Jonah Lynch. Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute. Communio 33 ...

MIRTH AND FREEDOM IN
THE MAGIC FLUTE
• Jonah Lynch
“Mozart’s melodies carry something of the birth
of an infant God, the remarkable union of opposite
absolutes, total simplicity and infinite depth. Only
here is the completely free and ever-surprising
united to formal structural perfection.”
On 4 December 1791, the day before he died, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart said to his wife and some close friends, “I should like to have
heard my Zauberflöte once more.” He began to hum Papageno’s song
in a barely audible voice, and then Kapellmeister Roser, who was
sitting at his bedside, went to the piano and delighted Mozart by
singing the song. 1
Why should Papageno, a secondary character and a buffoon,
have been Mozart’s companion during the final hours of his life?
Why not Tamino, the Enlightenment-Masonic hero who learns to
think for himself and joins the ranks of the initiated? Or Don
Giovanni, rebelling against death all the way to hell? Or, on the
other hand, should not the Requiem, which occupied his last days and
even so remained unfinished, have been closest to mind?
This is not merely an academic question; in attempting to
answer it, not only do some significant aspects of Mozart himself
1 Edward J. Dent, Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947), 216.
Communio 33 (Winter 2006). © 2006 by Communio: International Catholic Review

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 581
come to light, but one can also begin to intuit the inversion of
tragedy into comedy brought about by Christ’s redemptive death.
We will first examine the plot of Mozart’s final opera together with
some of the problems it raises, then make some observations about
Mozart’s personality, in order to attempt a unified understanding of
both the man and his masterpiece.
1. Synopsis of Die Zauberflöte
The opera opens with a serpent pursuing the young prince
Tamino. As he faints, three Ladies appear and kill the serpent. They
return to their Queen, and Tamino awakes to the sound of Papageno’s
entrance song. They get to know each other, and Papageno
boasts that he has bare-handedly killed the serpent.
At this, the three Ladies reappear and explain what actually
happened, while punishing Papageno for his lie. Together with the
Queen, they give Tamino a portrait of the Queen’s daughter,
Pamina, and entrust him with rescuing her from her abductor,
Sarastro. The Ladies then offer Tamino a magic flute, Papageno
receives a music-box, and the Ladies promise that “three wise Boys”
will accompany them and lead them to Sarastro.
Pamina has attempted to escape from Sarastro, but is
recaptured by her overseer, the moor Monostatos, who attempts to
have his way with her. At that moment, Papageno enters and is
frightened by the moor’s black face, who in turn is frightened by
Papageno’s extravagant appearance. Both run off, convinced they
have each seen the devil. Papageno then introduces himself to
Pamina and urges her to follow him to the Prince.
Tamino now appears, led by the promised Boys to a grove
with three temples dedicated to Reason, Nature, and Wisdom. After
being repelled from the first two, the priest at the temple of Wisdom
asks Tamino what he seeks—and, strangely, receives not “Pamina”
but “the kingdom of love and virtue” in response. He tells Tamino
that Pamina is indeed there but that the Queen has given a false
version of events. Once he is led to the inner sanctum, he is told, he
will understand.
Sarastro arrives, and as Pamina explains her flight to him, he
reveals that he knows her heart belongs to another, yet he refuses to
give her freedom. Monostatos brings Tamino into the hall, where he
and Pamina recognize each other and embrace. After separating

