Die Zauberflöte (Mozart/Schikaneder)
Jan. 1st, 2014 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSo AUGH finally it is yuletide reveals and I can Talk about The Magic Flute! (A more conventional reveal post, complete with my Flute backstory headcanon, is here, including treats in Dark is Rising, Wicked, and Mary Russell.) This Yuletide I went from liking this opera very much to being obsessed and utterly in love with this opera. I really think some of this is the most sublime stuff Mozart ever wrote (yes, okay, there's Figaro and the Exultate (the Tu coronis virgine AGH) and the Requiem,… fine, I'm being a little hyperbolic), some of the most meaningful. If I ever learn German, it well may be because of this opera, the same way that the Divine Comedy and Figaro, between them, got me to learn the small smattering of Italian that I know.
It's hard for me to know what to say about this opera to explain why I love it so. It's a very odd opera, really. It's a fairy tale, with a Prince and a Princess (or at least the daughter of a Queen), but one that doesn't really use, or subverts, fairy tale tropes: it starts out with a prince who flees from a dragon and faints, and a trio of women who kill the dragon, and it just goes on from there. It's highly symbolic and almost dreamy, but includes a bird-man who is very cheerfully down-to-earth. It turns into a Masonic initiation rite halfway through, but with the addition of a moving arc for the main female character that is combined with the initiation rite (a little more on that later). It defies categorization, even in the genres one thinks it is in, and that's part of what I love so much about it.
What I really love about it, I think, is that it's about the power of love, and mastering oneself, and the power of music. The music really is sublime, with new layers every time I listen to it. There were parts I listened to twenty times in a week, and I loved them more after the twentieth time than after the first. There were parts I had as earworms for days on end, and I didn't mind because they were such wonderful parts to have in my head. Mozart knew, I think. He knew that human beings were capable of great darkness, and he also knew they were capable of amazing love and forgiveness and redemption. It's all there in the music.
It is healing music. It is what I needed, to spend a month immersed in this opera. It was a Yuletide gift for me, to get this assignment.
(I could tell you about driving a rental car on the other side of the country with Pamina's voice ringing out: "Die Wahrheit! Sey sie auch Verbrechen!" Or the uncountable times I paused because I had to hear the end of the track that was playing and couldn't finish whatever I was doing until the track finished. Or the time I almost lost it hearing a particularly beautiful rendition of the random part "Drey Knäbchen, jung, schön, hold und weise…" Or the terrible church service at in-laws' church during which I kept myself from sobbing uncontrollably by forcing as much as I could remember of the "Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!" quintet through my head…)
Random notes:
-The opera is full of terrible lines like "Without [a man] all women tend to step outside their own sphere of activity." And then I read the booklet to the Solti recording I own (more on that in a separate post, much more than you ever wanted), which pointed out that it's also a highly Masonic opera (I mean, I knew that too, I just wasn't paying attention to it), and so it's actually kind of cool that in this Masonic (read: totally male) context that Pamina gets to be in the climax of the opera and is admitted as an initiate. And very in keeping with the Da Ponte operas, the climaxes of which are about reconciliation and forgiveness, especially between the sexes. OH MOZART YOU SUBVERSIVE. I went from being mildly annoyed by the sexism to just utterly adoring Mozart. (Well, that, and it's really hard to hear "Tamino/Pamina mein, O welch ein Glück!" and have any annoyance at all.)
-I guess maybe it's because the first recordings I listened to made it clear that Sarastro and Pamina's father were two different people, but I never had that sense at all, and it was shocking to me that this is a common interpretation.
-I feel very strongly that there is a reason the Pamina-Tamino-Sarastro trio (Soll ich dich, Theurer! nicht mehr seh'n?) starts with Pamina against the combined Tamino-Sarastro and ends with Pamina/Tamino singing together against Sarastro. I am just saying!
-D (who is not particularly into opera, although I occasionally drag him to something he HAS to see) likes to refer to this opera as "that one where no one could be bothered to think up different names for the characters." I have to say that I have typed "Pamino" and "Tamina" a lot this month...
(Edited 1-2-14 to add in missing umlauts, thank you thistleingrey!)
It's hard for me to know what to say about this opera to explain why I love it so. It's a very odd opera, really. It's a fairy tale, with a Prince and a Princess (or at least the daughter of a Queen), but one that doesn't really use, or subverts, fairy tale tropes: it starts out with a prince who flees from a dragon and faints, and a trio of women who kill the dragon, and it just goes on from there. It's highly symbolic and almost dreamy, but includes a bird-man who is very cheerfully down-to-earth. It turns into a Masonic initiation rite halfway through, but with the addition of a moving arc for the main female character that is combined with the initiation rite (a little more on that later). It defies categorization, even in the genres one thinks it is in, and that's part of what I love so much about it.
What I really love about it, I think, is that it's about the power of love, and mastering oneself, and the power of music. The music really is sublime, with new layers every time I listen to it. There were parts I listened to twenty times in a week, and I loved them more after the twentieth time than after the first. There were parts I had as earworms for days on end, and I didn't mind because they were such wonderful parts to have in my head. Mozart knew, I think. He knew that human beings were capable of great darkness, and he also knew they were capable of amazing love and forgiveness and redemption. It's all there in the music.
