Christopher Purves bass - Chandos

CHAN 3121 BOOK.qxd 12/9/06 4:19 pm Page 14
soon to be tragically cut short, was well on the
way to re-inventing opera as he knew it.
There is one other innovation. Just as
Mozart fitted musical style to dramatic need,
so he ensured that no single musical number
lasted a bar longer that it needs to make its
point, which cannot be said even of the great
Mozart operas that preceded the Flute. Take
the duet for the Priests in the second act, ‘A
woman’s beauty is beguiling’. It is over almost
before it has begun, and the perky postlude is
a little masterpiece of musical wit. One could
go on, and on, about such musical coups as
the sudden, heart-stopping string legato at the
entrance of the Speaker, or the awesome
solemnity of the end of his scene.
Or about the orchestral colour, again unlike
anything Mozart had done before, the airiness
of the accompaniments for the Three Boys,
the stark yet ineffably imposing simplicity of
sound – solo flute punctuated by wind and
drums – as Pamina and Tamino undergo their
Trials. Better just to listen to, and marvel at,
the freshness of thought behind every bar of
this miraculous score.
And marvel, too, at what it has to say to us,
even today, in a world in which irreconcilable
opposites are not unknown. Eternal truths
emerge from the mouths of children, the
power of music itself to heal, to save, to
reconcile, is celebrated time and again.
We need the Flute as much as ever.
© 2005 Rodney Milnes
The Magic Flute, its music and its
performance on this recording
When Mozart and Schikaneder collaborated on
The Magic Flute they created a new form of
German musical theatre, which contained
elements of the high drama associated with
Schiller and Goethe, the fantastic fairy-tales of
Raimund and Nestroy, but also the low farce of
that typically Austrian character, Hanswurst.
Not only did Schikaneder (or whoever really
did write the serious parts of The Magic Flute)
manage to combine all these elements, but
Mozart composed music of such diversity and
originality that one looks in vain for a parallel
in Mozart’s own output, or indeed in any other
operatic work before or since.
There are still reminiscences of Italian opera
in the Queen of the Night’s two arias, but the
music associated with Sarastro and the
Brotherhood is of astonishing originality, with
entirely new orchestral sounds, such as the
basset horns and trombones in the March of
the Priests in Act II and Sarastro’s following
aria, ‘O Isis and Osiris’ (No. 10). Throughout
the serious parts of the opera the noble voices
of three trombones are continually employed,
to introduce first the Masonic chords in the
Overture. Then the Three Boys who guide
Tamino and Papageno (No. 8), the
disembodied voices of the priests (also in
No. 8), the Armoured Men who assist at the
initiation ceremony (in the Finale, No. 21),
and finally to accompany Tamino’s magic flute
during the ordeals of fire and water (also in
No. 21). The magic flute itself was played on
stage by the tenor Benedikt Schack, and a new
instrument in opera, the Glockenspiel, was
played off-stage while Schikaneder as
Papageno mimed its playing on stage.
Although there are pictures of Schikaneder
doing this, we don’t really know what the
instrument was like which made the sound
(in Nos. 8, 20 and 21),
Each of the personages in this halfallegorical,
half-farcical entertainment has a
particular turn of melody expressing his or her
character: Tamino’s youthful nobility; Pamina’s
vulnerability and passion, expressed in her
tragic, almost hysterical lament in Mozart’s
favourite dark key of G minor, and her
projected suicide; the simple yet supernatural
quality of the music of the Three Boys
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contrasted with the all-too-human scheming of
the Three Ladies; the grotesque, comic villainy
of Monostatos, and above all the nobly ecstatic
outpourings of the Noble Lovers and the Two
Armed Men as they prepare for the Trials –
each contributes to a musical mosaic of such
richness that it is unusual even for Mozart.
However, it is in the music of Papageno that
the originality of The Magic Flute is most
noticeable. Mozart’s simple folklike melodies
are in perfect accord with Schikaneder’s naive
doggerel proverbs and are of a type virtually
unique in his output. For Papageno’s music he
seems to have tapped a melodic source which
we recognize as typically Viennese. Papageno
sings with Pamina just after he has first tested
the effectiveness of his magic bells, a melody
beginning ‘Armed with such a magic charm’
(‘Könnte jeder brave Mann’). This tune has
subsequently been used in various forms by
Austrian composers from Schubert to Mahler,
as well as by the Bavarian Strauss, to give a
Viennese flavour to the finale of his
Rosenkavalier. All the tunes sung by Papageno,
whether alone or in duets have this quality.
Beethoven must have felt the essential
Germanness of Papageno’s melodies when he
used them as models for Leonore’s two great
duets in Fidelio.