Sunday Classics: The Magic Flute -- Mozart, at 35, lived just long enough to leave us this spiritual testament

Soprano Dorothea Roeschmann and baritone Simon Keenlyside give a lovely account of the haunting Pamina-Papageno duet from Act I of The Magic Flute (with Colin Davis conducting, Covent Garden, 2003).

SHE: With men who feel love,
a good heart can hardly be lacking.
HE: To share these sweet urges
is then a woman's first duty.
BOTH: We want to enjoy love.
We live through love alone.

SHE: Love sweetens every trial.
To it every creature sacrifices.
HE: It adds spice to the days of our life.
It works in the circle of nature.
BOTH: Its lofty purpose shows that
there's nothing nobler than wife and man.
Man and wife, and wife and man
reach toward godliness.

[Note: It's tricky to translate something as seemingly simple as the variously repeated "Weib und Mann" and "Mann und Weib," since "Mann" really does mean both "man" and "husband" while "Weib" could refer to either "woman" or "wife." Clearly the overlapping senses are intentionally blurred here. We do this in English to an extent with the phrase "man and wife," so I tried to fall back on that. -- K]

by Ken

It doesn't take much to get me thinking about Mozart's Magic Flute. In this case I'm guessing it was a combination of:

* flipping on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast yesterday while I was huddled over the blogging machine, and landing in the midst of an arid performance of the Met's abridged "kiddie" version of the opera, out of which all soul had been carefully drained -- at least for the portion of the performance I stuck with. (Once upon a time my weeks were organized around the Saturday-afternoon Met broadcasts. I had to learn to fit the entire repertory onto C-60, C-90, and C-120 audio cassettes. Nowadays I may go whole seasons without tuning in to a Met broadcast.)

* having been reminded a couple of days earlier that, faced with a price I couldn't pass up, I'd bought, but never listened to, a DVD set of Glyndebourne Festival performances of six Mozart operas: Idomeneo plus the five masterpieces: The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, and of course The Magic Flute. I wound up watching the Magic Flute, from 1978 and quite a nice performance, with an especially lovely Pamina and Papageno in soprano Felicity Lott and baritone Benjamin Luxon. (Later I watched the Don Giovanni and Act I of the Cosi.)

Abduction, I admit, has its awkwardnesses, at least some of which I attribute to the fact that Mozart was trying so desperately to prove himself as an operatic composer worthy of decently compensated commissions. Mozart flexing every last bit of compositional muscle puts me in mind of the inspired cartoon from the Rocky and Bullwinkle series in which Bullwinkle-as-magician tells Rocky to watch him pull a rabbit out of his hat, and Rocky says things like, "Again? That trick never works." I'm thinking of the one where Bullwinkle pulls a giant roaring head (a lion?) out of the hat, then quickly shoves it back in, saying, "Oops! Don't know my own stren'th!" Alternatively, you might imagine the future Superman as a child, before he comes to understand that, measured against earthly mortals, he has superpowers.

By the time of The Marriage of Figaro Mozart had it all in sync, but already in Abduction we have a composer with direct access to the human soul such as few other creative artists ever have had. I like to point out that in the characterization of the "villian," the ferocious Osmin, we see a depth and delicacy of characterization that I doubt would have occurred to anybody else.

Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi, the three Italian-language operas Mozart wrote to splendid librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte, are of course among the supreme products of the human imagination. Still to come was one last take on the clunky old German Singspiel (or "song play") form -- musical numbers that are joined by spoken dialogue, more or less the way the typical Broadway musical is constructed, The Magic Flute.

In plot synopsis, it looks like a simple, not to say simple-minded, fairy tale. Handsome young Prince Tamino has found his way to Egypt, where -- accompanied by the jolly bird-catcher Papageno -- he is pressed into service by the "star-flaming" Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the clutches of the evil priest Sarastro. The prince has only to see a tiny portrait of Pamina to fall hopelessly in love with the princess. Only when he arrives at Sarastro's temple, everything seems turned upside-down. Here he is led to believe that the all-wise Sarastro is the font of virtue and the Queen of the Night the font of evil.

I don't think it's a coincidence that these four supreme operatic masterpieces of Mozart's all have this same basic format: The characters start out thinking they're working toward some fairly straightforward objective, but somewhere along the line, often without their quite realizing it, they find themselves in serious search of something quite different. Much the way real life has a way of working out. In The Magic Flute, Pamina and Tamino -- and even Papageno, in his more down-to-earth way -- find themselves grappling with some of the most basic of human issues: appreciating and acquiring real wisdom and maturity as well as generosity of spirit, finding purpose in life, balancing the realities and needs of our "daylight" and "nighttime" selves.

Of course, in the hands of another composer, it might have wound up as trivial and cliched as it sounds. To anyone who knows and has lived with The Magic Flute, it's nothing less than a miracle. It's Mozart at the peak of his amazing maturity, and never mind that it had its first performance some two months before the composer's death, not quite two months before what would have been his 36th birthday. There are some achievements that are beyond explaining.

