This is the first of what I hope will be many posts discussing the analyses of The Magic Flute found in books about opera. In these posts, I plan to outline each analysis itself, and then share my response to it and whether I like and agree with it or not.
The Operagoer's Guide, by the late Catholic priest and music scholar M. Owen Lee, was one of the first books on opera I ever owned and is an excellent resource for newcomers to the genre. It offers synopses of 100 operas from the standard repertoire, as well as a few paragraphs or pages of commentary on each. The portion on Die Zauberflöte is the last in the book and one of the longest and most deeply intellectual. Right away, Lee dismisses the idea that Flute consists of wonderful music paired with a ridiculous libretto, then gives a brief overview of the Masonic and political allegories the plot can be seen to contain, before plunging into a deeper exploration that goes beyond any specific time, place, religion or politics.
In Lee's view, The Magic Flute celebrates "mankind's progression from nature to culture." The Queen of the Night and Sarastro take center stage in his analysis, as does the transition from "feminine" unconscious and intuition to "masculine" civilization and reason. He equates the Queen and the Three Ladies with primitive humankind. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers who worshipped mother goddesses, dwelt as one with nature in small familial or tribal groups, believed in magic and superstitions, had no written laws or codes of morality, and instead lived by instinct and intuition. Sarastro and his brotherhood of priests, by contrast, are equated with modern civilization. Cities, government, organized religion, worship of father gods like Osiris, Zeus or Yaweh, and reverence for law, order and reason. Lee rejects the idea that the Queen represents evil or that Sarastro represents pure goodness: they're both morally gray, just as nature and culture both have their good and bad qualities. But the Queen must inevitably lose to Sarastro, just as nature has given way to culture throughout most of the world. Yet a society with no intuition would be just as doomed as one with no reason, so Sarastro's world keeps the best of the Queen's: the magic flute and bells, the Three Boys, and most importantly, Pamina.
Lee also argues that Tamino and Pamina's journey reflects the universal coming-of-age process that children go through, which itself mirrors the larger social changes described above. While he doesn't go the Ingmar Bergman route of suggesting that Sarastro is Pamina's real father, he does portray him as her symbolic father, and Tamino's and Papageno's too, while the Queen is the symbolic mother to them all. Lee observes that in infancy and toddlerhood, a child's life traditionally revolves around the mother, who nurtures, lavishes love unconditionally, and creates a safe, happy world – not unlike the Queen's "never-never land" with its pretty stars, where Papageno catches his birds and is indulged with sweets, and where the Three Ladies protect Tamino from danger and dole out magical gifts. But charming and initially necessary though this world is, the child must eventually outgrow it. As children grow, Lee writes, they leave their mother's care behind and shift their focus to the father, who traditionally serves as their teacher and disciplinarian, and whose love, like initiation into Sarastro's brotherhood, must be earned through "obedience to commandments." But the child achieves ultimate maturity by embracing a synthesis of the mother's intuition and the father's reason – like Tamino and Pamina using the Queen's flute to succeed in Sarastro's trials.
For the most part, especially in the anthropological portion, I think Lee's analysis is excellent. While anthropologists might debate whether his description of prehistoric life is accurate or not, his fundamental association of the Queen with nature and Sarastro with culture feels spot-on. After all, throughout the opera, the Queen is associated with natural phenomena like stars, thunder and lightning, and the rocks and overgrown trees of her domain, while Sarastro's realm is one of splendid man-made temples and gardens. David Hockney certainly realized this in his famous production design for the opera, which contrasts the chaotic asymmetry and nature imagery of the Queen's realm with the orderly, geometric architecture of Sarastro's. While I never would have thought to associate the Queen and her followers with a primitive kin-based tribe or viewed Sarastro's temple community as a "city," it does make sense, given that Sarastro is surrounded by throngs of priests, slaves and worshippers, while the Queen's queendom seems to consist only of herself, her daughter, the Three Ladies, and servant Papageno. Reading the central conflict as "culture vs. nature" rather than "good vs. evil" also makes sense of Sarastro and his priests' morally gray qualities, of the Queen and Ladies' shortage of outright villainous actions, of the fact that they're the ones who give Tamino the magic flute and Papageno the bells, and of the way the Three Boys seem to freely serve both sides. In this reading, the Boys and the magical instruments represent the wise, valuable aspects of nature and intuition, which even the most reason-driven culture needs to keep in order to thrive.
