I won’t be attempting here a play-by-play recounting of the tale of the magical flute and the  protagonist couple’s trials, with all its symbolic and metaphorical complexities. If you wish to pursue that, you will find yourself following many esoteric strands—of numerology; of alchemy; of astrology; of the Tarot(s); of symbolisms of the four elements; of chords and key relationships; of colors, of names, of light v. dark, sun v. moon, male v. female, and more. The pursuit carries far beyond what is contained in even the best of the synopses to be found in encyclopedias, program notes, or record booklets. But if you follow it through, you will arrive at a consistently understandable accounting of the happenings of the plot, and the intended meanings of those happenings. ^(I) And it will leave you in no uncertainty—as if the music conceivably could—as to the centrality of the serious scenes. True, of course, that Die Zauberflöte was written for Schikaneder’s own troupe at Schikaneder’s own Theater auf der Wieden, a relatively small theatre (estimates of seating capacity range from 500 to 1,000) out in the tax-free Freihaus district, visited by the Viennese upper crust but dependent on attracting a wider audience for popular entertainments. So, while Mozart and his collaborators were from the first aware that the symbolism of their opera would be meaningful only to their Masonic brothers, and its broader spiritual purpose only to an intellectual elite, its popular viability would depend on its comic and marvelous elements. Happily, the comedy could rest in the expert hands of Schikaneder himself, playing Papageno and supervising the rest, and the marvelous with the good technical apparatus of his theatre, including a flying machine—the “grand opera” was also a Maschinenkomödie. None of this, though, makes of Papageno and Papagena anything more than the comic Second Couple of long operatic and music-theatre tradition, or of their scenes anything more than the lower-level enactments of the First Couple’s adventures.

When I say that Die Zauberflöte is unperformable, I mean that if its integrity as an artwork were to be preserved, it would be unacceptable to many here-and-now sensibilities. That tends to be true of E-19 opera in general, because it embraces values and aspirations we like to think we have transcended—the problem being that if the great E-19 operas are presented with integrity and force, it turns out that they transcend us. We have no answer to them from our own values and aspirations, and their emotional suasion would seem to validate exactly what we hope to leave behind. Unacceptable as they are, we still require their music; without it, we may as well fold the whole opera project. Ergo the phenomena of Regietheater, of auteurial and adversarial presentations that lie about the works and render them nonsensical. And if this is true of the E-19 oeuvre in general (I have made the argument many times, I know), it is doubly true of Die Zauberflöte, an opera whose assumptions about hierarchies of race, class, sex, and social inclusion in general deviate from ours in the normal course of events, to say nothing of the current turmoil in precisely those spheres. This is all the truer the more we insist on the integrity of the original work, which we have been compromising with for several lifetimes now.