I've been living with The Magic Flute for, well, a sizable bunch of years, and over those years it has -- in common with a number of other great works of art which have become part of me -- helped shape and define my understanding of the world around me, and given me a way of measuring that understanding over time.

When I was still young and impressionable, I encountered a memoir by the great conductor (and in particular great Mozart conductor) Bruno Walter, in which he wrote that as he had progressed through life the always-beloved works of Mozart, and in particular The Magic Flute, which he considered Mozart's "spiritual testament," had risen to the point of eclipsing everything else. The notoriously uncheerful Otto Klemperer said that one of the things he would most regret about dying was losing The Magic Flute.

Our clip is a really lovely performance of the great duet "Bei Maennern, welche Liebe fuehlen." In the mission to rescue Pamina, it's the sidekick Papageno rather than Prince Tamino who finds the princess, who responds with a tender outpouring of compassion to the luckless bird-catcher's revelation -- remember, a total stranger to her until just minutes before -- that he doesn't have "a girlfriend let alone a wife." A soprano-baritone duet is a tricky thing to write, since their normal vocal ranges are separated by a full octave plus an extra interval of a fifth or so, so that even if they are assigned equivalent vocal lines, they don't fall in the same part of the voice. Mozart turns this into a singular opportunity.

No composer, or creative artist, had a stronger sense of decency or empathy than Mozart, and a really fine performance of "Bei Maennern" -- a difficult feat, given the pure simplicity of the vocal lines -- is apt to send us searching for words like "sublime."

(Note: I've never seen the complete performance our clip is drawn from, but it is available on DVD. I can't help suspecting that we may be seeing/hearing the best of it right here.)


THE MAGIC FLUTE ON RECORDS

It's one of those oddities of fate that the two recordings I consider most indispensable were both made in 1964. If The Magic Flute was, as Bruno Walter suggested, Mozart's spiritual testament, then perhaps Karl Boehm's recording of it with the Berlin Philharmonic (in glorious form) -- dramatically vital and singularly songful -- may be his. The cast (Roberta Peters as the Queen of the Night, Evelyn Lear as Pamina, Fritz Wunderlich as Tamino, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno, Franz Crass as Sarastro) is good to great, and the spoken dialogue is especially well performed. This remains among my handful of very favorite opera recordings. The DG Originals edition is attractively priced, though it doesn't include a libretto. (You can buy one, of course, or undoubtedly track one down online.)

There's no spoken dialogue at all in Otto Klemperer's Magic Flute, at the conductor's insistence; he believed that it made no sense to include it, badly performed by opera singers, on a recording. To EMI's consternation he was insisting on doing the same thing with the recording of Abduction from the Seraglio they were trying to make in the last year or two of his life. (A cast was actually assembled and sessions scheduled, but the conductor had to cancel for health reasons.) His Magic Flute recording, with a generally strong cast (Lucia Popp, Gundula Janowitz, Nicolai Gedda, Walter Berry, Gottlob Frick) probes deeper than any other, and often has a radiant beauty like no other. Shockingly, it's currently unavailable, though copies can still be found. His recordings of the three Mozart-da Ponte operas are even harder to find. Admittedly they're for somewhat specialized tastes -- they tend to be quite gradual, placing considerable demands on the singers. But you'll hear dimensions in all these pieces that go beyond what anyone else has looked for. It would be nice to have a box of all four Klemperer Mozart operas.

Among more recent versions I would put in a good word for the Philips recording sparklingly conducted by Neville Marriner, with a strong cast (Cheryl Studer, Kiri Te Kanawa, Francisco Araiza, Olaf Baer, Samuel Ramey). Georg Solti had a lifelong special affinity for The Magic Flute, an identification with it I can only describe as a feeling of special joy,. He had served as a musical assistant to Arturo Toscanini (and played the glockenspiel part) at the Salzburg Festival in the 1930s, and both of his Decca recordings, both with the Vienna Philharmonic, have solid but somewhat uneven casts. You might want to check out the later one (with Sumi Jo, Ruth Ziesak, Uwe Heilmann, Michael Kraus, Kurt Moll).

For the budget-conscious, there's a Classics for Pleasure issue of the lovely EMI recording conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (with Edda Moser, Anneliese Rothenberger, Peter Schreier, Walter Berry, Kurt Moll) that can be had online for a paltry $8.50 plus shipping (without libretto, but you should be able to track one of those down online).


AND ON VIDEO

There's a genuinely outstanding Munich performance conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (more vivaciously than the above-noted audio recording), with Edita Gruberova, Lucia Popp, Francisco Araiza, Wolfgang Brendel, Kurt Moll.

The legendary Ingmar Bergman made a deeply personal, deeply wonderful film of The Magic Flute (in Swedish), filled with the wonder of a child's-eye view. Happily, there's a Criterion Collection DVD.

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