582 Jonah Lynch
them, Sarastro orders the couple into the temple for a trial of
purification-initiation.
Act II opens with Sarastro’s presentation of Tamino to the
assembled priests. He vouches for the Prince’s worthiness, and then
sings the remarkable “O Isis und Osiris,” a prayer for protection of
the “new pair”—not, surprisingly, Tamino and Pamina, but Tamino
and Papageno.
The priests begin the examination, and Tamino says that he
seeks friendship and love. Papageno would prefer not to proceed,
but assents to the trials when promised a pretty young wife.
The Queen arrives and demands to know what has happened
to Tamino. Furious, she vows to disown Pamina if she does not kill
Sarastro, who then enters and reveals that he knows of the plot but
will not take revenge.
The purification rites continue with Tamino and Papageno
exhorted to silence, which the latter largely ignores. The Boys return
their instruments, offer them food, and tell them to have courage.
While Papageno harps about the “divine” food, Tamino plays his
flute. Pamina, attracted by the sound, appears. When Tamino refuses
to speak to her, she leaves in despair. A summons sounds, and the
two men leave for the temple.
Papageno does not accompany Tamino into the temple and
is driven away from every door he tries. An Old Woman enters and
says that unless he agrees to marry her, he will remain lost in the
clefts of the earth. He promises faithfulness (until a prettier girl
comes along) and she is transformed into a lovely young woman but
immediately disappears.
Pamina contemplates suicide. Just as she is about to plunge
a dagger into her breast, the three Boys restrain her and tell her to be
patient, for Tamino loves only her. As Pamina calls to Tamino, the
Armored Men tell her that she is now worthy to accompany him,
since she is not afraid of death. They recognize each other with
marvelous tenderness, and then proceed victoriously through the
trials of fire and water.
Meanwhile, Papageno despairs of ever finding his Papagena.
He plays his pipes three times to call her, but to no avail. As he bids
goodbye to the false world, the three Boys suddenly appear and
remind him to play his music-box. As soon as he does so, she
appears.
A traitorous Monostatos, the Queen, and the three Ladies
appear and explain that they wish to destroy the priests. A tremen-

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 583
dous chord sounds, and Sarastro definitively destroys their power in
thunder and lightning, plunging them into eternal night. “The cause
of strength has triumphed, crowning beauty and wisdom for
eternity.” 2
2. Shoring up the fragments
Any attempt to systematize this plot seems doomed. Every
detail reminds one of a thousand ancient stories—the Wicked
Witches and mysterious good fairies; kissing frogs and finding princes
(or, in the case of Papageno, a princess); heroic deeds requiring a
willingness for unlimited sacrifice, which once accepted is richly
repaid, and so on. Perhaps these fragments of connections to more
well-defined moral stories mislead the viewer into thinking he
glimpses a cosmic order lying just out of reach—muddying the
waters may lead some to see depth where there is only obscurity.
However, we would not expect a mirage to have borne the closest
scrutiny from the greatest composers and critics of the past two
centuries. How else are we to make sense of the opera?
There are many inconsistencies between the first and second
acts: the Queen begins as the force of Good against an Evil Sarastro,
but is revealed inexplicably as truly evil herself; Tamino is “converted”
to the Priests almost instantaneously, after wholeheartedly embracing
the Queen’s cause; Pamina has been held against her will by Sarastro,
and when he realizes that she loves another he explicitly refuses to
give her freedom, yet he is otherwise portrayed as a paragon of
clemency, etc. Many musicologists 3 have tried to explain this by
proposing that Mozart and his librettist simply changed their characters
halfway through writing the opera in order to differentiate their opera
from other similar works which had recently been performed in
2 Synopsis summarized from Peter Branscombe, W. A. Mozart—Die Zauberflöte
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 45–66.
3 Among many others, see Myer Fredman, From Idomeneo to Die Zauberflöte
(Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 163: “While Mozart was actually
composing it, he and Schikaneder decided to change her [the Queen] character to
become the personification of darkness, but what was already on paper was left
unaltered, which is perhaps why the Queen’s entrance has a noble quality befitting
B= major.”

584 Jonah Lynch
Vienna. This “lazy thesis” has been held by many eminent musicologists,
and still holds much sway today. 4
Others, such as Jacques Chailley, have proposed a much
more detailed reading of the opera as essentially masonic. 5 There is
much to this reading, and Chailley’s work is convincing from many
points of view. For instance, to interpret Tamino’s unexpected
answer at the temple of Wisdom (he says he seeks the “kingdom of
love and virtue,” not Pamina) as part of an initiatory rite does make
sense of an otherwise perplexing declaration. However, in his
attempt to read the entire work as a masonic allegory, he does not do
justice to Papageno, whom he describes as a merely comic character.
He would understand Mozart’s having called a “thorough Bavarian”
who “made fun of everything” a “Papageno” 6 as proof that the birdcatcher
in the opera had no significance beyond that of a comic foil
for the real drama of Tamino’s purification. It is true that Papageno
does play the buffoon, but the burden of this article will be to show
that he does so in the manner of King Lear’s Fool: the truth-teller in
disguise.
Chailley’s reading is also put in doubt by the rest of what we
know about Mozart’s composing style, and by the complete absence
of any discussion of political or philosophical topics in his correspondence.
Mozart wrote “absolute” music; it was neither autobiographical
self-expression nor illustration of a particular idea. Peter Branscombe
notes that “[i]t goes against what we know about Mozart
from the rest of his music to believe that his musical invention began
to be based on forces other than purely musical or dramatic ones, in
the way Schumann used cryptograms.” 7 It would be very strange if
only once in all his work, Mozart stooped to write programmatic
music. In the same way, the dearth of philosophical commentary in
his letters, or anything other than the most banal and self-serving
annoyance at the archbishop, tends to cast doubt upon the thesis that
4
Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1971), 9.
5
Goethe was also of this opinion. He wrote, “It is enough that the crowd should
find pleasure in seeing the spectacle: at the same time, its high significance will not
escape the initiates,” cited in Branscombe, W. A. Mozart—Die Zauberflöte, 180.
6
Letter from Mozart to his wife at Baden, 8–9 October 1791, in Mozart’s Letters,
ed. Eric Blom (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1956), 263.
7
Branscombe, W.A. Mozart—Die Zauberflöte, 138.

