The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Die Zauberflöte, an opera in two acts, K. 620, to a libretto in German by Emanuel Schikaneder, with spoken dialogue between the numbers · an overture and twenty-one numbers, eight in the first act and thirteen in the second, in the standard performing version · about two and a half to two and three quarter hours in performance, as more or less of the dialogue is kept
Mode
Singspiel; a popular magic opera with spoken dialogue, carrying seria coloratura, folk song, hymn, chorale and buffa ensemble on one stage
Mythos
The initiation: the helpless prince, the captive daughter, the three doors, the trials by silence, fire and water, and admission to the light; night against sun; the natural man who cannot be initiated
Phase
From a cry for help before a serpent to a sunrise; E flat at the first chord and E flat at the last
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in two acts, an overture and twenty-one numbers in the standard performing version, setting Schikaneder’s German, with spoken dialogue between the numbers
Register
From Papageno’s strophic songs and a padlocked hum to the Queen’s coloratura, Sarastro’s hymns and the Armed Men’s chorale
Scale
Two couples at two levels, a queen and a priestly order, three Ladies, three Boys, priests and chorus; a fairy-tale realm of night and a temple of the sun
Governing Proposition
A prince sent by the Queen of Night to rescue her daughter from the priest Sarastro learns that he was sent the wrong way, and is tried by silence, then by fire and water, until he and Pamina are admitted to the light together; beside him a bird-catcher fails every test and is given a wife anyway. The wager of the work is that the high path and the low are one world, and that a love made worthy by trial and an ordinary happiness are both at home in it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The overture opens Adagio, in E flat, on three chords: the signal of the brotherhood, sounded before the curtain rises and before anyone has heard of a brotherhood. An Allegro follows, a fugato on a theme driven by repeated notes and worked into a sonata form. The same chords will return in the second act, before the trials, and E flat will close the second finale: the key that opens the opera ends it. The overture and the March of the Priests were the last music Mozart entered in his catalogue, days before the first night.
No. 1 begins with a cry, “Zu Hilfe!” (“Help!”). A prince, Tamino, is pursued by a serpent and faints. Three women save him, the Ladies of the Queen of Night. The hero of an opera of initiation begins helpless, rescued by the servants of the realm he will leave, and the threes begin: three chords, three Ladies, and later three Boys and three temple doors.
Papageno enters with his song in No. 2: a bird-catcher with a panpipe whose figure is a five-note scale, who trades birds for bread and wine. In No. 3 Tamino sings to a portrait of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, and the aria is the sublime of a first feeling. The opera’s two men are set out side by side, and the count of the score favours the low one. Outside the finales Papageno sings in six numbers, Tamino in five, Pamina in four, Sarastro in three, the Queen in two. The comic man is on the stage more than the prince.
Movement II
The Queen of Night appears in No. 4, a recitative and aria that begins “O zittre nicht” (“O do not tremble”). It is grief: her daughter has been taken from her by Sarastro. The grief is real, and the music gives it whole. Then it hardens into command, and the aria ends in coloratura, the voice of opera seria brought into a suburban fairy play. The rest of the opera will call her the night; this number has already let her be a mother.
The night gives the prince his means. The Queen’s side supplies Tamino with a flute and Papageno with a set of bells, and three Boys to guide them; the flute, the libretto says, was carved from an ancient oak in a storm. In the quintet, No. 5, Papageno’s mouth is padlocked and he can only hum. Every one of these gifts will serve Sarastro, the Queen’s enemy, and the opera never says why.
Pamina is held in Sarastro’s domain and guarded by Monostatos, who makes the first of two attempts on her; Papageno comes upon them in the trio, No. 6. Then No. 7, a duet for the princess and the bird-catcher, who sing that man and wife together “reichen an die Gottheit” (“reach to the divinity”). It is sung by two who are not a couple and never will be, a princess and a man of birds, and it states the opera’s first disclosure before any trial has begun.
Movement III
The first finale, No. 8, is one current. The Three Boys bring Tamino to a temple, and he is turned back at the first doors and the second. At the third a priest, the Speaker, meets him, in a recitative that is half arioso, and the first act’s values begin to turn: the tyrant he came to fight is not what he was told. Voices from within tell him that Pamina lives.
