# Losing the plot



## David Phillips (Jun 26, 2017)

_A beautiful princess is imprisoned by a powerful ruler. A brave prince with a goofy sidekick takes on an impossible quest. A wicked queen uses her magic to lure the hero into evil. And every now and then, someone breaks into song._

Karajan once described the plot of Il Trovatore as being 'incomprehensible'. I have the same problem with Die Zauberflote - lovely music of course, but I find the setting, characters and story impossible to get to grips with. Lots of operatic plots are silly/banal/bonkers, but which ones make the least sense?


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

While we are on the subject of Mozart try this abandoned clunker - _The Goose of Cairo_.

Essentially it's a routine rescue plot but for some reason the hero thinks his movements will go unnoticed if he has himself smuggled in to the tower where his beloved is incarcerated by means of a huge mechanical goose. Yeah, right...


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## Mal (Jan 1, 2016)

David Phillips said:


> I have the same problem with Die Zauberflote - lovely music of course, but I find the setting, characters and story impossible to get to grips with...


Maybe its a matter of finding a decent performance on CD/DVD, with a decent booklet. I'd recommend the Chandos Magic Flute In English. Do not, on any account, watch Brannagh's film version, that just left me in total confusion.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Krol Roger - After an hour and a half of nothing happening it just suddenly ends.

N.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

_Krol Roger_ seems dreamlike to me - pastel shades rather than primary colours. I like it.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

elgars ghost said:


> While we are on the subject of Mozart try this abandoned clunker - _The Goose of Cairo_.
> 
> Essentially it's a routine rescue plot but for some reason the hero thinks his movements will go unnoticed if he has himself smuggled in to the tower where his beloved is incarcerated by means of a huge mechanical goose. Yeah, right...


Yeah, basically. :lol:

I think the guy who wrote the libretto was the same man who wrote the libretto for Idomeneo, and Wolfie had to do a lot of cajoling and direction on that libretto, but one was literally a goose! :lol:


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

elgars ghost said:


> While we are on the subject of Mozart try this abandoned clunker - _The Goose of Cairo_.
> 
> Essentially it's a routine rescue plot but for some reason the hero thinks his movements will go unnoticed if he has himself smuggled in to the tower where his beloved is incarcerated by means of a huge mechanical goose. Yeah, right...


Well it works with a wooden horse in Les Troyens...

N.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The Conte said:


> Well it works with a wooden horse in Les Troyens...
> 
> N.


What's good for the horse isn't good for the gander. Never look a gift goose in the mouth.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Learning to love the magic flute:
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2012/04/mozart_s_die_zauberflote_how_i_learned_to_love_the_magic_flute_.html


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Please remember Superhorn's law of opera :

'The opera has yet to be written with a plot as ridiculous as the things which happen every day in real life ".


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

The Magic Flute is an elaborate Masonic allegory . The Queen of the night represents the reactionary Austrian queen Maria Theresa (I believe this was the name of the empress at the time ) , who hated the Freemasons .
Mozart and Schickaneder were both freemasons .


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Larkenfield said:


> Learning to love the magic flute:
> https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2012/04/mozart_s_die_zauberflote_how_i_learned_to_love_the_magic_flute_.html


I agree with Swafford. The plot of _Zauberflote_ doesn't entirely make sense, but on a symbolic level it makes enough sense to allow Mozart's music to make perfect sense of it - if that makes sense! That's really all an opera plot needs to do. I got to know the music of Zauberflote before I knew much of the story, and so the plot has never seemed silly to me. I think _Cosi fan tutte_ is actually sillier, because its unbelievable goings on are placed in an ostensibly realistic setting. I much prefer my fantasy unmixed with mundane reality.


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## sharkeysnight (Oct 19, 2017)

Larkenfield said:


> Learning to love the magic flute:
> https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2012/04/mozart_s_die_zauberflote_how_i_learned_to_love_the_magic_flute_.html


I'm glad others like the Bergman film. I think it was the third version of the opera I saw, after two different Met versions, and it's kind of my favorite. The staging captures the feeling of opera, and art, being done for the sake of itself - like, of course you do an opera, who wouldn't want to see people sing and have these fantastic things happen to them? And it unexpectedly crosses over into Bergman's lurid psychologies, too, which provides great and startling contrast and makes everything feel extra heady. It's just a neat marriage of medias.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

sharkeysnight said:


> I'm glad others like the Bergman film. I think it was the third version of the opera I saw, after two different Met versions, and it's kind of my favorite. The staging captures the feeling of opera, and art, being done for the sake of itself - like, of course you do an opera, who wouldn't want to see people sing and have these fantastic things happen to them? And it unexpectedly crosses over into Bergman's lurid psychologies, too, which provides great and startling contrast and makes everything feel extra heady. It's just a neat marriage of medias.


