It seemed to me I had one other weapon against Fate, if it could be said to be that: This role I had prepared to sing, the Queen of the Night. To sing the aria was to prepare for The Magic Flute. I had prepared the role of the Queen of the Night. I was never going to be asked to perform it again—I was right for neither role, not the Queen nor Pamina, her daughter. But for this reason, it had amused me to prepare it—one solution to my curse, it seemed to me, if it existed, was to sing outside my Fach.
I had only ever seen the opera performed once, in the company of Pauline and our Haustheater troupe shortly after arriving to begin the Weimar rehearsals for Le Dernier Sorcier. Pauline had arranged for us to see The Magic Flute, the opera ahead of hers in the season’s schedule.
The Magic Flute begins with a handsome young man journeying at night who meets an evil serpent in the forest and, overcome with the terror, he faints. As the serpent prepares to finish him, three sorceresses arrive and defeat it, and then they debate as to which one of them he shall belong to as a lover. This bargaining is interrupted by a mystical communication from their queen, the Queen of the Night, who arrives and tells them he is to be her daughter’s rescuer and, if successful, be given her hand in marriage. When he awakens, the sorceresses convince him he is the one who killed the monster and then tell him the story of the Queen’s daughter, kidnapped by a demon and now a prisoner of the vile wizard Sarastro, in need of a brave hero to rescue her from his Temple of Reason. The Queen then appears to the young hero and awards him this quest. She shows him a portrait of her daughter, and he falls in love with her. She gives him a magic flute, which, when played, will quiet all hearts and keep him safe, and she then sends him on his way.
To her daughter she had given a knife for Sarastro—to kill him.
Pamina tries to escape but is captured again and returned to Sarastro’s Temple of Reason. There she is made to wait until her hero arrives to rescue her. Several times she feels driven mad by waiting for him, but she is always reassured that he will come, that he loves her, and despite never having met him, she allows herself to be reassured. He, meanwhile, is captured by the wizard when he tries to sneak into the palace and is made to become an initiate in order to rescue her. Sarastro tells him he will give her to him if he passes the tests he sets for him. Tests of silence, fire, and water.
I remember I waited in vain for the hero to use his flute to defeat the wizard. He confused me—he was a handsome incompetent who could not slay monsters or defeat wizards, good only for obeying whomever seized him until his next capture, the Queen first and then Sarastro—and he betrays the Queen and his mission immediately. At the end, when the Queen is plunged into Hell for daring to try to rescue her daughter, we are told the daughter and the hero are now followers of Reason and Wisdom and that they love each other and repudiate her.
The story seemed cruel to me.
I could see The Magic Flute was a story of love before first sight—but at least for Pamina, it seemed the sort of story a man might tell about love—a man deluded about love, deluded as to how love comes to be. Love is never governed by Reason.
The rest of the story is mysterious. There is no reason Tamino is the hero except that he is beautiful—he looks the part. There is no reason for Pamina to wait for him to rescue her—she almost rescues herself—except that she is told that he loves her. She is a captive to that more than she is to the wizard—she had nearly been free. There is no reason for them to believe Sarastro is a figure of Reason, either, beyond what he says, unless Reason is a kidnapper who uses demons to obtain his goals. But the ending is called a victory for love.
I, however, loved the Queen. The lovers were nothing to me. I loved the power she commanded and the terror others felt at her appearance. I, too, wanted to be feared, even just once—I wanted to be feared especially that night in the Weimar theater, caught as I was in my strange cage made from my own ambitions and mistakes—what a joy it would be, it seemed to me, to summon her spectral power, to appear out of the air before my captors and have the power to force them to cower before me.