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 585
Mozart was making surreptitious comments about overturning the
aristocracy or speaking primarily to the initiated, as Goethe thought. 8
Finally, many of the symbols Chailley identifies as masonic are
polyvalent: the “mystical number three” could just as well be
Christian, and the conflict between light and dark has been a favorite
symbol of more than solely the Enlightenment and ancient Egypt.
A significant work by Ivan Nagel deals with these questions
in quite different terms. Nagel sees an anti-hero in Tamino, pointing
out that he “speaks his most human words before he meets the priests
of humanity and wisdom.” 9 Tamino also has no solo aria in the
second act, which Nagel interprets to mean that his conversion has
rendered his moral taste “thoroughly unmusical, indeed antimusical.”
10 Nagel reads this conversion through the historical events
that overturned aristocratic clemency (mercy) in favor of bourgeois
equity (autonomy), which “loathed to owe anything to the will of
the gods and princes and hastily obliterated all reminders of aid or
bounty from above.” 11 He does not affirm that Mozart was necessarily
taking sides in the upheaval of European society, but that at least
subconsciously he felt that if “justice is the clemency of nations”
(Pétion), the second act must merit the clemency already shown to
Pamina by Sarastro. 12 This sort of system of exchange is repulsive to
Nagel, as he shows in an interesting passage worth quoting in full:
Happiness in Mozart’s buffa means ultimately only that someone’s
wishes and hopes are fulfilled—and never that self-exertion is
rewarded, that someone, by an act of clenched will, subdues an
8
Mozart was continually annoyed with Archbishop Colloredo for failing to
provide him with steady work and decent pay. This theme returns repeatedly in his
letters, indicating that it was not anti-clericalism or disobedience but human
ambition that led to his eventual break with the archbishop.
9
Immediately before attempting to enter the first temple, Tamino says, “My
purpose is noble and pure . . . . To me, rescuing Pamina is a duty” (N. 8), noted
in Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy. Reflections on Mozart’s Operas (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 78.
10
Ibid., 99.
11
Ibid., 97.
12
Pamina had just been incited by her mother to murder Sarastro; when the latter
enters immediately afterward and she begs forgiveness for entertaining such bloody
thoughts, he sings that he already knows her thoughts, and that revenge is
unknown to these sacred halls (N. 15, Aria “In diesen heil’gen Hallen”).

