The Problem of Monostatos's Race

 

What to do about Monostatos in modern productions of The Magic Flute?

As far as the libretto’s problems of ethics are concerned, the misogyny can be worked around. The priests’ anti-woman pronouncements can be played in a way that clearly mocks them. Pamina can be given a dimensional and warmly human characterization that’s far more than a standard fairy-tale damsel. The Queen can be portrayed as a tragic villain driven to extreme actions by sympathetic motives, The ending can be staged  as a celebration of man and woman’s unity, in which Tamino and Pamina become fully equal partners who strengthen each other. But the issue of racism can’t be dealt with quite so easily. Unless the libretto is changed, a black Moorish slave is inescapably portrayed as a lecherous and sadistic yet inept comic villain. He preys on the white Pamina and repeatedly threatens to kill her for her scorn, whom Papageno initially thinks he's the Devil because of his dark skin, and he's portrayed as needing to be restrained and punished by his master Sarastro.

Some Mozart lovers defend Monostatos’s portrayal and insist that it should be seen as anti-racist. They insist hat he’s a tragic figure, only cruel because he’s enslaved and despised for his race, and that his unrequited love deserves pity. They make the same arguments that are often made about controversial minority characters in classic literature, such as Shakespeare’s Othello and Shylock, or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. I’ll admit that Monostatos does bring Shylock to mind in his Act II aria when he exclaims “Have I no heart then? Am I not of flesh and blood too?” But we can safely say that he lacks the depth and dignity of Shylock, Othello or Heathcliff. Repeatedly he’s the butt of low-comedy jokes. Nor is his “love” for Pamina shown to consist of anything but desire to possess her, nor does he need an Iago to persuade him to threaten to kill her. There’s also the fact that his masters and enemies are clearly portrayed as good, virtuous people, and are never shown to treat him unfairly. Yes, commentators often call out Sarastro for sentencing him to a prolonged foot-whipping. But (a) this is a punishment for attempted rape, and (b) the uncut spoken dialogue in Act II reveals that the sentence was never carried out, but that Sarastro pardoned him in honor of Tamino’s initiation day. The enemies of Othello, Shylock and Heathcliff are blatantly bigoted and cruel to them.

Besides, it’s not clear if Monostatos’s status as a slave is tied to his race or not. Most traditional productions will portray all the slaves as black, but the fact that in the uncut spoken dialogue, the other slaves call him “the Moor” and “the black Monostatos” seems to imply that they’re neither Moors nor black themselves. Of course, the fact that Monostatos is a slave at all, and that Sarastro and his priests have slaves to begin with, is a different problem that very few productions resolve.

It’s no surprise that modern productions often try to redeem the opera's race relations by removing Monostatos’s blackness. Many have taken advantage of the story’s fantastical atmosphere and made him look strange in an inhuman way, maintaining his status as an “other” without (in theory) offending any real-world ethnic group. In various productions, he’s been green-skinned, blue-skinned, ghoulishly white-skinned, pure white-skinned but covered in black tattoo-like markings, a furry brown man-beast with horns and a tail, a yellow and black striped lizard-man, and various other concepts. Or sometimes he's just been a white man in an exotic pseudo-Moorish costume.

Whether these choices are better or worse than leaving the character as a black man has been debated. As a white person, I’m honestly not sure which side of the debate I favor. For one thing, some critics point out that to make Monostatos look freakish, or to make him a non-human monster, degrades him more than Mozart and Schikaneder ever did. He was always meant to be a human being like the rest of the characters, just a different ethnicity, and rewriting him as a fantastically different species than they are distorts all his interactions with them. Meanwhile, portraying him as a white man but still dressing him in Moorish clothes is only a half-hearted “fix." It does nothing to change his portrayal as a dangerous exotic foreigner, but only erases the color-related aspect. Others argue that to change Monostatos’s race is a more racist choice than following the original libretto. The fact that Monostatos is a subordinate black man in a society of powerful white people, with a forbidden passion for a white princess and seething with anger that his skin color makes his desire a crime, is key to his character as originally written. To erase this aspect of him (they argue) is to pretend that such things aren’t important. They call for productions to stop “sanitizing” the opera, to portray Monostatos as the black man he was written to be, and to make the audience think critically about him

