The Pied Piper of Vienna

Mozart's nightmare, live at the Lowry

Promotional material, Opera North

I thought I’d distract myself for a moment by writing about Mozart, secret societies, music theory, Masons, and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. But the piece took a different turn. Oh well.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see James Brining’s production of The Magic Flute for Opera North at the Lowry in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester. The Quays is a strange place,¹ the Lowry is a strange venue,² The Magic Flute is a strange opera,³ and I was in a strange mood. The clouds were low over the north of England. Manchester was thronged with crowds visiting the Christmas markets. I had recently been put on psychiatric drugs, and my brain was humming at unsettling frequencies. My companion, a young post-doc recently arrived on these shores, told me his father was a big fan of The Magic Flute. But then, he is a Freemason, and they love this opera. It casts them as the heroes.

There are two things I should say about The Magic Flute before we start. The first is that it is, even by the standards of its time, an enthusiastically sexist and racist piece of theatre. The second is that it contains some of the best music ever written. These two facts occasionally drive me to distraction. I want to hear the Queen of the Night blow the windows out with Der Hölle Rache, I want to shed a happy little tear as Papageno stutters his way through the final duet with Papagena. But how can I enjoy it when the story keeps telling me that women are bitches, Black men are sex fiends, and the ideal form of government would be rule by a secret cabal of sex-trafficking patriarchs?⁴

One (perfectly reasonable) way to manage these contradictions is by saying “fuck Mozart” and doing something else with your Saturday night. But because I can’t get enough of the music, the contradictions persist. They persist for Brining, too, and his staging of the opera⁵ is not an attempt to resolve them, but to take them seriously.

If you haven’t seen The Magic Flute and don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a sketch of the plot:

Tamino, a prince from a foreign land, is sent on a quest to rescue the Queen of the Night’s daughter, Pamina, who is being held captive by a king named Sarastro. Aided by the bird-catcher Papageno, three useless boys, a magic glockenspiel, and the titular magic flute, Tamino sets out to find the object of his desire (he was instantly smitten after seeing a picture of her). Meanwhile, Pamina tries to escape her jailer, Monostatos (a “Moor”), but is recaptured. Monostatos is just about to have his wicked way when Papageno shows up and scares him off (Papageno proceeds to complain to Pamina that he doesn’t have a girlfriend). Elsewhere, Tamino comes across three temples (Wisdom, Reason, and Nature) guarded by one of Sarastro’s crew. He tells the guard off for serving a horrible, monstrous etc. abductor of women etc. Sounds like woman-talk, the guard says—you haven’t been listening to women, have you Tamino? Sarastro is a Good Guy! Barred from the temples, Tamino wanders off. Enter Pamina and Papageno, followed shortly after by Sarastro and retinue. Sarastro explains that he’s going to take Pamina back into custody—for her own good, of course, because young girls need the guidance of older men. Monostatos shows up, having found Tamino lurking in the forest. Pamina, seeing Tamino for the first time, naturally falls in love. Sarastro takes them all back to his Temple of Wisdom, but condemns Monostatos to seventy-seven lashes of the bastinado for being such a saucy fellow.

In the next scene, Sarastro holds a meeting with his lieutenants. Tamino is our kind of guy, he says, and I only abducted Pamina to bring them together. He calls on Isis and Osiris (there’s a lot of cod-Egyptian stuff going on in this opera) to guide the couple through the Trials they must Undergo to be Purified. Papageno is told that if he is Purified, too, he can have a girlfriend (they’ve been keeping a girl named Papagena on hand for just such an eventuality). The Queen sends her emissaries to talk sense into Tamino, but he's not indulging this feminine chatter anymore.

Later that night, Monostatos tries it on with Pamina again (lots of racism in the libretto, here) but is interrupted by the Queen, who asks her daughter what happened to Tamino. He’s with his new bros, Pamina explains, adding that they’re really not that bad—they just love wisdom! The Queen goes apoplectic, hands her daughter a knife, and tells her to gut Sarastro like a fish. She baulks. Monostatos, seeing an angle, throws in his lot with the Queen. Meanwhile, Papageno meets a charming teenager who tells him she’s going to marry an older man named Papageno (he likes the sound of this). Tamino and Papageno undergo their first trial, which consists of ignoring their girlfriends. Papageno is rubbish at this, proving he is neither Pure nor Worthy, but Tamino passes with flying colours. Dejected Pamina contemplates suicide, but the three useless boys from earlier in the story show up to tell her that Tamino is just pretending to be a dick to impress his new friends, which is a relief.