Count me as another Mozart/Bergman fan. And as a Wagnerian, I love the glimpse of Sarastro backstage studying the score of _Parsifal_. It not only points out the kinship between Sarastro and Gurnemanz (both basses and wise men), but possibly refers to the "reine Tor," the innocent fool Parsifal (who like Tamino must undergo a trial or rite of passage) and to the innocence of childhood itself. One great artist (Bergman) gives new insight into a second (Mozart) by a passing reference to a third (Wagner). Brilliant!


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

At least a rational case could be made that Azucena went crazy after her mother was killed and in a fit of mental insanity mistakenly dropped her very own son into the fire.

How about the guy who made a pact with the King that if he ever heard the sound of a certain horn, he would agree to commit suicide. Finally, as he is about to marry the lady of his dreams and they are about to take their vows, guess what he hears? So what does he do? Honor before love. He says bye bye and carries out his promise. 
The name of this irrational story is Verdi's Ernani.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

The plot of Zauberflote is nonsense, of course, unless you happen to be a Freemason, perhaps. And the dialogue is a pain. Mozart's music is, of course, some of the greatest ever written so I listen to it for that.
Of course, if we sort out the opera plots which make sense we are left with fairly thin pickings. For a start, people sing rather than speak - something my wife finds it very difficult to come to terms with although she's a singer. Just think of other Mozart operas: Figaro discovers the woman he is going to marry is actually his mother! The lovers in Cosi somehow don't recognise their own fiancés. The whole thing is irrational unless you want to be swept away by Mozart's music.
But don't stop at Mozart. I mean, can one really believe that Norma managed to have two children without anyone finding out? Can we honestly believe that Gilda would die for a man who she has just found out is carrying on an affair? Can we believe that 'Fidelio' managed to live in close proximity to the jailor and his family without anyone finding out that he was actually a woman?
Can we really believe that consumptive heroines managed to sing farewell arias which would tax even the strongest lungs?
And don't lets get started on Wagner, with the twins eloping and their offspring ending up marrying his aunt! Or Lohengrin with a guy riding in on a swan. Is there a timetable? And if you're going to criticise Zauberflote for its nonsensical plot, then what about the pseudo-religious, pseudo-philosophical Parsifal? Something that to me makes the Magic Flute look rational, but I know others disagree! 
But of course we don't go to opera for a rational experience. Most opera plots are pretty nonsensical. It is willing suspension of disbelief aided by music we find utterly marvellous in those operas we love. And that music persuades us to accept what is going on on the stage - a tribute to the genius of the composers concerned.
And if we're going to talk about irrational plots, just look at some of Shakespeare's. Begin with Twelfth Night


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## David Phillips (Jun 26, 2017)

Mozart's music doesn't date but the libretti of his operas have. I don't know why somebody doesn't come up with a different story for The Magic Flute: new plot, new characters, new lyrics - please God, not by Tim Rice - in a contemporary setting that would fit the scope of the master's music and find a new audience.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

David Phillips said:


> Mozart's music doesn't date but the libretti of his operas have. I don't know why somebody doesn't come up with a different story for The Magic Flute: new plot, new characters, new lyrics - please God, not by Tim Rice - in a contemporary setting that would fit the scope of the master's music and find a new audience.


It's not uncommon nowadays to tamper with the plots of operas. Sometimes you can barely recognize the work from what's going on onstage. I'm generally opposed to more than very minor changes, as I find most of them are not improvements. Fantasy, fairy tale and myth might seem ripe for "updating," since none of it is "believable" anyway. But why should we expect it to be? _Zauberflote_ is an interesting case, since its music achieves a higher dimension of meaning, a spiritual nobility, hardly justified by its characters and story. I think it works only because it portrays a fantastic realm unattached to mundane reality, and I'm having a hard time imagining it in a contemporary setting.