But does this place too much faith in the audience’s ability to think critically? In contemporary Western society, racism is still rampant. In an era where black people are still disenfranchised, where black men are stereotyped as violent criminals and frequently brutalized and murdered by police, and where the “danger” of black men sexually preying on white women has always been one of the most hateful and deadly of all racial stereotypes, do we need a black Monostatos? Can we guarantee that his portrayal won’t be needlessly hurtful to black audience members and encourage the racist views of non-black audience members? Nothing that makes this opera an immortal classic has anything to do with Monostatos’s blackness. Is it so important for modern productions to include such a troubling aspect?

Of course, another part of the problem is that whether or not the production changes Monostatos’s race, he’s nearly always been portrayed by white tenors. In traditional productions, the role is usually performed in blackface, almost never by a black singer.

But whether Monostatos is portrayed in blackface, by a black singer, or with some different concept, his depiction is bound to stir up strong feelings. For that reason, I thought it might be useful to create a list that notes which of the opera’s many filmed productions portray Monostatos as a black man and which ones portray him differently. This way, viewers who refuse to watch a production with a blackface Monostatos will know which of the filmed versions to avoid, as will viewers who despise productions that erase his blackness. The vast majority of filmed Flutes follow longtime tradition and have the role sung by a white tenor in blackface, but there are a few exceptions.

(Note that this isn’t a complete list of all the filmed Flutes available. There are still a few others which I have yet to see.)

Productions with a blackface Monostatos

*1964, Salzburg Festival, cond. István Kertész

*1971, Hamburg State Opera, cond. Horst Stein

*1975, Ingmar Bergman film, cond. Eric Ericson

*1976, Leipzig Opera House, cond. Gert Banhner

*1978, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, cond. Bernard Haitink

*1982, Salzburg Festival, cond. James Levine

*1983, Bavarian State Opera, cond. Wolfgang Sawallisch

*1986, Sydney Opera House, cond. Richard Bonynge

*1989, Drottningholm Court Theatre, cond. Arnold Östman

*1991, Metropolitan Opera, cond. James Levine

*1991, Salzburg Festival, cond. Georg Solti

*1992, Ludwigsburger Schlosstheater, cond. Wolfgang Gönnewein

*2000, Zürich Opera, cond. Franz Welser-Möst

*2006, Salzburg Festival, cond. Riccardo Muti

*2007, Zürich Opera, cond. Nikolaus Harnoncourt (although his look is more “pitch-black ghoul” than “African person”)

*2012, Salzburg Festival, cond. Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Productions with a black singer as Monostatos

*2006, Kenneth Branagh film, cond. James Conlon

Productions with a non-black (or at least non-Moorish) Monostatos

*1995, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, cond. John Eliot Gardiner (instead he just has a thick black stripe down his white face)

*2001, Paris Opera, cond. Ivan Fischer (instead he’s a pot-bellied gorilla-like creature with black fur)

*2003, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, cond. Sir Colin Davis (instead he’s ghoulishly pale and obese)

*2006, Metropolitan Opera, cond. James Levine (instead he’s white, but obese and with a grotesque, multicolored, beak-nosed face and pigs’ feet)

*2011, Teatro alla Scala, cond. Roland Boër (instead he’s a 19th century Ottoman Turkish soldier)

*2013, Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, cond. Sir Simon Rattle (instead he’s a white gravedigger whose face is only “black” with soil)

*2017, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, cond. Julia Jones (instead he's ghoulishly pale and bald, with pointed ears and long fingernails)

*2019, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, cond. Ryan Wigglesworth (instead he’s a white workingman whose face is only “black” with coal dust)

The problem of Monostatos will probably be debated forever. Regardless of whether you prefer productions that faithfully depict him as a black man or not, it’s always interesting to see how different modern stagings approach the issue of his race. It will be equally interesting to see how future productions handle it over time. A definitive modern solution to the problem Schikaneder and Mozart created is probably impossible to find.