With respect to “the work itself,” there are three themes I’d like to touch on. One: Die Zauberflöte is the first E-19 opera, as I define that species in Opera as Opera. Two: any responsible interpretation of it must consider its serious elements as primary and its comedic ones as strictly secondary. Three: it’s not an accident that of all the E-19-and-earlier operas that have come in for auteurial and often adversarial production in recent decades, this should be the one to find its cultural assumptions (as declared by its presenters) so incompatible with ours as to render it unperformable, and to push the artform (in their presentation) over the edge into the something else altogether.

ONE: the first E-19 opera. In Opera as Opera, I use the term “E-19 opera” to identify all those works that make use of a particular protagonist-couple narrative—one that, in its pure form, tells the story of an unjustly dispossessed man and a highly placed woman who fall in love and aspire to a marriage which would restore the man to his understood-as-rightful position, leaving the protagonists an elevated couple at the end. ^(I) Die Zauberflöte antedates by about forty years the start of what I think of as E-19 Proper, and so might best be termed a proto-E-19 opera. But it sets that narrative in motion. As a happy-ending work of social accommodation, it is one of the few operas in which the narrative reaches its desired end. It begins with both protagonists dispossessed, Tamino of the vast Eastern realm where he’s a Prince, and Pamina of the Kingdom of The Night, where she’s a Princess. As in all operas of the E-19 redundant narrative, they must overcome antagonists. But though the latter have onstage representation, they are best understood as parts of the couple’s own former identities, which they must leave behind to achieve their union. Given the work’s emphasis on individual self-perfection and philosophic idealism, we can also call Die Zauberflöte the first German Romantic opera. With its mythical and mystical origins, it leaves behind the world of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas, as well as that of his earlier Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

TWO and THREE: The necessary dominance of the serious elements and the alleged unperformability of the opera. These themes are fused, and thus best considered together. Among operas whose mythical derivations extend into systems of esoteric belief (Pelléas et Mélisande being the most prominent other example)^(II), Die Zauberflöte is the one whose connection to such a system is best documented. It is unquestionably intended to represent the rituals of Masonic initiation as practiced in the Vienna of the 1780s and ’90s, and to teach high moral purpose as envisioned by the Masonic movement of that time. Considered in historical context, that movement, though not monolithic, was on the whole socially progressive, a manifestation of the Enlightenment principles to which many highly educated and ethically committed men subscribed. (It should be understood that even in its Viennese manifestations, Masonism had its internal divisions. Not long before beginning work on Die Zauberflöte, Mozart, who had attained the degree of Master, had changed his allegiance from a lodge governed by the rationalism of Ignaz von Born to one that had a strong Rosicrucian influence.) A difficulty for us, though, is that even if we get past our quite pardonable default parodic response to secretive benevolent societies (vide The Honeymooners’ Raccoon Lodge or, more pointedly, “Mind Head,” of Steve Martin’s sublimely stupid Bowfinger), we encounter the Viennese Masons’ attempts to authenticate their rituals through claims, not wholly unfounded but in good part fantastical, of direct descent from ancient Egyptian mysteries, and to find an ultimate wisdom therein. Still, we must accept as beyond challenge Mozart’s sincere dedication to Masonism, along with, at the least, the conscious compliance of Emmanuel Schikaneder and the others (Carl Ludwig Giesecke, von Born) who at one time or another were reputed to have been involved in the construction of  the libretto. And it is beyond challenge that the bringing forth of the initiation sequence and its moral destination in his German “grand opera”—for so it was billed—was Mozart’s passionate wish. He wasn’t writing a kiddie show.