MOZART AS DRAMATIST
43
tuosity of the earlier opera has given way to effortless assurance; this
is especially striking in the treatment of the ensemble. Music defines
the marvelous dramatic illusion, the fairy-tale world which exposes
Mozart's vision of human perfectability and the vanity of evil. Planes
of reality merge in this music, and all the diverse lines of action con–
verge to one resolution: the grave, tranquil, unearthly March heard
as the initiates go forward to suffer the Ordeals. This still climax,
with flute and drums and quiet brass, is surely the most extraordinary
in all opera.
If
Gluck had written it, we would complain that it has
no counterpoint; if Mozart had written it anywhere else, we could
rightly call it senseless. For the avenging Statue, Mozart had been
able to paint a Triumph of Death which has probably been the despair
of later composers. Now he shows the Queen of Night's defeat, in
her last ensemble,
"Nur stille, stille, stille, stille!"
as a painless, al–
most organic process. Her agent Monastatos is innocent of trombones,
chromatic rows, and d-minor; at his first appearance he is practically
equated with Papageno, and he always sings approximately in Papa–
geno's comic style. The coloratura of the Queen herself can mislead
only the uninitiated or the unthinking, children or children in spirit.
It had seduced Mozart in
Die Entfiihrung.
You can hear it said that
T he Magic Flute
is a supreme work
of art entirely on account of its beautiful music, and in spite of the
foolish accompanying plot. That is the "pure-music" view of opera.
But the truth is that its adherents would not tolerate fully a third of
the music of
T he Magic Flute
in the concert-hall, outside its dramatic
framework; think of Papageno's folk-songs, or Tamino's great recita–
tive with the Orator, or the unimaginably bare March for the Ordeals.
Other critics, and especially Germans, have admired voluminously
its combination of beautiful music and noble ideals. This can
hr
sentimental, though, unless the nature of the alloy can be defined;
plenty of Metastasian operas have put beautiful music next to noble
ideals without suffering canonization. The strength of
The Magic
Flute
is that its philosophy or its binding dramatic idea is consistently
moulded by the dramatic form, in which music is the essential ele–
ment, as always in opera. Something of what Freemasonry meant to
Mozart-something of what religion means to any man-is indeed
fused into articulation here, and musical drama is the refining agent.
