Page 139 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

CLASSICAL 1750–1820 137

Zauberoper (“magic opera”), which
mingled comedy with supernatural
elements and impressive spectacle.
Keen to repeat the success of
Wranitzky’s work, Schikaneder
himself wrote the libretto for the
new opera, although it is likely that
Mozart collaborated as well. The
two men took a fairy tale by August
Jacob Liebeskind, Lulu, oder die
Zauberflöte (Lulu, or The Magic
Flute), as their starting point but
transformed it almost beyond
recognition. Among other things,
they added Masonic elements
(Wranitzky, Schikaneder, and
Mozart were Freemasons), such
as in the initiatory ordeals that
the protagonists endure.
The Magic Flute
Mozart died in 1791, just two
months after The Magic Flute
premiered. It was not only his last Night to the touching comedy of Opera-goers in London watch from a
major completed work but also one the duet, “Pa-pa-pa-Papagena,” box in a 1796 painting by an unknown
of his most sublime. In all Mozart’s in which Papageno and his mate artist. Opera became fashionable in
operas, he showed an unsurpassed Papagena imagine a blissful future the early 18th century, with new operas
commissioned for each season.
gift for creating the right music to together. Only such a perfect
fit each character, situation, or command of musical expression
emotion. In The Magic Flute, this enabled Mozart to hold together The Magic Flute’s influence on
ranges from the deep solemnity of convincingly the often unsettling the development of singspiel and
the priest Sarastro’s songs and two ambivalences and reversals of the German Romantic opera was
powerful arias of the Queen of the opera, such as the point when the fundamental. It carried singspiel
Queen of the Night unexpectedly into the 19th century, when the
turns from grieving mother to spite- genre developed in two directions.
filled ally of her daughter’s worst One strand led to Beethoven’s
enemy, Monostatos. opera Fidelio (1805), and—more
The opera’s premiere on formatively—to further “magic
September 30, 1791, started badly operas,” such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
Salieri listened and watched but ended well. During the first act, Undine (1816) and Carl Maria von
with total attentiveness … the audience was muted in its Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) and
there wasn’t a number that response. Perhaps, despite the Oberon (1826). These were the
didn’t call forth from him recent success of Oberon, King of precursors of full-blown German
a “bravo” or a “bello.” the Elves, they were baffled by the Romantic opera, best exemplified
Wolfgang Amadeus Zauberoper’s strangely magical in the works of Richard Wagner.
Mozart qualities. In the second act, The other strand of singspiel stayed
however, the audience came true to its lighter-hearted origins,
alive and at the end called Mozart leading to the Viennese operettas
onto the stage to applaud him. of Johann Strauss the younger
The Magic Flute has remained (Die Fledermaus) and Franz Lehár
perennially popular ever since. (The Merry Widow). ■

US_134-137_Mozart_Magic_Flute.indd 137 26/03/18 1:00 PM