Pamina and Papageno have their scene, and Papageno’s bells sound. Then Sarastro enters, and the finale closes on his order. That order is the opera’s light, and it keeps slaves, orders Monostatos beaten on the soles of his feet, and teaches Pamina that a man must lead a woman’s heart. The values of the act have reversed in a single number, and the work does not go back to reconcile them.
The second act opens with the March of the Priests and Sarastro’s aria with chorus, No. 10, “O Isis und Osiris”, where the bass voice and the low winds make calm into grandeur. Then the episodes begin. Two priests warn against women’s wiles in No. 11, and the priests sing that women are chatter and deceit. The Ladies try Tamino and Papageno again in a second quintet, No. 12. In No. 13 Monostatos makes his second attempt on Pamina and asks whether he must forgo love because a black man is ugly. The opera does not answer him.
Movement IV
The Queen returns in No. 14, “Der Hölle Rache” (“Hell’s vengeance”). The grief of the first act has become fury, and the fury is turned into the voice’s highest notes: four times the line rises to the high F, through staccato figuration that makes the voice an instrument of rage. Sarastro follows in No. 15 with an aria of calm, the bass reaching down to the low F. The two extremes of the human voice stand side by side, a mother above and a priest below.
No. 16 is a trio for the Three Boys, in a lightness of their own. Then the trial of silence meets the love it tests. Tamino may not speak; Pamina takes his silence for indifference, and sings No. 17, “Ach, ich fühl’s” (“Ah, I feel it”), in G minor, the deepest feeling in the work, to a man who cannot answer her. The silence is enforced against the music, and the form makes the trial: he has to hear it and say nothing.
A chorus of priests follows, No. 18, and a trio of farewell for Pamina, Tamino and Sarastro, No. 19. Papageno, who has failed the same tests, wants a wife, wine and sleep, and says so in a song, No. 20; he has already met an old woman who will turn out to be Papagena. Here the second act is most a chain of episodes, and the spoken dialogue between the numbers, much of it routinely cut, carries the plot without the music.
Movement V
The second finale, No. 21, gathers everything. The Boys find Pamina in despair, on the point of taking her own life, and save her. Two Armed Men guard the gate of the trials, singing a Lutheran chorale melody in octaves over strict counterpoint in C minor. Pamina joins Tamino and leads him: the couple, not the man, passes through fire and water, and the flute plays alone against muted brass and timpani, a march through the elements.
Papageno despairs too, and the man who failed every test is given his happiness, Papagena, by three boys and a set of bells; their duet follows. The Queen’s last attack is dispatched in a few bars. The sun rises, the chorus sends the night down, and the opera ends in E flat, where it began. Both men end in the same light, one by wisdom and one by appetite, and the opera does not rank their happiness.
Mozart composed the opera through the summer of 1791, breaking off to write La clemenza di Tito for Prague. It was first performed at Schikaneder’s Theater auf der Wieden, in the Vienna suburbs, on 30 September 1791, with Mozart conducting and Schikaneder as Papageno; Mozart died on 5 December, ten weeks later. Goethe began a sequel, Der Zauberflöte zweiter Teil, and left it a fragment; Schikaneder wrote his own, Das Labyrinth (1798), with music by Peter Winter. Beethoven wrote cello variations on two of its numbers, Hofmannsthal and Strauss modelled Die Frau ohne Schatten on it, and Bergman filmed it in 1975. What the work shows has outlived its doctrine: that the trial and the failure of the trial can end in one light.
