It was on September 30, 1791 – 228 years ago today – that Wolfgang Mozart’s opera-slash-singspiel, The Magic Flute, received its premiere at the Freihaustheater auf der Wieden in Vienna, conducted by Mozart himself. 

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) in 1789, by Doris Stock

In terms of its story arc, The Magic Flute is a mess. Like a Hollywood screenplay re-written by one (or two or three) too many writers, its libretto is all over the place, all of the time, projecting five parallel simultaneous storylines. 

Storyline number one

The Magic Flute is a fairytale farce, featuring dancing animals, dragons, a bird-man and a bird-lady, an evil queen, a noble brotherhood of priests, a clownish Blackamoor, and your basic stock-in-trade prince and princess.

Storyline number two

The Magic Flute is a love story about successful and unsuccessful couplings. On one hand, the prince ends up with the princess, and the bird-man with the bird-lady. On the other hand, the minions of the evil queen hunger desperately for men but dine only on death; the Blackamoor lusts for the princess but eats only her dust.

Storyline number three

The Magic Flute is a “coming of age” story, one that traces the prince’s journey from post-adolescence to manhood, from a fainting wimp with no arrows in his quiver (literally) to a heroic, death-defying stud.

Diane Damrau as the Queen of the Night

Storyline number four

The Magic Flute is a feminist tract. Yes. At its heart, it’s about the struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal worldviews. The opera’s essential protagonist – the Queen of the Night – is an old-world matriarch: a tough, savvy, professional woman who has hit the glass ceiling and is now enraged by her betrayal at the hands of men. Conversely, the Queen’s daughter, the Princess Pamina, is rewarded by those very same men for her bravery and purity and is made a priest in the society of men, presumably reconciling mankind and womankind. (Boy, does that ever tick off her mother, the Queen of the Night!)

Storyline number five

The Magic Flute is a depiction (for those cognoscenti “in the know”) of the Masonic rites of initiation, from the rituals of selection to enlightenment, a journey from darkness, fear and superstition (that is, from ignorance) to light, courage, and wisdom (that is, enlightenment).

If The Magic Flute is indeed such a confusing mish-mash of plot and insider information, why is it considered an epic masterwork? That’s an easy question to answer. Because Wolfgang Mozart wrote the music. Mozart’s music so elevates the genre of singspiel, breaths such life and depth and humanity into what are stock characters, renders so complex the interaction of those characters during ensembles and finales, and imbues the moments of ritual in the opera with such sublimity and majesty that the opera as a wholistic experience transcends entirely the weaknesses of its libretto. 

(It’s one thing to create a great opera by composing great music to a great libretto, as Mozart did in his operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, with libretti by the wonderful Lorenzo da Ponte. It’s another thing altogether to create a great opera by writing great music that elevates, completely, a klutzy libretto filled with cardboard characters, specious dramatic situations, and endless obscure Masonic references and at the same time make the piece appealing to the general public for whom it was written. The Magic Flute might very well be Mozart’s greatest masterwork, just because of the distance between its libretto and the final prod...