Jacques Chailley (1910–1999)

"And, as Goethe once remarked forcefully and succinctly to all the Papagenos of the succeeding century and a half: 'More knowledge is required to understand the value of this libretto than to mock it.'" (297)

"Far from being that 'fable pieced together like Harlequin's cloak' which, with complaisant scorn, it is still accused of being, the action of DIE ZAUBERFLOTE is a remarkably constructed symbolic story rigorously developed. In order to see it so, however, we must approach it on its own terms.... If the word 'Symbolist' had not acquired so precise a meaning in literary history, we could say that DIE ZAUBERFLOTE is, in its way, as 'Symbolist' as PELLEAS ET MELISANDE. In both operas, the events represented upon the stage are only images and reflections of an invisible reality that alone supplies the background for the real action. More here than in PELLEAS, all the logic flows from the linking of symbols, not from a psychology from which all realism has been eliminated. Like Debussy, Mozart applied all the force of his genius to the musical translation of those symbols: his music explores the words and the 'hidden words,' and is not content until it has used its magic power to the full. DIE ZAUBERFLOTE must 'transform the passions of men, fill the melancholy with joy, turn amorous the misogynist.' And because of it, the Man and the Woman, hand in hand, will be able to face Water and Fire, and thus to attain the illumination of the great syntheses of the Golden Age.
"Although the libretto is violently antifeminist in effect, it nonetheless attacks Woman only in order to exalt her transformation in the mystery of the Couple and so to restore the ideal of true love which the society of the period scoffed at so readily...." (294-5)

"...the action of DIE ZAUBERFLOTE turns essentially on the struggle between two antagonistic ideas symbolized by Day and Night, Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, Man and Woman. To say, as is common, that their struggle is that of Good and Evil, of Freemasonry and its enemies, is a simplification...
"Nowhere, in truth, is it said that the Queen of the Night represents Evil. Night is darkness, not wicked in itself. But it is the opposite of Day, and if the conflict becomes sharp, the creators well know where their sympathies lie. DIE ZAUBERFLOTE is essentially a symbolic illustration of that conflict between two worlds, the Masculine and the Feminine, the conflict to be resolved, after the necessary purification, by the new, perfect union in the Mystery of the Couple.
"But to reduce this analysis entirely to a sexual problem would be excessive. It is only one aspect of a view of the world which calls upon old traditions of esoterism." (92-93)… (more)