Mozart: The Magic Flute

You can take the narrative of The Magic Flute at any number of levels. At its simplest it tells the story of a journey from darkness to light. It starts at night, the Queen’s realm, and ends in blazing sunlight, Sarastro’s. At its most complicated, it is well known to be an allegory based on the rituals of Freemasonry. Mozart broke the operatic mould with The Magic Flute. It was not written for the Viennese Court, as was his previous German opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio. It was not written for a metropolitan opera audience who pretended to understand Italian, but for the Theater auf der Wieden, a rackety old theatre in the suburbs built of wood and only temporary - it has long since vanished. The actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder, whose troupe had toured widely through German-speaking lands, had taken a lease on the theatre, and wanted to make some money with a bit of popular entertainment, an apparently ramshackle fairy-tale of the kind then very popular in Vienna. There was opportunities for spectacular stage effects, with much flying on wires and use of trapdoors. A pantomime at the Hackney Empire might be a useful analogy. Shickaneder himself wrote the libretto, almost certainly from members of his company. The libretto, like its source, Liebeskind’s Lulu oder Die Zauberflöte, was set in Egypt - a magical land with serpents, handsome princes and demonic queens. Mozart transcended the fairy-tale format, and you can sense him relishing the freedom that both the format and writing for a popular, operatically uncommitted audience gave him. He was not compelled to fulfil any expectations, no show-off arias, no compulsion to follow conventional form. He could do whatever he wanted, and he did, which is one reason why the opera remains so fresh.