Content preview - You need a premium account to view this content.

The Queen of the Night

A Mother Betrayed

Victoria A. Webb

I t may be difficult for some to understand how any mother could sincerely sing both arias assigned to the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute. Indeed, most critics assume she is insincere, at best. In herfirst aria, the Queen expresses desperate suffering caused by the abduction of her daughter, Pamina. In the second, Pamina has safely returned to her mother's embrace, only to be confronted with her "wrath of hell." I recently gained some insight into this inconsistency when I came face to face with a mother's wrath. On a long train ride, I sat next to an older woman who was a politically active teacher and the mother of two daughters; she spoke to me as if I were one of them. She was very interested in my academic achievements and asked about my professional intentions. I told her that I enjoyed teaching and would continue to do so, but that my highest aspiration was to use my education as a wife and mother. I could not have foreseen her reaction. She screamed at me, "How dare you! I burned my bra for you!"

The Queen of the Night is traditionally portrayed as the villainess of the opera and an enemy of the powerful Sarastro. Tamino's progression is clear: he grows and matures in an opera that could be conceived of, in a general way, as a Bildungsroman, a story of development in which the male hero develops morally as he learns discipline, duty, and his responsibility to society. When seen in this light, Sarastro is a kind of fatherfigure to Tamino as Tamino prepares to take Sarastro's place and lead the temple order into a new age. But the relationship of actual family members-of Pamina to her mother, the Queen of the Night-is often glossed over. Their relationship should be of particular interest to Latter-day Saint readers, who have a deep respect forfilial piety.

The Queen is usually associated with defiance of Enlightenment principles; she, her ladies in black, and the night setting are interpreted as the foil to Sarastro, the temple priests, and the sun. Indeed, a Latter-day Saint audience might even tend to superimpose its own religious beliefs on the order of priests and their temple, which would make the Queen's insubordination an act of pride and ultimately wicked. Nevertheless, a purely textual reading of the libretto can shed a different light on the queen. The words are often not understood by audiences that do not speak German and that are more interested in the Queen's tremendous arias, usually accompanied by theatrical spectacle. A purely textual reading is, of course, reductive for an opera but necessary because the text tends to be neglected. A close textual reading undercuts a dichotomous "black and white" interpretation of the opera and allows a sympathetic view of the Queen to emerge: she can be seen as a benign but fallible woman stripped of her power because of her gender and as a mother who feels betrayed by her only daughter.