Everything comes to a head the next day, when Tamino and Pamina pass through the final Trials (of Water and Fire), which turns out to be pretty easy. Tamino plays a little tune on his flute and all is well. Dejected Papageno contemplates suicide, but the three useless boys tell him to play his glockenspiel, and Papagena shows up. What joy! They decide to have lots of rustic babies. The Queen and Monostatos, creeping through the temple, agree that when Sarastro is overthrown, Pamina will be married off to her former jailer. But their schemes are interrupted by thunder and lightning. They flee, the sky clears, and Sarastro and his crew lead Tamino and Pamina into the radiant light of Beauty, Truth, Goodness, etc.

This is all very problematic.⁶ It is also daft. Even audiences at the time—and Vienna went nuts for it—were baffled by the plot. How does Papageno find Pamina so quickly, and why isn’t Tamino with him? If the Queen of the Night can magically appear in her daughter’s room, why delegate the job of rescuing her to a stranger she found passed out in the forest? Why does the all-wise, all-benevolent Sarastro employ a sicko like Monostatos? Opera is famous for its melodrama and irrationality, yet even opera critics are fairly united in condemning the libretto⁷ of The Magic Flute as the most ridiculous ever set to music.

It does have its defenders, though. Some have tried prove that the story only seems stupid. If you understand all the esoteric Masonic symbolism, it’s a perfectly clear metaphor for the soul’s path to enlightenment. Others have argued the whole things is veiled commentary on Austrian politics of the 1780s, with the Queen being the Catholic, reactionary Empress Maria Theresa, and Sarastro being a stand-in for her son, the liberal-minded Joseph II. These arguments are not without merit, but they aren’t why people like the opera. The music is what gets under your skin, and the music is why it keeps getting staged. Yet the disparity between music and libretto has always posed a problem for producers, and the fact that modern audiences find much more to dislike about the story only adds to the challenge. How do you make any of this work as a piece of theatre?

I’d seen The Magic Flute a couple of times before, in Toronto and New York,⁸ and found both productions underwhelming. They leaned into the fairy-tale aspects of the story—perhaps hoping the sense of unreality would excuse the batshit (which is probably what Mozart and Schikaneder were thinking, too). Brining does something different. He knows that The Magic Flute is a fairy tale, but he also knows that all fairy tales are nightmares.

The show begins with a little girl in bed. She puts on a gramophone record, and the first three majestic chords of the overture ring out. Ss the violins launch into that beautiful allegro at the sixteenth bar, a party begins upstage, behind a screen dividing the girl’s room from a room with a long dining table. The revellers (played by the actors we will shortly be introduced to as Tamino, Pamina, and co.) are really going at it, and a seedy-looking man (Colin Judson, our Monostatos) comes into the girl’s room and torments her with a stuffed snake. Sarastro (Msimelelo Mbali) eventually gets the party under control and attempts to say grace, but is interrupted each time by the three “knocks” of the adagio at bar ninety-seven. The girl’s mother (Anna Dennis) storms in, shuts down the party, and orders Sarastro to leave. He reluctantly obeys. The girl goes to sleep, and a lighting change indicates she has begun to dream—a dream that is simultaneously a fantastical version of the party she just witnessed, and the story of The Magic Flute. She wanders the set throughout the show, looking on unobtrusively. After the finale, in which Sarastro leads his ecstatic followers upstage into the light of a triumphant sun, the stage is left suddenly empty: the girl stands in the centre, Sarastro slightly to the side. They stare each other down as the curtain drops.

Using the free time provided by the overture (in this case, seven or so minutes) to add context and nuance to a production is standard practice, but I’ve never seen it done so effectively. By summarising the story in mime, and giving it a more congenial ending, Brining allows the audience to view the show twice: first as farce, then as tragedy. The Queen of the Night becomes the misunderstood heroine. This interpretation has appealed to many viewers over the years, and I found it compelling enough to make it a plot point in my novel, In the City of Pigs. It’s a framing that works precisely because the story is so bizarre. It only takes a slight change of focus to reverse the moral polarity.

The production makes its argument in other ways, too. Pamina (Claire Lees) is depicted as being drugged by her captors, and Sarastro’s people are dressed in uniforms reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. Mbali plays Sarastro as unnaturally calm, which, coupled with his hypnotic take on O Isis und Osiris, creates a sense of understated threat. Egor Zhuravskii’s Tamino as distractible and easily swayed. Judson’s Monostatos is white (which allows Brining to cut most of the racism) and looks like a British nonce out of central casting. And Anna Dennis…well, she really does appear to feel the vengeance of hell boiling in her heart when she sings Der Hölle Rache. Most of all, one feels for poor, put-upon Papageno (Emyr Wyn Jones), who comes across as a lonely Welshman who just wants a drink and a friend, and doesn’t much rate all this stuff about Purification.

But does it really matter that Brining has taken a famously problematic text and found a way to make it a bit more palatable to modern audiences? All the great eighteenth and nineteenth century operas are problematic, and negotiating these kinds of challenges is all in a day’s work for the modern opera company. The right casting and some judicious cuts can sand the sharp edges off even the most offensive classics, and with enough mental effort and a few grad-school tricks you can re-interpret a text any way you like.

