The ideals of Enlightened Harmony and Peace were utterly disrupted, and history took another turn. All this was eventually to lead to the French Revolution, and with the birth of the Napoleonic era, the Enlightenment came to an end, roughly in 1815. Everywhere the Enlightenment produced restless men (because they were mostly men) impatient for change. Modern science has its roots here.Īlso, the enlightened understanding of human nature was one that emphasized the right to self-expression and human fulfillment, the right to think freely and express one’s views publicly without censorship or fear of repression. The philosophers believed that science could reveal nature as it truly is and show how it could be controlled and manipulated. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement, strongly influenced by the rise of modern science and by the the long religious conflict that had followed the Reformation. The Magic Flute was composed in 1791, right at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, which had started in the early years of the 18th century. But let us first take a quick look at the time in which Mozart lived. He was a singer and an actor, as well as the General Manager of the Opera where The Magic Flute was first performed, but far more important than this was the fact that both he and Mozart were Freemasons. So why did Mozart choose to write an opera about Initiation? He didn’t – the text – the libretto -was written by a friend of his by the name of Emanuel Schikaneder. The characters are deliberately chosen to demonstrate and underline this main theme, but in themselves, they are totally subordinate to the main idea: the soul’s advancement through initiation. Behind the apparent naïvety can be found a quite profound statement about the importance of the initiatory process, disguised as a fairy-tale. It does so quite openly, if you have ears to hear and eyes to see. And it is, in fact, the only opera which deals with this particular subject. A story of Initiationīut I’m going to speak about something deeper still – for the story told in The Magic Flute is really a story of Initiation. Yet others might regard it as a parable dealing with the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment.
Still others will see it as a love story. Some are fascinated by the fairy-tale dimension of The Magic Flute, others might just enjoy the great music. This is often the case with great works of art: they can be enjoyed and understood on several levels depending on your experience and insight. There is a kind of lightness to it that makes it, in fact, ideal as an introduction to opera in general, or as a family-type entertainment.īut beneath this apparent simplicity can be found several deeper layers of meaning.
The Magic Flute is arguably the most well-known and loved opera in the history of music, probably because it has a simple fairy-tale type of plot and because the music is easy to listen to and to “understand”.
The subject of this lecture is “Die Zauberflöte” or “The Magic Flute”, written in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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