586 Jonah Lynch
indifferent or unfavorable outer world. First and foremost,
happiness means that all dwell closely together in love and strife
(and thus learn how rightly to wish and hope, not in solitary,
terroristic yearning). The philistine element of Die Zauberflöte can
be measured by this scale. It lurks not so much in Tamino’s
subservience to the Order and the rules as in the delusion of
abstract autonomy: that a man under alien control still takes pride
in being sufficient to and responsible for himself. Not collectivism
but petty-bourgeois individualism makes the German
biddable, obedient to an ethics that transfigures sour drudgery
into the solipsistic ecstasies of duty and discipline. The happiness
of buffa, however, is Mediterranean, not because of dreamy
atmospherics but because in those regions, far away from Luther
and Kant, the individual and society never saw themselves as
opposites. 13
Although he seems to have intuited the limits of his own
position, 14 Nagel proposes something similar to the French Revolution’s
understanding of fraternité, which excludes hierarchy. Many
other commentators have noticed this idea in a significant exchange
in the opera: when Tamino is presented to the Priests by Sarastro as
a candidate for initiation, one of them asks, “Will Tamino withstand
the harsh trials?” After Sarastro responds that he will, the second
priest says, “He is a prince.” At this, Sarastro corrects him: “He is a
man (Mensch)!” 15 Even if it could be maintained that Mozart had
politics in mind, which is doubtful, Nagel’s interpretation seems
reductive, as we will explore below. For example, the egalitarian
interpretation runs aground on the fact that Tamino’s initiation
13 Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, 35.
14 It would seem that, for all his enthusiasm elsewhere in his work for a peaceful,
secular order based on immanent pardon, knowing “of nothing external to it, no
god, no sovereign, no esoteric order” (Autonomy and Mercy, 34), Nagel intuits the
need for just this sort of point of reference (a god, a sovereign, etc.) for the
individual and society to avoid antagonism, as he notices in the Mediterranean
peoples and their happy dwelling together in love and strife.
15 N. 9a. Some have understood this to be proof that Mozart’s sympathies lay
with the revolutions then occurring in Europe. Others, including many music
directors, have explicitly interpreted the fall of the Queen of the night to be the fall
of the Catholic Church, and in one recent video recording she and her three Ladies
are represented respectively as Pope and Cardinals. In the playbill for the 1947
production at Covent Garden, the Queen is represented with the classic
iconography of Our Lady: enthroned above a crescent, crowned with stars (see the
cover of Branscombe’s book, W. A. Mozart–Die Zauberflöte).

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 587
simply replaces the aristocracy of birth with that of a sort of gnostic
illuminati. 16 Surely he could not have expressed the triumph of the
“inner circle” so convincingly if he were not conscious of doing so!
Further, to interpret Die Zauberflöte’s finale hailing the triumph of
light (“The sun’s rays drive out the night” 17 ) as Mozart’s embrace of
the Enlightenment’s belief in progress or its anti-Catholicism would
be to forget his simultaneous work on the Requiem. No papal bull 18
was required to convince him of the reality of sin, as this last great
work attests.
Clearly, Die Zauberflöte cannot be reduced to a masonic
program any more than it can be explained away as a random
assemblage of pieces of fairy-tales without broader significance.
3. Mozart and the Church
Much has been made of the tensions between Mozart and
the Church hierarchy as proof that he was a nominal Catholic at
best, a conclusion supposedly corroborated by his initiation into the
masonic lodge “Zur Wohltätigkeit” in 1784. 19 In a letter a few years
earlier, Wolfgang had written to his father, “laugh heartily and be
16
Fichte’s liberation of men from the “chains of the Thing-in-itself” was
supposed to mirror the French Revolution’s liberation from external chains, but
in many cases this self-sufficiency was interpreted as inner freedom which could
legitimately accept political oppression. “This inner-directed idealism provides a
clue to Die Zauberflöte, and shows how easily the language of metaphysical idealism
could slide imperceptibly into the poetry of inner spiritual development and
transformation, and from thence into the realms of the mysticism and
supernaturalism typical of early Romanticism” (Nicholas Till, Mozart and the
Enlightenment. Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas [New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 1992], 275).
17
N. 21.
18
In March 1791, as Mozart was working on his final opera, Pope Pius VI issued
a brief reaffirming the dogma of original sin.
19
The debate on this issue has been reignited by a recent interview with
Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, quoted in Avvenire, 19 July 2006
(accessed 7 August 2006 from http://www.disal.it/Objects/Pagina.asp?ID=5063).
The cardinal affirmed that Mozart’s “oft-mentioned belonging to the Masons is
unfounded.” While it seems beyond doubt that Mozart was in fact inducted into
the lodge in 1784, the cardinal is correct in affirming that Mozart’s faith is
indubitable and that his music is a testament to that faith.

