A new episode of “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” just dropped! It’s about Die Zauberflote by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, and this one was a long time coming. I’ve rarely struggled so hard to produce a single podcast episode, or a single blog post.
It was a struggle because I have so much to say about The Magic Flute. It’s not exactly my favorite Mozart opera but I suppose it is my favorite Mozart opera story, and probably my favorite all-time opera story. I find so much psychological, cultural and spiritual depth in this 1791 musical fantasy relic that I kept getting stuck trying to outline my thoughts about it. I started working on this episode nine months ago but kept following new paths inside this mysterious work. I eventually decided the only way I’d ever get the episode out would be to invite a friend to tackle the show in real time with me. I’m grateful to Gaby Kogut, an art historian and fellow opera fan in New York City – for agreeing to meet this challenge with me.
The specific challenge, as Gaby and I agreed before we began talking, is to rescue Die Zauberflote from cliche. It’s not popular with opera singers, because they all performed it to death in school, and it’s performed so often that a mention of the title often elicits a groan among opera experts – even though many of these performances leave their audiences thrilled and elevated. What Gaby and I tried to do in this 90-minute conversation is treat this opera’s themes with seriousness and respect, and to cut away at any viewpoints that weren’t fresh. We had no plan for our journey into this topic but quickly found ourselves in the realm of Jungian (and occasionally Freudian) psychology, marveling at Pamina’s courage as she breaks away from her authoritarian mother, which led us to conclude that The Magic Flute boils down, if one wants to boil it down in this way, to stories about children individuating from parent figures and coping with the anxiety of parental pressure in a variety of ways.
We also talked about the male gaze, the question of evil, the birdiness of Papageno, the history of freemasonry, the combination of Egyptian, Greek, Japanese, Arabic and Moorish influences in this opera, commedia dell’arte, flatly drawn villains in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter, the Wizard of Oz, David Hockney, the Hapsburgs, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Henry, Jacques Louis David, Alexander Chee’s novel “Queen of the Night”, misrepresentation and Miss Representation, Raccoons, Elks and Shriners and whether or not we like Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 Swedish version of this opera, Trollflotjen (yes, we both like it a lot).
I’m not exactly sure why this episode took me 9 months to get done, but Gaby sure helped, and I hope I’ll get the next episode out at a faster pace. Please listen to this one, on whatever podcast streaming service you like best! Here it is on iTunes:
Here are some images from various productions of this opera that we discuss in this conversation:
Mozart may have been neurodivergent, and that’s only one of many reasons why I’m dedicating this blog post to my late friend Steve Silberman of San Francisco, the great author of Neurotribes and many books and liner notes and ephemera about the Grateful Dead and the Beat Generation. I’ve known Steve since 1994, because he introduced himself to me (and welcomed me into his own cool corner of the underground Internet, based in San Francisco) very soon after I launched Literary Kicks. He has given me moments of support and friendship since then, even though I’d barely seen him in the past 10 years. I hate writing tributes to great people who died, and Steve is one of three old friends of mine who died this year. Steve Silberman was a very special and courageous person. I can’t bear to eulogize him again, but here’s what I wrote on Facebook.
