The Meaning of Mozart

By Drew Lichtenberg

In 1768, when he was only 12, Mozart had already composed La finta semplice and Bastien und Bastienne. The Austrian Emperor Joseph II commissioned the Italian-style opera buffa. Another patron, the quack doctor and hypnotist Franz Mesmer, commissioned the Singspiel. German for “singing-play,” the form was a popular one. It mixed spoken and sung dialogue and drew upon vernacular sources with an omnivorous appetite. In the 1770s, still a teenager, Mozart would tour Italian courts and try his hand at opera seria. Back in Vienna, he kept writing incidental music for German-language plays and Singspiele.

In the 1780s, Mozart would work with Lorenza da Ponte, a Jewish freethinker and librettist, on a series of masterpieces. They premiered at public theatres in Vienna and Prague. But they featured sublime arias and musical forms drawing on the courtly Italian tradition. The Marriage of Figaro (1785), a “commedia par musica,” entangles and untangles plots across the social spectrum. The play is merry, but Louis XVI detested it, and with good reason. It enacts the tensions that would explode in the French Revolution. Don Giovanni (1788) is a dramma giocoso (“drama with jokes”). It tells the story of the legendary libertine, dragged to hell by a magical statue. But this metaphysical story is larded by the ironic perspective of his companion Leporello — a comic Sancho Panza to his tragic Don Quixote. The opera’s intense, terrifying ending transfigures into a gay opera buffa sextet. This untranslatable musical effect is like experiencing the deliquescence of a soul.

Mozart saved the best for last. The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte, 1791), Mozart’s last completed work before his tragic early death, is such stuff as dreams are made on. It shows his formidable musical technique reaching a vertiginous peak. It also is one of the great arguments for the pleasures to be found in popular theatre.

The piece had humble origins. It was the brainchild of Emanuel Schikaneder, Mozart’s friend and manager of the Theater auf der Wieden, a variety theatre in the Vienna suburbs. At the premiere, Mozart himself conducted. Schikaneder — a former traveling fiddler and member of a Shakespeare troupe — played Papageno. The result was a tremendous success. According to a contemporary account, to get a ticket you had to arrive at the theatre by mid-afternoon and wait for three hours. All the while, you were “bathed in heat and sweat and impregnated by the garlicky fumes of the smoked meats being consumed.”

If Italian opera was the craze of the 1770s, fairy-tale operas were now the thing. In 1789, Schikaneder’s company staged Karl Ludwig Giesecke’s Oberon. (Giesecke, a member of the same masonic lodge as Mozart and Schikaneder, would collaborate and act in The Magic Flute.) That same year, Jacob Liebeskind’s story “Lulu, or the Magic Flute” was published. Before The Magic Flute premiered, so too did another Liebeskind adaptation at a rival theatre: Die Zauberzither or The Magic Bassoon.

If Don Giovanni is a dark night of the soul touched by unexpected grace, The Magic Flute is its polar opposite. At first glance, it is a simple-seeming morality tale. It presents clear oppositions between good and evil: a dashing Prince, a kidnapped Princess, a sympathetic Fairy Queen, and the forbidding tyrant Sarastro. Upon further inspection, the play deepens into an examination of what the Germans call Sein und Schein, or appearance and reality. The Queen of the Night’s astonishing aria in Act 2 — one of the operatic repertory’s most challenging set pieces — is shrouded in menace. Sarastro — whose name suggests Zoroaster, the ancient Persian god of wisdom — similarly conjoins opposite aspects. Though gentle and kind, he forces Tamino and Pamina to undergo tests of mental and physical fortitude. Instead of operatic forebears, in fact, Mozart’s Queen and King suggest characters from Shakespeare. Like Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they are the presiding sources of magic and authority, by turns beneficent and foreboding, placed in mutual opposition but forming an eventual concord.

Mozart’s score weaves these oppositions into an avaunt! Inspired, he uses different musical idioms for each character. The Queen of the Night and her Ladies sing impassioned coloratura straight out of the Italian tradition. Tamino’s music is likewise Italianate and classical in contour. Clowns Papageno and Papagena sing folk tunes straight out of the Singspiel repertory. Pamina sings in a Germanic, romantic register. Sarastro sings in a low bass of clarity and gravity, which some have suggested is Mozart’s attempt to write in a “Masonic Style.” George Bernard Shaw once said it was “the only music that could without fear be put into the mouth of God.”

In the final scene, all the plots and characters come together. The lovers and clowns share the stage. The Queen of the Night sings with Sarastro, the Sun King. For the finale, Mozart combines the Kyrie of the Latin mass with a Lutheran chorale, creating an effect at once Catholic and Protestant. At a time when Europe was split by religious wars, this was a radical gesture. Though it uses church aesthetics, the logic is ultimately a musical one, which is to say aesthetic, humanist, secular. If The Magic Flute is a fairy tale, it is one of the Enlightenment, in which the heightened consciousness approaches the realm of dream. It is also a hugely entertaining and beautiful time in the theatre. That is the meaning of Mozart. 

This article has been edited for use in this publication.