588 Jonah Lynch
merry and always remember, as we do, that our Mufti H.C.
[Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo] is an idiot, but that God is
compassionate, merciful, and loving.” 20 Alone, this quote might
seem to indicate a deist disdainful of organized religion, but a year
later, he wrote again to his father from Paris, saying that on the night
of his first symphony performance there, “I prayed God that it might
go well, for it is all to His greater honor and glory; and behold—the
symphony began. […] I was so happy that as soon as the symphony
was over, I went off to the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice, said
the Rosary as I had vowed to do—and went home . . . .” 21 This was
not an isolated event. His faith informed his life in every significant
aspect: in 1781, he defended his honor, again to his father, regarding
his desire to marry Constanze, saying, “The voice of nature speaks
as loud in me as in others, louder, perhaps, than in many a big strong
lout of a fellow. I simply cannot live as most young men do these
days. In the first place, I have too much religion; in the second place,
I have too great a love of my neighbor and too high a feeling of
honor to seduce an innocent girl . . . .” 22 He later vowed to write
the C minor Mass in thanksgiving for marrying Constanze.
It would be reductive, then, to label Mozart either a radical
dissenter or an unthinking follower. He was clearly able to be
annoyed with God’s servants without rebelling against his Church,
and it is instructive that in Enlightenment Paris he would forego
triumphal celebration of his symphony’s success in favor of praying
the rosary! It is also worth noting in passing that nearly every letter he
wrote to his Freemason brothers is a thinly veiled request for money:
it is not impossible that his continued participation in the lodge was
motivated by his dire financial need. Finally, he did not believe
himself forced to choose between the Church and Freemasonry:
although Clement XII had condemned the fraternal order in 1738,
this bull was not promulgated in Austria due to opposition from
Joseph II in order to protect the many highly placed personalities,
including ecclesiastics, who would have been thus excommunicated. 23
20
Blom, Mozart’s Letters, 37.
21
Ibid., 107–108.
22
Ibid., 185.
23
The timing poses a problem, since Joseph II was not in power until 1765, and
his mother Maria Theresia was hostile to the Masons. See Chailley, The Magic Flute,
Masonic Opera, 60.

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 589
The portrait that emerges from these facts has been most
clearly described and explained by the Christian theologians who
have written about Mozart. In 1956, the bicentennial of Mozart’s
birth, Karl Barth offered a few concise insights in a public lecture:
“What he translated into music was real life in all its discord.” 24 This
idea is specified in an important way by another sentence: “What
occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of the balance, a
turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without
disappearing, in which joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing
it, in which the Yea rings louder than the ever-present Nay.” 25 Barth
saw that Mozart censored nothing. He omitted none of the apparently
contradictory details of life—and that this universality was
possible precisely because he was certain of the victory of the “Yes”
over the “No.” Luigi Giussani, in contrasting the fear of the
unknown with the certainty of faith, meant something similar when
he wrote, “With his hand in his mother’s, the child will go into any
unlit room in the world.” 26
Mozart was this sort of child. One of his greatest joys was to
“play” (literally) at the piano: to improvise for a few friends, often
for hours at a time. 27 Playing, however, requires tranquil certainty:
a frightened child will not play. The experience of musical improvisation
is also closely linked to a sense of freedom—an overly critical
audience can block a musician as much as a lack of technical
preparation can. This idea can be extended to include the “tranquil
certainty” and freedom of true faith in a good, loving, omnipotent
God. With that sort of faith, difficulties do not disappear, but they
are seen as ultimately less powerful than the goodness that conquers
all. If Christ is truly risen, there can no longer be real despair.
Although sadness and suffering remain, in a mysterious way, the
prayer for peace has already been answered.
Barth was somewhat apologetic for the one phrase in a letter
by Mozart which criticized the Protestants for having their religion
24
Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1986), 33.
25
Ibid., 55.
26
Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1997), 130.
27
In this respect, Peter Schaffer’s film Amadeus is quite accurate.