I suspect Mozart and other composers would be puzzled by the thought that future societies would want to update their work. They might well ask why we don't just write our own operas.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

If "believability" in art is just a matter of whether it looks like real life, then very little art - musical, visual, or other - is "believable." But that sort of literal faithfulness to mundane reality is not what art is fundamentally about. Art is not a replication, but a re-creation, of visible reality for the purpose of expressing and revealing a hidden reality. In order to do this, our familiar visible reality must be rearranged and represented by signs and symbols which take us beyond the familiar, often precisely because they do not resemble it.

We shouldn't conflate the "unbelievability" of artistic symbolism with simple illogic and absurdity. As DavidA points out, opera is inherently unrealistic in the most basic way: it is sung rather than spoken. But that fact is unrelated to its artistic purposes, which are really no different than those of spoken drama. An opera plot should, ideally, make sense. But "making sense" doesn't have to mean conforming to everyday happenings in the physical world. Myths and fairy tales contain magical events which can make perfect sense, because their sense lies not in their outward aspect but in what they represent. The drinking of the love potion in _Tristan und Isolde,_ for example, represents a crisis in the consciousness of the lovers, who, forbidden by harsh circumstances to express their true feelings, have reached the moment of ultimate despair and chosen to die together, but now find that death eludes them and realize that further suppression of their love is impossible. This "magical" event is, in a deeper sense, utterly believable as an expression of the characters' emotional trajectory and of the opera's fundamental plot idea. And when, in Act 3, Tristan contemplates his life's tragedy and cries that he brewed the potion himself, a "magical" device acquires an even deeper reality.

This sort of "unbelievability" is a wholly different matter from the illogic, unlikelihood, or sheer absurdity of events we sometimes find in librettos that purport to depict people naturalistically in the everyday world. There are different genres of opera, as there are different genres in literature. Myth, fairy tale, fantasy, farce, history, romance, tragedy - all operate in different ways to tell us truths of different kinds. In art, it's only those truths, not their mode of representation, to which the notion of "believability" is relevant.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

David Phillips said:


> Mozart's music doesn't date but the libretti of his operas have. I don't know why somebody doesn't come up with a different story for The Magic Flute: new plot, new characters, new lyrics - please God, not by Tim Rice - in a contemporary setting that would fit the scope of the master's music and find a new audience.


I don't think we need a new plot any more than we need a new plot for say Aida. Just we don't take it too seriously


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

The Conte said:


> Krol Roger - *After an hour and a half of nothing happening it just suddenly en*ds.
> 
> N.


Sounds like Strauss' Capriccio.


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## alan davis (Oct 16, 2013)

I don't like Krol Roger, I love it. Opera to me is music and song. The story line?? Far less important.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Fritz Kobus said:


> Sounds like Strauss' Capriccio.


True, that wouldn't be a favourite of mine either.

N.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

David Phillips said:


> Mozart's music doesn't date but the libretti of his operas have. I don't know why somebody doesn't come up with a different story for The Magic Flute: new plot, new characters, new lyrics - please God, not by Tim Rice - in a contemporary setting that would fit the scope of the master's music and find a new audience.


The beauty of Mozart's music is that it's composed specifically for the libretto he's working from, down to his requesting certain sounds from the librettist, word-shapes that are more pleasing to the ear when sung. A new story wouldn't work. Plus, we're so used to TMF, it would just sound wrong. All this is imho. But as well, The Magic Flute isn't without great emotional power. Because of the music, true, but also the story...


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Kieran said:


> The beauty of Mozart's music is that it's composed specifically for the libretto he's working from, down to his requesting certain sounds from the librettist, word-shapes that are more pleasing to the ear when sung. A new story wouldn't work. Plus, we're so used to TMF, it would just sound wrong. All this is imho. But as well, The Magic Flute isn't without great emotional power. Because of the music, true, but also the story...


The music of the Magic Flute is filled with Masonic symbols. Without them in the libretto the music wouldn't make sense.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> The music of the Magic Flute is filled with Masonic symbols. Without them in the libretto the music wouldn't make sense.


How can music contain Masonic symbols? I don't know what they are, but the music makes perfect sense to me.


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## David Phillips (Jun 26, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> How can music contain Masonic symbols? I don't know what they are, but the music makes perfect sense to me.


The three slow brass chords in the overture tell us, not too subtly, that a Masonic symbol is being evoked.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

David Phillips said:


> The three slow brass chords in the overture tell us, not too subtly, that a Masonic symbol is being evoked.