Still, I don't consider this a flawless reading of the opera, or the only "true" one. For all the problems of the standard "good vs. evil" interpretation that a "nature vs. culture" reading solves, the latter still has problematic shades in its own right. No modern, liberal-minded person can overlook the darker implications of "Primitive, nature-loving, goddess-worshiping cultures were lawless, amoral and inevitably doomed – let's celebrate our advanced civilization with its organized religion and patriarchy." No amount of "They're both morally gray" or "Sarastro's world keeps the best of the Queen's world" can fully shake those implications. Of course Flute isn't a 21st century work and there's no way to make it completely unproblematic. But it's worth remembering that the Queen and her followers can also be seen to represent the Baroque era's ruling powers, the Ancien Régime and the Catholic church, which weren't uncivilized but over-civilized, while Sarastro and his priests also represent the underdog Freemasons and the church- and nobility-toppling values of the Enlightenment. Lee mentions this reading, but quickly moves past it in favor of a more "universal" interpretation (Being a priest himself, it makes sense that he should downplay the opera's possible anti-Catholic sentiments.) But it's innate within Mozart's music. The sophisticated Baroque-inspired glitter of the Queen's arias creates a much stronger sense of a dazzling yet decadent world than of a simple, primitive one, while the simpler, cleaner melodies of Sarastro and his priests evoke a simpler and purer way of life, not a more complex one.
I don't entirely care for Lee's reading of the Queen and Sarastro as the universal mother and father either, though it is valid. First of all, "nurturing mother, strict father" is hardly a universal upbringing for all children, even if it is traditional, nor is "mother dominates early childhood, father dominates later years." Those assumptions are all too gender essentialist (granted, Flute's libretto is full of gender essentialism to begin with), and regardless of gender, the idea that any parent's love should need to be "won through obedience" is personally repugnant to me. Secondly, it doesn't ring true to the entire opera. The Queen doesn't "lavish love unconditionally." Her most iconic moment consists of her imposing a fearsome commandment on her daughter and threatening to disown her if she disobeys! And afterwards, who comforts Pamina with a warm, nurturing aria about his belief in peace, forgiveness and offering love to those who stray? Sarastro!
But whether or not I agree with all of Lee's views of the opera, his is still a deeply thoughtful and wonderfully insightful analysis, definitely worth reading and worth considering. And if the suggestion that culture inevitably defeats nature feels uncomfortable, he reminds us that after Mozart's lifetime, the Romantic era replaced the Enlightenment, and nature, intuition and the unconscious were celebrated. Lee demonstrates this by looking to the greatest fantasy work of the 19th century German opera stage: Wagner's Ring Cycle, which, Lee observes, contains most of the same archetypes as Flute, but has them meet completely different ends. As the towering patriarch and civilization-builder, in place of Mozart's glorified Sarastro, Wagner gives us the tragically flawed Wotan. As his spiritual (and in The Ring, literal) progeny, the triumphant Tamino and Pamina are replaced by the doomed Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and in place of the resplendent Temple of Wisdom, we see Valhalla destroyed in flames. Instead of plunging into eternal night, the mother goddess (Erda) and three ladies (the Rhinemaidens) live on after civilization burns – the former dreaming her prophetic dreams, the latter three frolicking happily, just as they did at the beginning. And the magical artifact (the ring in place of the flute) returns to the natural, feminine source from which it came. Yet culture and reason will always rise again, Lee argues, and exist in an eternal balance with nature and intuition. We need both Mozart and Wagner, both Sarastro and the Queen, and all they represent.
The Operagoer's Guide is an outstanding book that I recommend to any new opera lover: not just for the chapter on Flute, but for all 100 opera commentaries. As for the Flute commentary, it might not be flawless, but for the most part it's excellent. Probably its best aspect is its sheer respect for Flute and refusal to dismiss its libretto as silly or incoherent. Whether or not Lee's analysis is one you agree with, it shows that Flute is worthy to be analyzed.
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