590 Jonah Lynch
“too much in their heads.” 28 This point was later taken up by Hans
Küng, who sought to point out the specifically Catholic aspect of the
composer:
It is a belief in God, his providence and eternal life, which for
Mozart need not constantly be striven for in a strictly Lutheran
way, in a constant struggle with your conscience or through
pangs of conscience. Indeed, it is a belief relatively immune even
to modern criticism of religion, while at the same time being
quite compatible with a religious scorn for clergy and in the long
run even with humanistic masonic ideals. All in all, it is a good
Catholic assurance beyond all optimism and pessimism. 29
While his words may be too ambiguous, Küng seems to be
indicating the childlike, simple faith that does characterize Mozart’s
letters and his religious music with the phrase “good Catholic
assurance.” In his “Tribute to Mozart,” Hans Urs von Balthasar said
substantially the same thing. He wrote, “Mozart serves by making
audible the triumphal hymn of a prelapsarian and resurrected
creation, in which suffering and guilt are not presented as faint
memory, as past, but as conquered, absolved, transfigured present.” 30
Not only is faith the source of a quiet certainty, which might yet
relegate suffering to the past and thus ring false in the end: it presents
the negative as present and transfigured.
Another passage from the Swiss theologian, a commentary
on the farewell trio 31 between Pamina, Tamino, and Sarastro,
provides further insight into the same mystery:
This earthly drama is not justified or reevaluated in that other
sphere only at a subsequent stage, nor is it broken down into a
transitory chaff and an eternal kernel, which alone would be
gathered into the heavenly barns: rather, what is earthly always
takes place from the very outset, without any abbreviation, in the
medium of what lies beyond the earthly and makes a space for it.
28 Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 26.
29 Hans Küng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993), 26.
30 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Tribute to Mozart,” Communio: International Catholic
Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 399.
31 N. 19.

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 591
There is no transposition: the world is in the sphere of redemption,
and earth is in heaven in its true and authentic position. 32
The flesh is not a mere excuse for staging a drama that occurs
in truth only elsewhere. Mozart marvelously expresses this in his
brief but dense trio. In Balthasar’s interpretation, the complex
interplay of sacrifice for love and for an ideal, departing and
remaining, mystery, obedience, and joy co-exist simultaneously in
the web of relationships between the three characters. It is interesting
that he did not try to extend his beautiful reading of this trio to
a more global understanding of the opera, and indeed it is hard to
imagine how he could have done so. He explained that
[i]t is clear that part of the perfection of “The Magic Flute” is the
incredible variety of the characters, scenes, and musical forms, the
lofty and lowly, the tragic, heroic, burlesque and idyllic, pathos
and the stolidly down-to-earth, profundity and absurdity: “il faut
de tout pour faire un monde.” If a composer like God creates the
opera of our world and puts the crucified and risen Son at its
center, there must be no faultfinding and wondering if he could
not have made it better. 33
Perhaps it is precisely the immediacy of this carnal, particular
present in all its variety that makes for both the universality of
Mozart’s work and its resistance to systematization. In any case, if
32 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 3: Creator Spirit (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 529.
33 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 2: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 269. A similar reading, with some important
extensions, can be found in D. C. Schindler’s recent book Hans Urs von Balthasar
and the Dramatic Structure of Truth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 92.
He writes, “It is Tamino’s action that therefore brings about his own selfactualization,
by ‘saturating’ his ‘general’ universality and at the same time
‘universalizing’ his individuality concretely by actualizing the order of the
‘community’ into which he is inserted. If we were to ask what in particular in this
gathering of elements represents the divine idea, we would have to say it is the
whole Magic Flute. And to see the full scope of this understanding of ideas, we
would have to see that this example from Mozart’s opera illuminates not just
human life and human activity, but in fact whatever is brought into existence by
God’s creative knowing, which is every existing thing in the world. In a manner
analogous to what unfolds in the plot of The Magic Flute, everything that exists finds
the irreducibly different aspects of its being brought into unity in action.”

592 Jonah Lynch
God is “ever greater” than the images that can be made of him, his
work, too, must contain unfathomable depths.
34 N. 2.
4. Hero and buffoon, merit and gift
Let us return to the characters, then, and see if there are any
clues to the question that prompted this study. One element that
immediately appears as significant is the relationship between the
protagonists and time. Papageno is a “child of nature,” ever seeking
instant gratification, unwilling to accept any sacrifice except when
confronted with present suffering which exceeds that required by the
sacrifice (for instance, he leaves a delicious meal only when Sarastro’s
lions arrive; he promises faithfulness to an old hag only when
threatened with “damnation”). He lives in the present, and in the
first line of his opening aria (the one Mozart wanted to hear before
he died) he says he is always joyful. He is quite willing to accept
everything as gift, and regards all the talk about “being a man” as
unnecessary and unattractive. Without doubt, his shortsightedness is
a limitation of his character. A man who explains that he lives “by
eating and drinking” 34 and who aspires to nothing more than
catching a pretty maid and populating the world with little Papagenos
and Papagenas could not be taken as a model of humanity. Or
could he?
Tamino, on the other hand, cedes only once to the desire for
immediate satisfaction. When he first recognizes Pamina, he rushes
into her arms, only to be separated from her at once by Sarastro. Yet
neither the arduous task he (nobly or hastily?) accepts from the
Queen nor the trials of initiation pose any difficulty for his obedient,
ardent spirit. For him, the future is the locus of fulfillment and the
present is illuminated by its promise. He is unwilling to accept
fulfillment as a gift: it must be earned through faithful obedience to
the priests and Sarastro. This strikes one as noble, but what if
fulfillment were necessarily to be an unmerited gift? Could his
gracious self-gift of the initial scenes actually have become violent
self-affirmation by the end of his initiation rite? What are we to
make of his lack of faithfulness in his abrupt conversion to the Priests
instead of the Queen? Is it ultimately a crass calculation, obedience

