the premiere of his Singspiel opera, The Magic Flute, lifted his spirits immensely with its successful premiere in Vienna on September 30, 1791. He had, indeed, never before experienced such a triumph. Within the next year, the opera would be performed 100 times.

It has never fallen out of favor since. Novels and plays have been based on it. Ingmar Bergman and Kenneth Branagh made films of it. Cambodian dancers adapted it. The Canadian national anthem is based on it. And, of course, no grand opera company worthy of the name doesn't include it in its repertory.

Perhaps, though, the gods quibbled with a phrase by Mozart's librettist and Masonic lodge brother, Emanuel Schikaneder, who premiered the role of Papageno: When virtue triumphs on earth, "mortals will be like gods." Less than ten weeks after the premiere, Mozart himself was dead.

Purification rituals

The Magic Flute is about many things, but the music is what matters. The Masonic scaffolding of the plot— triads everywhere, in the story line, the score, the scenery— lends a patina of Enlightenment mumbo-jumbo to the simple and perennial tale of two lovers who must endure a series of trials— including a pretty awful prospective mother-in-law— before they can worthily unite.

Tamino is a virtuous prince who must nonetheless undergo "purifications" based on ancient alchemical formulas. Pamina is a princess whose mother, the Queen of the Night, tells her that she will win the hand of her intended, but then sets Pamina up to be ravished by the queen's lecherous minion, Monostatos.

Why would Mom do such a thing? Well, she's evil, see— or, more accurately, the personification of those dark, tellurian forces that virtue must overcome.

All of which doesn't keep Mozart from giving the queen two of the most famously difficult and gorgeous arias in opera, thereby causing us to hope she won't be banished too quickly.

Phallic overtones

Opposed to the queen is Sarastro, the stately high priest whose cult is clearly based on Masonic ritual. He shepherds Tamino through his trials, aided by a magic flute that represents the ultimate harmony the prince seeks as well as serving as a protective wand. The phallic overtones of this sweet reed speak for themselves.

Pamina is more impatient of all this stuff, and Tamino seems as coy as Clark Kent in preserving her virtue.

The subplot involves the bird catcher Papageno, whose formula for the good life is simpler: sleeping, eating, drinking and wenching. As with Sancho Panza or Falstaff, Papageno exists not merely to provide comic relief but also to poke fun at all schemes designed to ennoble human nature. In fact, his send-up of the main plot, along with the queen's quirky machinations, is what makes The Magic Flute an opera at all rather than a somewhat staid cantata.

Although Tamino undergoes the symbolic ordeals, it's really the female of the species who seems in need of purification rites. Women, the libretto makes clear, are impulsive, fickle, irrational— Sarastro's order, like the Masons themselves, is needless to say for males only—and wickedness is personified by the queen.

Politically incorrect

Ideologically, then, The Magic Flute is terribly retrograde by modern standards, and the patriarchal marriage that it proposes as the reward of virtue and the road to bliss is a nonstarter in our modern world.

Fortunately, though, Mozart burlesques both sexes sufficiently to redress the balance. The Magic Flute is comic in its resolution— ordered virtue overcoming the anarchic forces of vice— but comic throughout in the way it juxtaposes high and low, the solemn and the bawdy.

Opera Philadelphia has taken this cue in a well-mounted and highly entertaining production, first staged by Diane Paulus for the Canadian Opera Company.

Hitting the high F

The first thing to get out of the way in a review of The Magic Flute is whether the Queen of the Night hit the F6 in her "Hell's Vengeance" aria. If it doesn't happen, forget the rest of the show; it's all you'll remember. Soprano Rachele Gilmore hit it, to deserved applause, and was generally a serviceable dragon lady.

Bass Jordan Bisch, as Sarastro, had the opposite challenge: a string of low Fs to dig out of the bottom of the register, and the effort was apparent. Mark Stone's Papageno was a fine, scene-stealing piece of work.

Antonio Lozano, a handsome presence onstage, made a dutiful Tamino; his role is dramatically if not vocally the most difficult in the opera, because he is almost entirely passive throughout. That makes for a very wooden sort of swain, unless at least some ardor and conflict can be shown. We understand that Tamino is meant to be a paragon, but he needs to be more.

Elizabeth Zaroff's Pamina displayed spirit, and Joseph Gaines's Monostatos was suitably randy. The queen's three female attendants, black-clad like their mistress and, in an inspired touch, wearing identical black-rimmed glasses, were utilized to much comic effect, at one point clambering erotically over the sleeping, Gulliver-like Tamino.

Myung Hee Cho designed the fine sets and costumes, and Drew Billiau worked his usual wonders with light design, especially in the dawn colors that signify the risen sun that banishes the night and affirms virtue.

Ben Franklin belonged

The Masons were in the progressive vanguard of the late 18th-Century Enlightenment, hard as it may be to credit that now. In the absence of political parties, they served as a sounding board for critique and reform. Their secrecy was a necessity, but also self-validating; they conceived themselves as a select elite that drew upon ancient wisdom as well as modernizing notions of government and religion.

Haydn was a Mason; so was the Prussian king and enlightened despot Frederick the Great, along with Ben Franklin and George Washington. Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello fame was a member, and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, currently is.

Personally, I'm not cut out for fraternities and secret societies. But give the Masons their due: they gave us The Magic Flute.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read a related commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.