Thanks. I think I read that somewhere. So that's what DavidA meant by the music being "filled" with Masonic symbols...?


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

It’s really difficult on any level to accept that people are going to interrupt their lives and burst into song. Witness the decline of the Movie Musical and the Broadway Musical. It requires a willing suspension of belief on the part of the listener. If we are willing to make that leap, itjust one more step to accept farcial Opera Plots that are thin justifications for great Music.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Woodduck said:


> Thanks. I think I read that somewhere. So that's what DavidA meant by the music being "filled" with Masonic symbols...?


Apparently the score is laden with groups of discernible 3's, perhaps somebody who knows more could help out, but I'll consult my David Cairns book later, and the libretto contains da Vinci Code style Masonic symbols too, since Shikanader was also a member...


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Triplets said:


> It's really difficult on any level to accept that people are going to interrupt their lives and burst into song. Witness the decline of the Movie Musical and the Broadway Musical. It requires a willing suspension of belief on the part of the listener. If we are willing to make that leap, itjust one more step to accept farcial Opera Plots that are thin justifications for great Music.


The Broadway Musical is hardly in decline. Quite the opposite. At any given time, you will find more musicals than straight plays playing both on Broadway and on the West End stage.


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

case in point, Phantom of the Opera

"The box office revenues are higher than any film or stage play in history, including Titanic, ET, Star Wars and Avatar."

http://www.thephantomoftheopera.com/facts-figures/

NB I didn't say it was any good.:lol:


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Belowpar said:


> case in point, Phantom of the Opera
> 
> "The box office revenues are higher than any film or stage play in history, including Titanic, ET, Star Wars and Avatar."
> 
> ...


Glad you didn't. I saw it and was bored stiff. Come back Lon Chaney! Let's have a real scare!


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

I find the plot of the Magic Flute more tolerable than that of Mozart's other operas as it appears so obviously allegorical that I don't care about its narrow realism anymore than I would in a Kafka short story. Figaro, which is more about depicting human passions than making a philosophical point, is an entirely different matter and I'm exasperated by the silly and stupid melodrama: people hiding behind chairs, reveals about long lost parents, the crossdressing for absolutely no reason...

That said, the closet scene is still incredibly amusing.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Gallus said:


> I find the plot of the Magic Flute more tolerable than that of Mozart's other operas as it appears so obviously allegorical that I don't care about its narrow realism anymore than I would in a Kafka short story. Figaro, which is more about depicting human passions than making a philosophical point, is an entirely different matter and I'm exasperated by the silly and stupid melodrama: people hiding behind chairs, reveals about long lost parents, the crossdressing for absolutely no reason...
> 
> That said, the closet scene is still incredibly amusing.


Hasn't it occurred to you that Figaro is a farce in which the ruling classes are lampooned?


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

DavidA said:


> Hasn't it occurred to you that Figaro is a farce in which the ruling classes are lampooned?


Yes, which doesn't make it any less ludicrous.


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## Faustian (Feb 8, 2015)

DavidA said:


> Hasn't it occurred to you that Figaro is a farce in which the ruling classes are lampooned?


It has occurred to me and I still find myself agreeing with many of Gallus' sentiments.

_Die Zauberflöte_ is not only by far my favorite Mozart opera but one of my favorite operas period, and not just for the delightful and radiantly beautiful music. I find myself connecting with this fairy tale that raises questions about the nature of life and death, about mankind's progression from nature to culture, from unreason to reason, and it's creative fusion of those opposites far more than with the content of his other operas. I think some of the commentary about the work being full of Masonic symbolism is almost certainly right, but I also think this Masonic element usually has been overemphasized. It limits the opera too severely to it's own period, and makes mere allegory out of what is a universal and profoundly true mythic statement about renewal, rebirth, and regeneration.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

...............


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

Faustian said:


> It has occurred to me and I still find myself agreeing with many of Gallus' sentiments.
> 
> _Die Zauberflöte_ is not only by far my favorite Mozart opera but one of my favorite operas period, and not just for the delightful and radiantly beautiful music. I find myself connecting with this fairy tale that raises questions about the nature of life and death, about mankind's progression from nature to culture, from unreason to reason, and it's creative fusion of those opposites far more than with the content of his other operas. I think some of the commentary about the work being full of Masonic symbolism is almost certainly right, but I also think this Masonic element usually has been overemphasized. It limits the opera too severely to it's own period, and makes mere allegory out of what is a universal and profoundly true mythic statement about renewal, rebirth, and regeneration.