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 593
to the highest bidder? These are questions, not affirmations,
suggestive of further significance below the surface of the action.
With a second look, we notice that there is a different sort
of duplicity in the buffoon Papageno, which can be seen particularly
clearly in the scene mentioned above. When Sarastro’s lions arrive
to rouse him from his food, he cries out for help. 35 Something rings
very true in that brief instant: he has been enjoying his meal to the
point that he ignores the Priests’ summons, boasting that he would
not leave eating even if the lions came to fetch him. Of course, once
they do come, he cries out to Tamino in fear, who plays his magic
flute to calm the beasts, and the reluctant Papageno follows him
offstage.
Because this and other scenes make us laugh, we think
Tamino is obviously the more important character. Seriousness and
tragedy strike the contemporary sensibility as vastly more important
than humor and comedy, in the same way that ugliness has come to
seem more valuable than beauty. 36 Yet in all its frivolity, the scene
describes an exquisitely human lack of foresight, vain boasting, and
desperate prayer for salvation from disaster. While it is easy to pass
over this last aspect as hypocritical, something similar to the way that
the confession of recurring sins can feel like an abuse of God’s
mercy, precisely the act of asking for help affirms the authentic status
of the human as a created being in need of redemption. Perhaps this
seeming duplicity is not due to the artificial divide between intention
and outcome (as it might be in a Tamino-Freemason: the road
to hell paved with good intentions) but rather derives from the
35 The entire action of the opera derives from Tamino’s cry for help when
attacked by the serpent, but his initial neediness soon gives way to the selfaffirmation
of the hero and then of the initiate. The opera is certainly too complex
and perhaps too ambiguous to admit of a single correct interpretation, and the
intention here is not to slander Tamino. It does seem correct, however, to affirm
that Papageno’s cry for help is in continuity with the rest of his character, whereas
Tamino’s cry is an exception.
36 Dietrich von Hildebrand made a penetrating comment when he wrote: “We
live in a time that is in danger of suspecting everything beautiful of being
saccharine and pathetically superficial, a time that promotes a cult of ugliness,
considering ugliness to be deeper than harmony and harmony as something cheap
and boring.” The rest of the article provides a wealth of insights into the state of
contemporary music, which risks affirming “originality at any cost” and often
speaks an “Esperanto of atonality.” See “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1962),”
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7, no. 2 (2004): 205.

594 Jonah Lynch
painful, mysterious division caused by original sin. It is also quite
humorous, which brings us to some final considerations.
5. The comedy of redemption 37
The “joyful nonsense” 38 of Papageno’s arias reveals what the
preceding analysis of Mozart’s composing style and personality
suggested: that he was more interested in life itself than in serving
any reductive ideology. This held true even during the performance
of his work. During the first run of the Magic Flute, he famously
interrupted one of Papageno’s arias by playing an arpeggio on a
glockenspiel offstage, causing the actor (Schikaneder) to become
furious and refuse to continue singing. 39 Surely a composer’s capacity
to interrupt his own masterpiece in this way should make one think
twice about a too-serious esoteric interpretation!
If we understand unity to mean an independent framework
capable of enclosing the whole opera, we will remain unsatisfied in
searching for a “unified” understanding of the man and the masterpiece.
But if unity can mean the Catholic affirmation that no detail
of life is insignificant, 40 which is proper to faith in an incarnate God,
we arrive unexpectedly at a coherent understanding of the coexistence
of such characters as those we find in the Magic Flute, and
at a hint as to why the dying composer would remember Papageno
with particular affection. The buffoon is the character who breaks
free of any schematic understanding of the opera, the one who
reminds the listener of the infinite complexity and endless fascination
life itself holds. He has an understated humanity, easily overshadowed
by Tamino. His incoherence and comic desperation at having
lost a completely unmerited gift (Papagena) can make an audience of
individualists nod in approval: he got what he deserved. Yet we are
37
This title is borrowed from Ralph C. Wood’s excellent work of the same
name: The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1988).
38
Von Hildebrand, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” 203.
39
This event, well-portrayed in the film Amadeus, appears in a letter Mozart
wrote to his wife on 7 October 1791.
40
See, for example, Luigi Giussani, Why the Church? (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2001), 211–216.

