Complaints about the libretto have long shadowed The Magic Flute. The spoken dialogue especially has been disparaged, first regarding plot and, recently, gender and race. This chapter argues that to cut the dialogue is to lose a wealth of detail with respect to character and plot that needs to be understood as essential to the dramatic action. It offers close readings starting at the level of words or phrases that cannot be lost without consequence. Issues examined in speech include class and institutional hypocrisy (Tamino and Papageno); gender (the Queen of the Night); race (Monostatos); and female ambition (Sarastro). Each character conveys in speech a desire to be seen beyond stereotype, demonstrated here alongside relevant social context in Mozart’s time and ours. With nuanced treatment of controversial issues, the chapter debunks a fundamentally flawed justification for cuts – that our society is morally superior to the one that produced this work.

Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

This chapter recounts the history, context, and significance of Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Whereas films from theatrical or operatic sources tend to distance themselves from stage artifice, Bergman’s production emphasizes and revels in it. In doing so, it also comments on and, in some ways, turns from the work for which he is best known, celebrated and, sometimes, excoriated. The Enlightenment optimism of Mozart’s text provides a sharp contrast to Bergman’s brand of anxious, often agonized high modernism. It also provides a foil, both heartening and convincing, to the direness so often evident in 1970s cinema, and in the life and discourse surrounding it.