Act III · The Twelve
The two paths require each other. Tamino seeks wisdom through trial; Papageno, given the same trials, wants a wife, wine and sleep, fails them, and is rewarded anyway. Cut either and the other is left a thesis. The trials are required by the love: Tamino’s silence, which Pamina takes for indifference, produces “Ach, ich fühl’s”, and her despair produces the Boys’ rescue in the second finale. The overture’s three chords return before the trials as the work’s signal. What holds the axis here is give. Act II is a chain of episodes: the priests’ duet against women, the Ladies’ second quintet, Monostatos’s second attempt on Pamina, the old woman who is Papagena, and dialogue the tradition cuts with little loss. Necessity is strongest in the two finales.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated in two parts. Love is made worthy by trial, and the couple, not the man, passes through it: Pamina leads Tamino through fire and water, and the duet of Act I has already said that man and wife together “reichen an die Gottheit” (“reach to the divinity”). And the ordinary man is not saved by wisdom and does not need to be: Papageno fails every test and gets his Papagena. That second disclosure is the work’s own and holds. Held below the gate because the first is declared rather than shown, and because the order the opera celebrates keeps slaves, has Monostatos beaten and teaches that a man must lead a woman’s heart, and the work does not see it. The music sometimes knows more than the doctrine; the work never says so.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height comes often and in many kinds: the overture’s three chords and its fugato; Tamino’s portrait aria, the sublime of a first feeling; the Queen’s grief in No. 4 and her fury in No. 14, rising four times to the high F through staccato figuration that makes the voice an instrument of rage; Sarastro’s two arias, calm made grand by the bass voice and the low winds; Pamina’s G minor aria; the Speaker scene, half arioso; the Armed Men’s chorale over counterpoint in C minor; the flute alone against muted brass and timpani in the trials. Held below Otello’s 9.4 because the opera means its comic register: the padlock quintet, the Papagena business and Monostatos are charm and play. It rises often and descends as often, on purpose.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The archetype is built, not cited. The plot is an initiation: a prince faints before a serpent, is sent by a mother figure for a captive daughter, is turned at three temple doors, tested by silence, then by fire and water, and admitted to the light with his bride. Night against sun bears the load: the Queen’s realm is the night, Sarastro’s circle of the sun the reward, and the last chorus sends the night down. The flute, carved, the libretto says, from an ancient oak in a storm, and the bells are instruments of passage. Papageno, half bird, the double who cannot be initiated, is built into the myth rather than left outside it. Held at 9.0: Tamino and Sarastro stay nearer to types than to persons, and the Egyptian mysteries are Masonic costume as well as structure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Viennese suburban magic opera, the machine play with a comic servant and songs: Wranitzky’s Oberon (1789) and Schikaneder’s own Der Stein der Weisen (1790). The departure is that Mozart made the popular genre carry everything he had: seria coloratura for the Queen, folk song for Papageno, Masonic hymn for Sarastro, a chorale prelude in Bach’s manner for the Armed Men, buffa ensemble, and the long through-composed finales of his Italian operas. A suburban fairy play became an opera of initiation. The stake was real but bounded: a proven commercial genre, in a theatre built for it, and the turn taken along the road of his Italian finales and his Masonic music. A popular form turned upward, not an art’s grammar broken; the axis clears its gate by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that the high path and the low are one world. The Singspiel’s mixed form, spoken word beside music, strophic song beside chorale, is that knowledge: Papageno’s songs and Sarastro’s hymns are two musics of one stage, and neither is subordinated. The trials are staged as music. Tamino’s silence is enforced against Pamina’s G minor aria, which he cannot answer, and fire and water are crossed to the flute’s march. The two finales are the form at its strongest, long spans that move from Boys to Speaker to chorus in one current. Held down by the spoken middle of Act II, where the dialogue carries the plot without the music, and by the Queen’s last attack, dispatched in a few bars.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, and more than two centuries of it: Goethe’s unfinished sequel; Kierkegaard’s reading of Papageno in Either/Or; Bergman’s film of 1975; the feminist and postcolonial readings of the priests and Monostatos; and the long debate over the plot’s break, where the Queen turns from wronged mother to villain, read as a change of plan in the writing or as the design of an initiation in which the candidate learns that first appearances deceive. Performance settles nothing: what to do with the dialogue, whether this is an entertainment for children or a rite, how to stage Monostatos, the Queen and the priests. Held below the Ninth’s 9.7 on volume, and because some of the debate concerns the libretto’s coherence rather than its depth.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work showed that German, sung and spoken, in a popular theatre, could hold the whole range of opera, and it gave German opera its founding model of the serious and the comic in one drama, with the sacred brought onto the stage without liturgy. It is less a reorganisation of operatic means than Don Giovanni or Wagner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line runs through Beethoven’s Fidelio, a Singspiel with spoken dialogue and an ending in light; Weber’s Der Freischütz, of forest, night and trial; Wagner’s Parsifal, a brotherhood, a temple and a trial; and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), consciously its successor. Goethe and Schikaneder both wrote sequels.