Mirth and Freedom in The Magic Flute 595
happy that the gods were merciful, and that he did receive his joy in
the end, perhaps because underneath our self-righteousness we
recognize ourselves, too, as needy. Life promises life, and we would
rather be given grace than the justice we deserve.
Without making a theologian of the composer or a saint out
of the buffoon, it does seem possible that Mozart’s recollection of
Papageno in the final moments of his life was an implicit recognition
of the principle that not only makes it possible to “dwell closely
together in love and strife” in the social order, but also makes
laughter itself possible, even in the face of death: common reference
to the God who is not “in our heads” but who has redeemed us and
lives among us. As a Catholic, with the prior gratitude necessary to
be truly creative, he could see the world from the point of view of
the redemption: full of variety and color, suffering and joy, but
ultimately comic, not tragic.
The joy and color theologians have found in Mozart have
not been heard in music so convincingly since his passing. However,
it is not the solitary example of childlike certainty rising up to
become universal art, capable of holding apparently opposite
categories in unity. Rather, this quality has always characterized
authentic Christian experience. One thinks of the radical difference
which can be seen in comparing paleochristian tombstones to their
Roman contemporaries: the former express a simple certainty in the
Resurrection and the hope of future life together, as well as the
tender sorrow of separation; the latter are cold and solemn,
backward-looking. The magnificent mosaic in the Basilica of St.
Clement in Rome shows an understanding of unity within the
multiplicity of tasks that make up human existence: within the
branches of the tree of life, fishermen, farmers, scholars, monks, and
friends all find their place. No aspect of life is left out, from the
feeding of ducks to the translation of the Scriptures. The same
affirmation could be made of Giotto’s frescoes, the stained glass at
Chartres, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Walter Braunfels, brother-in-law of Dietrich von Hildebrand
and an accomplished composer in his own right, made the following
beautiful statement:
[i]t is the human commitment to events, however they may
come, sustained by a trust that all things come from God, which
for Mozart stripped reality of its problematic character and
brought forth a litheness and freedom of spirit, which at the same

596 Jonah Lynch
time is a true commitment to the reality of the present moment;
for true detachment does not remove itself from reality, it only
illuminates it with its special light from above. It is the humility
which speaks out of Mozart’s music in such a human way,
lending it that metaphorical quality which may seem facile to the
superficial listener, but for one attentive to the essential, that
makes for what can stir most keenly—namely the lightest vessel
with the deepest content. Only he who rests in God can
overcome both sadness and happiness with such inner bliss that
these opposites of the human soul can work upon us in a similar
way. Mozart’s music is carried by an inner joy that brings all
emotions into harmony, be they joyful or painful. Humor and
deep seriousness seem to accompany one another in his art and
in this life all the way to heaven’s gates. It is humility before
things as they are which makes Mozart’s world so sublimely
natural. 41
Indeed no words can better be used to describe Mozart’s
music than “sublime” and “natural.” Beethoven is heroic, tragic—
although at the end, he too can be sublime, with the autumnal
serenity of a warrior turned contemplative; Bach erects his marvelously
ornate cathedrals of sound—and occasionally he too passes into
a timeless realm which could be truly termed sublime, though rarely
natural. But Mozart’s melodies carry something of the birth of an
infant God, the remarkable union of opposite absolutes, total
simplicity and infinite depth. Only here is the completely free and
ever-surprising united to formal structural perfection. Mozart speaks
with human words, as God spoke his Word through a birth, a life,
and a death. Yet in those simple events lay the Incarnation, the
eternal mission of the Son from the Father, suffering which destroys
death, and transfiguration into deathless life. G
JONAH LYNCH, F.S.C.B., currently serves in Rome as the vice-rector of the
seminary of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo.
41 Quoted in von Hildebrand, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” 205–206.