It is healing music. It is what I needed, to spend a month immersed in this opera. It was a Yuletide gift for me, to get this assignment.
(I could tell you about driving a rental car on the other side of the country with Pamina's voice ringing out: "Die Wahrheit! Sey sie auch Verbrechen!" Or the uncountable times I paused because I had to hear the end of the track that was playing and couldn't finish whatever I was doing until the track finished. Or the time I almost lost it hearing a particularly beautiful rendition of the random part "Drey Knäbchen, jung, schön, hold und weise…" Or the terrible church service at in-laws' church during which I kept myself from sobbing uncontrollably by forcing as much as I could remember of the "Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!" quintet through my head…)
Random notes:
-The opera is full of terrible lines like "Without [a man] all women tend to step outside their own sphere of activity." And then I read the booklet to the Solti recording I own (more on that in a separate post, much more than you ever wanted), which pointed out that it's also a highly Masonic opera (I mean, I knew that too, I just wasn't paying attention to it), and so it's actually kind of cool that in this Masonic (read: totally male) context that Pamina gets to be in the climax of the opera and is admitted as an initiate. And very in keeping with the Da Ponte operas, the climaxes of which are about reconciliation and forgiveness, especially between the sexes. OH MOZART YOU SUBVERSIVE. I went from being mildly annoyed by the sexism to just utterly adoring Mozart. (Well, that, and it's really hard to hear "Tamino/Pamina mein, O welch ein Glück!" and have any annoyance at all.)
-I guess maybe it's because the first recordings I listened to made it clear that Sarastro and Pamina's father were two different people, but I never had that sense at all, and it was shocking to me that this is a common interpretation.
-I feel very strongly that there is a reason the Pamina-Tamino-Sarastro trio (Soll ich dich, Theurer! nicht mehr seh'n?) starts with Pamina against the combined Tamino-Sarastro and ends with Pamina/Tamino singing together against Sarastro. I am just saying!
-D (who is not particularly into opera, although I occasionally drag him to something he HAS to see) likes to refer to this opera as "that one where no one could be bothered to think up different names for the characters." I have to say that I have typed "Pamino" and "Tamina" a lot this month...
(Edited 1-2-14 to add in missing umlauts, thank you thistleingrey!)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 10:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 05:24 am (UTC)and *sends you umlauts* ä (ä) and the o in Flöte and the u in Glück ;)
(If remembering the character entities is hard, the conventional workaround is vowel-e: ae, oe, ue--and indeed the umlaut mark comes from various little vowels written above another vowel in medieval German manuscripts; it was the scribes' way of hinting distinctions in what was originally a Latin-language context.)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 03:50 pm (UTC)I have mixed feelings about the Magic Flute. I mean, I don't have mixed feelings about the music, I just love the music, but I'm not entirely sure it works as a piece of drama? It feels more like a musical essay on the Enlightenment to me, and that essayistic quality doesn't always hold my attention, qua the Da Ponte operas which are still asking deep questions about the Enlightenment, but with a character-first approach.
And then Tamino feels, if not entirely Wagnerian, certainly High Teutonic, but Papageno's like a character out of Shakespeare, Falstaffian, and Pamina is almost an Italian heroine. There are all these parts there, and Mozart and Schikaneder move them around so carefully, but I never feel like there's something bigger than the sum of the parts.
On the other hand, the Taymor Magic Flute is one of the best date nights I've ever known. It just bowls women away. :P
And yeah, the Magic Flute as Mozart's great ode to the power of music to work magic on human souls is undeniable and wonderful. And I loved what you said about how spending time with the music was a Yuletide gift to you: I felt the same way when I wrote Debussy/Ravel and got to spend a month forced to pay close attention to their music.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 09:31 pm (UTC)So, yeah, I agree that it's a bit, um, fragmented. And I agree totally that the Da Ponte operas hold together much more coherently. But I still love Magic Flute a lot, perhaps more than the Da Ponte operas (Flute is, whatever its flaws, less cynical than the Da Ponte operas), and I think the music, rather than the libretto, holds it together. It doesn't hold together in the way that the Da Ponte operas are so intricate and well-thought-out, but it does in a more simple way, a more visceral way, I think.
I've watched about half of the Taymor Magic Flute, which I like immensely (also, I have a severe weakness for opera in English, I have realised), but I am not entirely sure if I love it or not, now that I have Opinions about the characters. (See also today's post about being imprinted by the BBC version with Dorothea Roschmann.) I shall let you know when I finish watching it :)
It really was the best part of Yuletide for me (in a Yuletide where a lot of very lovely things happened). I am glad you got a Yuletide like that too :)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-02 10:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, I get so mad at Tamino when he just takes what Sarastro says at face value. Why???
Also, I should say that the Met does two versions of the Taymor Flute, a full version in German and an abridged version in English geared toward families, and I've only seen the German version. It's the only opera I've seen twice at the Met in the same staging.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-03 02:38 am (UTC)Ah, I didn't know that. I have borrowed the DVD of the abridged version in English. (I'd honestly prefer an unabridged version -- and some of the abridgements are a bit abrupt -- although I rather like it in English.)