I’ll try to keep this brief, because I’ve already blithered on about The Magic Flute far too long, and you must be getting pretty sick of it. So instead of coyly easing up to it in my usual insufferable manner, I’ll state the main question right here at the beginning: Why have the stories of the Holy Grail inspired countless works of literature and art through the ages, whereas the Masonic fairy tale of The Magic Flute has no life outside the opera?
And I’ll give you my answer in one word: sin. (See—I told you I’d keep it brief.)
The notion of sin is what’s missing in The Magic Flute, and that lack is what keeps the characters from living and the story from going anywhere.
Yes, we do have good and evil in the opera, but I confess I sometimes have trouble telling them apart. In the story, Good kidnaps a daughter from her mother, holds her against her will, and puts the hero through a series of dreadful revolving doors; Evil attempts to retrieve her daughter and to assassinate the kidnapper. You can see why I just have to take Sarastro’s (and the music’s) word for it that he’s on the side of light; I wouldn’t know him by his fruits.
Surprisingly enough, we don’t really get good and evil in the best versions of the Holy Grail stories. Instead, we get sin—good corrupted into evil in varying degrees. In other words, what we get is something like the real world, with real people who (in spite of their eminence and celebrity) are very much like us.
We showed you in The Grail Code how the whole Lancelot cycle by Walter Map can be read as an allegory of sin and redemption, expulsion from paradise and the quest to regain paradise lost. To make that allegory, the author (or authors) took a hero who embodied everything that their audience would think of as good and deconstructed him. I mean that both in the modern literary critics’ sense and in the more fundamental sense of knocking the foundation out from under him. Lancelot has to learn that everything that made him glorious was actually sin, and it was keeping him away from the only thing that was really worth having. And even after he figured that out, he still lapsed into sin again. That’s what sin is like.
That understanding of sin makes what could have been a cardboard hero into a real person, whose interior struggles hold more interest for us than his most glorious battles and adventures.
Incidentally, this is also, I think, why Papageno is the only character in The Magic Flute who comes across as a real person. He has that sinful nature that we all recognize in ourselves: he wants to do good, but he’s always distracted by greed, lust, cowardice, or whatever passion happens to grip him at the moment. He fails and has to be forgiven by the gods—something we certainly recognize in ourselves. Mozart, genius that he was, saw immediately that Papageno was the only person in the story that anyone would really like and gave him all the best songs, as well as an enchanting set of magic bells that actually get a lot more exposure than the magic flute of the title. Papageno is a sinner like us, and if the story had actually recognized the nature of that sin, it might even have been interesting without the music.
It’s too bad Mozart never wrote a Holy Grail opera. Wagner did, but Wagner was no Mozart.