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 235 years: the opera has been performed without a break since 1791, and the score survives whole in Mozart’s autograph. Its presence on the stage is wide, and earns its tenth. The charges come from a surface fixed to its moment. The spoken dialogue is cut, rewritten or replaced in most productions, so part of the unit survives in the books and not on the stage. The lines on women and on Monostatos’s blackness are now commonly altered or staged against, and the Egyptian Masonry is period dress. The alterations take back more than presence adds, and hold the axis a tenth below Don Giovanni, four years older, which carries no such charge.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Mozart in his last year at full command: the overture’s fugato, its theme of repeated notes driven into a sonata form; the Armed Men’s chorale over strict counterpoint; each group drawn by its own style and colour, trombones for the priests, the glockenspiel and a five-note panpipe scale for Papageno, coloratura for the Queen, a lightness of their own for the Three Boys; the long continuity of the finales; vocal writing at both extremes, the Queen’s high F and Sarastro’s low F. The libretto is part of the work and holds the axis down. Schikaneder’s verse is singable and often deft, in the comic songs and the trials, but the plot joins badly, and the dialogue is flat in the middle of Act II. Three tenths below Otello, where Boito’s verse is virtuosic.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, Papageno’s strophic folk song and the Armed Men’s chorale. One law governs them, the law of the initiation, which places each character by how far he can go; the E flat frame and the three chords bind the musical world, and the range covered is wide. What holds the axis at 8.3, with The Encompassed the lowest of the twelve, is the plot’s break. In Act I the Queen is a grieving mother and Sarastro a tyrant; from the first finale the values reverse, and the work never fully reconciles its two acts. The flute, the bells and the Boys, given by the night, work for the day without explanation. Read as the design of an initiation, the reversal is a lesson in appearances; read as libretto, it is a seam. Both are credited, and the seam is charged.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, in Pamina’s grief and Tamino’s silence; love and marriage, in two couples at two levels; the family, in the Queen’s claim on her daughter and the dead father’s bequest of the circle of the sun to Sarastro; the state, a priestly order against a dynastic queen, with a ruler’s justice and its punishments; labour and class, a bird-catcher who trades birds for bread and wine beside a prince; the natural order, in birds, serpent, fire, water, night and sun; the sacred, in Isis and Osiris and the chorale. They are integrated: the political quarrel is the family quarrel, and the sacred grounds both. What holds the axis at 8.3 is the fairy-tale frame, which thins every order: the state is an allegory, history is absent, and the world is a stage of symbols.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.2. An opera performed without a break for 235 years, its score whole in the autograph; two centuries of return, from Goethe’s sequel and Kierkegaard to the debate over the plot’s break, with nothing settled in performance; and Mozart’s command in his last year, from the overture’s fugato and the Armed Men’s chorale to the voice written at both its extremes.
Limiting Dimension
The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.3: one law, the initiation, governs folk song and chorale, but the plot’s break leaves the first act unreconciled with the second and the night’s gifts working for the day unexplained; and the orders are held and integrated, but the fairy-tale frame thins them, with the state an allegory and history absent. Next above them, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 8.4: an Act II chain of episodes and dialogue the tradition cuts, and a disclosure whose first part is declared rather than shown, inside an order the work does not see.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve clears it by a tenth at 8.6, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the aggregate of 8.8 stands below the summit in any case.
Basis · the score and libretto of Die Zauberflöte, K. 620, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across performance, not a measurement. The work is scored in its standard performing version, an overture and twenty-one numbers in two acts, and Schikaneder’s libretto, sung verse and spoken dialogue as he wrote it, is part of the work. No production, cut or recording is the object; that the dialogue is routinely cut or rewritten in performance is weighed under The Imperishable only. Words and music are scored together, on Schikaneder’s German as Mozart set it. German is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, in fragments of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and is not charged to the work, and no published translation is quoted. The numbers were counted by act and by role by script. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the term Mozart’s catalogue uses for the work, the first cast beyond Schikaneder, the keys of most single numbers and the instruments used in particular ones, the literary sources of the libretto, the length of the first run and the present place of the autograph. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.