The thing is that I don’t think Brining has re-interpreted The Magic Flute. He has understood it. By sticking a little girl on stage as an avatar of the audience, a girl who occasionally joins in the chorus and the dancing, he’s practically begging the question: is this the sort of filth we should let our children see?

There’s something else as well, something even more unsettling. Consider that Brining presents the story as a child’s nightmare, and yet it doesn’t end with her waking up. It ends with a silent confrontation between her Sarastro—a reminder that Sarastro is still ruler of this world, and that Mummy might not be there the next time a party gets out of hand. Like the best fairy tales, the real fairy tales, the old German ones dripping in blood and semen, Brining’s Flute tells children that their nightmares are true. Every gift is poisoned. The prince will abandon you. The king speaks of wisdom, but he has a closet full of severed heads.

This might be the most faithful interpretation of the opera ever staged.

Surely you must be joking, I hear you say. This artwork is a relic of a cheerfully bigoted time, and Mozart had the same benighted views as any other Enlightenment “genius.” He wrote the music for an opera called “All Women Cheat” about how much women love cheating.⁹ He wrote the music for an opera about a serial rapist. If The Magic Flute seems like a retrograde bit of patriarchal wank, that’s because it is. Couldn’t Brining have put his talents to better use?

Sure. But there is a scene at the end of the first act I didn’t mention before. After Tamino is told that Sarastro is a Good Guy, he sits down to play his flute. The animals of the forest gather round, drawn in by its spell. Immediately after, Pamina and Papageno are caught in the forest by Monostatos and his guards—but the music of Papageno’s magic glockenspiel turns them witless. Recall the legendary Orpheus, whose lyre charmed the god of the underworld. Recall the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who also had a magic flute. All of Mozart’s operas express and enact, to one degree or another, an ambivalence about the power of music to compel and bewitch. Mozart knew that music was a tool for manipulation and subterfuge: he understood better than most how it could make people feel things and believe things they wouldn’t otherwise feel or believe. And so it is significant that the hinge point of this deeply troubling story set to incandescently beautiful music begins with two vignettes about how music can disarm, befuddle, and lead astray.

Did Mozart do this on purpose? I doubt it. Despite Miloš Forman’s attempt to turn him into a tortured-artist-idiot-savant, Mozart was a normal man who was extremely good at one thing. His views were unremarkable for his era and social class. He probably found Schikaneder’s libretto moving and hilarious. But art is often smarter than the people who make it, and Brining’s production of The Magic Flute rings true because he takes what’s already there and makes it explicit. In a darkened hall the charming Mozart plays his tunes, and slowly the nightmare turns into a dream.

1. Once Britain’s third-busiest port, it is now a playground for people who have money but not real money. It reminds me of Toronto.

2. The interior has, for unaccountable reasons, been painted purple.

3. Technically, not a proper opera: it’s a Singspiel, which emerged in the eighteenth century as a vehicle for low comedy performed by German vagrants. It premiered in Vienna on September 30, 1791, with Mozart conducting. He was already suffering from the illness that would kill him two months later.

4. Was its author secretly English? One wonders.

5. It is a revival of the production he premiered in Leeds in 2019. Brining follows the common British custom of performing the opera in English translation (by Jeremy Sams), which is why I’m referring to it as The Magic Flute rather than Die Zauberflöte. I’ve referred to the arias etc. using the original German, because that’s how they’ll be named if you try to look them up. The decision to do everything in English adds to the topical discomfort, which I’m going to assume is intentional. The production also featured BSL sign language interpretation—not something I’d seen before at an opera, but which I found quite moving. When I eventually go deaf thanks to my Disease, I’ll be glad of these sorts of innovation.

6. This was pointed out long before woke moralists like myself arrived on the scene. Sir Denis Forman, OBE, has a good deal of fun comparing Sarastro to Hitler in A Night at the Opera, his indispensable guidebook to the form published in 1994.

7. Mozart’s best-known operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, were written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. But in 1791 Da Ponte was sacked by the new Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II, and so The Magic Flute was an Emanuel Schikaneder joint. While Da Ponte went on to become the first professor of Italian Literature at Columbia University in New York, Schikaneder (who was more of a song-and-dance man) died penniless and insane during the Napoleonic Wars.

8. The Canadian Opera Company’s production in 2017 ripped off Bergman’s idea of staging it as a play within a play, which is the kind of half-smart gimmick the COC is always trying and failing to pull off. At the Met, in 2019, it was a holiday show strictly for grannies and kiddies. The Queen of the Night sounded like she had a cold.

9. I mean, technically “Così fan tutte” translates to “All women do that.” But what do they all do? Cheat.