The Queen of the Night

created by Bridgette Scott

Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute," is a work of intricate balance. The opera is poised somewhere between comedy and tragedy, between fairy tale and politics. The music can be at times harrowing, and at times hilarious, and even the plot plunges the audience from the realm of the absurd to the epitome of solemnity. But perhaps the strongest source of contradiction in the opera lies in the character of the Queen of the Night. In the first Act, she is introduced by her merciful act of sending her attendants to slay the vicious dragon. She then sings an incredibly haunting and sorrowful aria, "Behold Me, I Am Brokenhearted," and as she leaves the stage, the audience sees in her a distraught mother and a benevolent figure of power. However, this drastically changes in the second half of the opera. Mozart informs the audience that the Queen of the Night is really a treacherous witch, and reinforces this new information with the Queen's threatening, vicious aria, "You Will Avenge Me, Daughter." She storms off in a fury, and the audience, aghast that a Mother would force her daughter to commit murder, roots for the Queen's downfall. Indeed, they are not disappointed - in the final scene, Mozart shows the Queen soundly defeated by Sarastro's powerful light. "The sun's golden glory has vanquished the night," he proclaims, and the curtain falls on a festive atmosphere of triumph and merriment.

But after the opera is over, the curtain calls complete, and the theater gradually emptying, there is the nagging sensation that something was not quite right. Sifting through the memories of the many arias and duets sung that evening, the opera goer searches for an explanation for this disquietude, and logically can find nothing wrong with the opera. Everything was neatly explained - Papageno and Papagena were finally united, as were Pamina and Tamino. The Queen's jealousy over not having the shield of the sun was revealed, and her reign of tyranny was finally brought to an end by the mighty and good Sarastro. The only problem, though, is that by the time the Queen's true nature is uncovered, the audience has already committed themselves to being sympathetic towards the Queen. They must then hastily discard their favorable and pitying sentiments, and replace them with harsher feelings of scorn and dislike. As a general rule, though, sudden change is difficult for human beings to swallow. Thus, it is hard to hate the Queen of the Night. After having invested much emotion and sympathy in the Queen in the first Act, the audience is quite naturally reluctant to admit that they were completely fooled by her, and to jump immediately into Sarastro's camp.

The more the opera goer thinks about it, the more she is convinced that she was right in sympathizing with the Queen in the first place. After all, in the end of the play, everyone ends up loving someone - Papageno loves Papagena, Tamino loves Pamina, Sarastro loves humanity. But who does the Queen of the Night love? Only her daughter, who was taken away from her by Sarastro. Thinking back at the Queen's heart wrenching aria, it is difficult to completely write off the Queen as evil. Her tender words about her daughter show that she has some degree of humanity and tenderness. In fact, it seems that the only sin of the Queen of the Night is her challenge to the authority of Sarastro. The undertone of antifeminism in the opera, then, serves even further to make the female audience, at least, feel sorry for the suffering Queen.

What, then, could Mozart possibly have been thinking? Didn't he realize the dangers of alienating his audience by giving them a sympathetic character and then snatching her away? As it turns out, Mozart and the librettist did not begin composing "The Magic Flute" with this element in mind. In March of 1791, Emmanuel Schikaneder, one of Mozart's drinking buddies, approached the musician about a project. His idea was to create a singspiel based on a fairy tale called "Lulu, or the Enchanted Flute." Mozart readily agreed, and Schikaneder began to work on the libretto. About a third of the way through, though, somebody else in town mounted a successful production based on the same story. In order to compete with this new production, Schikaneder and Mozart switched everything in "The Magic Flute" around, thus giving the opera some undertones and contradictions that can be quite jarring, including the dramatic change of the character of the Queen of the Night.

In the original fairy tale, the Queen of the Night was the heroine, fighting against the evil Sarastro, head of a mysterious brotherhood. In Mozart's production, the first third of the opera supports this portrayal. But then the opera changes drastically, and the Queen is turned into a spiteful power monger, and Sarastro is a noble hero who kidnapped Pamina for her own good. Mozart explains this change by simply saying that the first two scenes were a lie, cleverly concocted by the Queen of the Night, but the audience cannot help feeling tricked. For the rest of the opera, Mozart works to convince the audience that they should cheer for Sarastro, and hope that the sun king can successfully suppress the dark Queen's revolt against the light. However, the seed of sympathy for the Queen has already been planted, and upon her defeat, the opera goer can only have mixed emotions. Walking out of the theater, the opera goer must wonder whether "The Magic Flute" truly had a fairy tale ending.


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