1. In Silence and Selfhood: The Desire of Order in Mozart’s Magic Flute (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), I attempt to bring together a number of contemporary critical approaches with Mozart’s Magic Flute.

2. Within any continuity of musical language, the music becomes outdated more slowly than the out-of-the-way forms of drama that tend to be made into operas—melodrama, commedia comedy, and patriotic-historical spectacle.

3. The majority of critics who engage The Magic Flute love it enough to try to resolve its intrusive elements of male supremacy and misogyny, usually by willfully evading lines of text like “A man must guide your heart; without him, every woman tries to exceed her rightful sphere” and “Beware of women’s wiles—this is the first duty of our brotherhood” and focusing instead on the moral and musical transcendence Pamina earns in act 2, implying that her perfection must trump the earlier pronouncements. Any implicit connection between the Order’s contempt for women and Sarastro’s violence toward Pamina is seldom discussed. Still, I have sat in audiences and heard them hiss Sarastro’s misogynistic words and have read of productions in which Sarastro is played as a tyrannical ayatollah rather than an enlightened ruler or in which Tamino and Pamina transcend the values of the Order and signal the fact by symbolically breaking the flute at the end; it seems that these internal moral contradictions have become more difficult to ignore. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) anticipates much of this: “Men’s education suppresses its own violences, and I have never yet seen my heart’s version of the Flute. In it the good priests with the majestic voices would do what they really do; they would shove Pamina forcibly into the cubbyhole where Zarastro [sic] locks her up, they would beat up the Queen of the Night, they would kick Papageno, the truth at last” (75–76). See also David Scroeder, Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 26–29, for an argument that Mozart and Schikaneder deliberately intended the authoritarian violence of Sarastro’s order—featuring slaves and torture as well as misogyny—to ironize the sanctimony of their pronouncements.

4. This free adaptation of the original speech, intended only as a sketch, abbreviates the original and reorders some of its passages (see 2.1). It also borrows from other passages in the libretto. Note that, in order to clarify the action, I have chosen to move Sarastro’s order to admit Pamina to the process of purifying trials to this early point in the act (whereas in the original he orders her into the temple of trials in a later scene), and it is the two priests in the finale who sing that “A woman who fears neither night nor death is worthy and shall be consecrated.” I have also chosen to state openly what is more indirectly implied by the action, that Sarastro intends to pass his leadership on to Tamino. Free as this version is, then, it refers to the original throughout, and the only ideas I have consciously invented are (1) that it is only on this night that Sarastro has learned that Pamina is destined for Tamino; thus, he has “newly” purified his heart by giving her up; (2) Sarastro’s open acknowledgment of personal wrongdoing, according to my thesis in this article: “To her, I withdraw my claim, and humbly beg my brother-priests’ forgiveness for my rash and dangerous action, which has put our cause at risk;” and (3) Sarastro’s final reference to error in the misogynistic Order itself: hence the added phrase “in rescuing our Order from error within as well as calumny without.”

Michael Evenden

BYU Studies Publications