I see the Magic Flute as the apotheosis of the Enlightenment and all that entails (including Freemasonry), the opera is almost a literal staging of Kant's famous line about "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity".


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## Faustian (Feb 8, 2015)

Gallus said:


> I see the Magic Flute as the apotheosis of the Enlightenment and all that entails (including Freemasonry), the opera is almost a literal staging of Kant's famous line about "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity".


That's an excellent way of putting it, and on one level I do believe it absolutely is. But at the same time it is so much more. I also see many of those archetypes present in the work that would later be defined by Jung: Tamino is the archetypal male hero, befriending his "opposite" in Papageno, encountering the "anima" in the Queen (who has the dragon slayed for him and and then expects him to free her daughter from distress), discovering the "Wise Old Man" in Sarastro, integrating the experiences by passing with his princess through fire (the archetypal male symbol) and water (the archetypal female symbol) and finally finding the completion of his "Self" in the sevenfold circle at the end.

Or you can look at all this mythologizing on a more personal level: Pamina is a child maturing. Before birth, the child and mother are one, and after birth a process of spiritual separation begins and the child finds other relationships, primarily with a new commanding figure in the father. Psychologists distinguish between mother and father principles. The mother, physical source of being, is nature while the father is culture, discipline and law. The mother's love is protective and unconditional, the father's is won through obedience. Seen in this way, the Queen of the Night is not evil, however she may appear to some characters on stage, and Sarastro is not simply a personification of good. They are personifications of ambivalent forces, and Sarastro's kingdom does not so much oppose the Queen's as compliment it. Remember, the power of the Queen's intuitive gifts of the flute and bells still work in Sarastro's land of reason.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Faustian said:


> That's an excellent way of putting it, and on one level I do believe it absolutely is. But at the same time it is so much more. I also see many of those archetypes present in the work that would later be defined by Jung: Tamino is the archetypal male hero, befriending his "opposite" in Papageno, encountering the "anima" in the Queen (who has the dragon slayed for him and and then expects him to free her daughter from distress), discovering the "Wise Old Man" in Sarastro, integrating the experiences by passing with his princess through fire (the archetypal male symbol) and water (the archetypal female symbol) and finally finding the completion of his "Self" in the sevenfold circle at the end.
> 
> Or you can look at all this mythologizing on a more personal level: Pamina is a child maturing. Before birth, the child and mother are one, and after birth a process of spiritual separation begins and the child finds other relationships, primarily with a new commanding figure in the father. Psychologists distinguish between mother and father principles. The mother, physical source of being, is nature while the father is culture, discipline and law. The mother's love is protective and unconditional, the father's is won through obedience. Seen in this way, the Queen of the Night is not evil, however she may appear to some characters on stage, and Sarastro is not simply a personification of good. They are personifications of ambivalent forces, and Sarastro's kingdom does not so much oppose the Queen's as compliment it. Remember, the power of the Queen's intuitive gifts of the flute and bells still work in Sarastro's land of reason.


You've made explicit here the meaning of feelings I've had about _Zauberflote_ but have never worked out in my own mind. I might attribute my failure to do so to the fact that I've spent little time with the opera since my early infatuation with it many years ago. Back then I was busy discovering some of these same archetypes in Wagner, and reading what you've said here brings home the remarkable resemblances between Tamino's hero's journey and that of Siegfried-Parsifal in Wagner's pentalogy. Tamino's trials, of course, are a gentle, comedic Enlightenment version of the treachery, temptation, pain and literal death Wagner's twice-incarnated hero must undergo to renew the Spear and Grail's sacred marriage.

I'm more grateful to you for this characteristically concise exegesis than I can tell you. Now it remains for one of us, or someone, to draw out all the parallels between these profound masterworks. I suspect it's been done, don't you?


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## Sieglinde (Oct 25, 2009)

The real mystery of Il trovatore, in 90% of performances I have seen, is "why the HELL would Leonora pick the tenor".


For stupidest plot, it's probably Ernani. How Genre Blind IS that guy? 


And then there's Iris. Just reading the synopsis made me facepalm.


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