Salzburg Studiesin English Literature and CultureSEL&C Edited by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner

Sabine Coelsch-Foisner Dorothea Flothow Wolfgang Gortschacher (eds.)

Mozart in Anglophone Cultures

PETER LANGInternational Verlag der Wissenschaften

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche NationalbibliothekThe Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deut­sche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at <http://www.d-nb.de>.

Printed with the support of the Rector of the University of Salzburg

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I D Interdiszipliniires ForschungszentrumI r \ V * * * | I MetamorphischerWandel in den Kiinsten

ADVISORY BOARD

Holger Klein, University of Salzburg Mike Pincombe, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Gyorgy Szonyi, University of Szeged Merle Tonnies, University of Bayreuth

John Woolford, University of Manchester

Cover illustration:Ludwig Michael von Schwanthaler, Mozartstatue (1842)

© Dorothea Flothow

ISSN 1614-5542 ISBN 978-3-631-56256-7

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Viewing Mozart and His Magic Singspiel Through Seriocomic Spectacles: W. H. Auden's "Metaiogue" to The Magic Flute1

Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo)

Ever since Goethe's famous statement on The Magic Flute's double appeal to both a pleasure-seeking majority and an elite of discriminating 'initiates', com­mentators have stressed the attraction of Mozart's opera magica for culturally and educationally diversified audiences.3 The recognition o f this fact may have prompted the National Broadcasting Company to commission W. H. Auden and his partner Chester Kallman to translate its libretto for a television production by the NBC Opera Theater in the spring of 1955. The production was evidently intended to commemorate Mozart's bicentenary in 1956. The text that Auden and Kallman eventually handed over was an adaptation rather than a 'mere' translation.4 The production was broadcast on 15 January 1956 and the libretto was published in book form in July of the same year. The book version was accompanied by a "Preface", which recapitulated and amplified most of the arguments that Auden had already made in his article "Reflections on the 'Magic Flute'", published in Center in December 1955.5 The two collaborators further expanded their text by adding a "Proem", "Metaiogue" and "Postcript" in verse. According to Edward Mendelson, Auden wrote the "Metaiogue" to The Magic Flute around October 1955 and published it separately in Harper's Bazaar and The Listener in January 1956 (Lib., p. 634).

The "Metaiogue" will be at the heart of this essay as it is the longest and most ambitious of the revisionist interpolations in Auden and Kallman's adaptation. Besides, as the poem was published separately and under Auden's own name, there can be no doubt about its authorship. The "Metaiogue" presents a serio­comic commentary on Mozart's and The Magic Flute's changing reception and the contradictions that arise as latter-day interpreters try to make sense of both. The commentary is intimately linked to Auden's concern with the aesthetic value and social significance of art in the aftermath of the bloodshed and brutality characterizing the first half of the twentieth century and the colossal rise of con­sumerism and commercialization in the West in the decade following the Second World War. Typically, he expresses his crucial concern with the politics of aesthetics through the "formal, ironic and resolutely 'disenchanted' poetics" that was subsequently identified as a distinctive trait of his middle period (1940- 57).6 Consequently, the "Metaiogue" is dismissive of all forms of idealization,

160 Ludmilla Kostova

including the romantic worship of genius that has been a long-standing feature of Mozart's reception. As will be seen, this does not preclude appreciation of exceptional artistic ability or achievement. What Auden refuses to celebrate in the "Metalogue" as well as elsewhere is the hyper-elevated, mystical view of creativity that came to be associated with nineteenth-century Romanticism by most representatives of Anglo-American modernism in the interwar period, the 1940s and the 1950s.

In addition to being a vehicle for modernist 'toughness', the poem ingeniously pastiches Pope's neoclassical style and recaptures some of the Augustan poet's mannerisms. It may likewise be linked to a very different type of 'neoclassi­cism': that of Igor Stravinsky, whose name is mentioned towards the end of the "Metalogue" (Lib, p. 156). In 1951 Auden collaborated with Kallman to produce the libretto of Stravinsky's opera A Rake's Progress. He must have been attracted by some of the Russian composer's ideas on myth and artistic uni­versality.8

Furthermore, the "Metalogue" bears a close relation to Auden's own aesthetic- pedagogic practice at the time, targeted as it was at providing enlightenment and guidance for the US artistic elite. As Aidan Wasley has remarked, Auden even­tually became "his adopted nation's chief arbiter of poetic fashion and form" ("API", p. 129), and his New York apartment came to function as "an informal [...] salon" where some of the younger American poets that he had taken under his wing could get together to discuss poetry, listen to classical music or meet cosmopolitan luminaries such as T. S. Eliot and Bertolt Brecht ("API", p. 130). It seems plausible that Auden assigned the recitation of the "Metalogue" to the actor playing Sarastro, high priest of Wisdom, whose name recalls that of Zoroaster or Zarathustra,9 in recognition of his own public role as a mentor to the young. The instruction he imparted comprised interpretation of various echelons of past and present-day culture10 as well as familiarization with his own poetic practice and theoretical insights.

We should bear in mind, however, that Auden's identification with the sage of the "Metalogue" is by no means absolute. Sarastro is in many ways an ironic construct whose role is roughly comparable to that of the Speaker in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. Like that tail-coated narrator-interpreter, he aims to edify 'the uninitiated'.11 Unlike the Speaker, though, Auden's Sarastro does not wish the audience to experience The Magic Flute as a quasi-religious drama but tries to engage their critical capacity as well.

To gauge the significance of all this and account for the textual strategies Auden employs in the "Metalogue", we need to consider select aspects of his and Kallman's "Preface" to the adaptation of The Magic Flute. Among other things, the "Preface" shows Auden moving resolutely towards a symbolic-

W H. Auden's "M etalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 161

archetypal approach to art. Significantly, even before his involvement with the Mozart project under consideration he was recognized as a 'kindred spirit' by Northrop Frye himself.12

The "Preface" was produced in response to continued criticism of Auden and Kallman's adaptation of the original libretto of The Magic Flute's: as has already been remarked, Auden had already responded to the detractors in an article.13 It therefore starts with a justification of the two authors' artistic choice: they maintain that "no other opera calls more for translation than Die Zauberflote", but the translation should likewise be "an interpretation" {Lib, p. 129), albeit not a decontextualising one. In their view, the latter tendency is exemplified by pro­ductions of Carmen, Aida and The Cherry Orchard that transported the operas and the play to a "mythical and hospitable Dixie" (Lib, p. 129). In contrast, The Magic Flute should "remain in its own Never-Never Land" (Lib, p. 129) rather than be transposed to a modern context.

Interestingly, Auden's Sarastro is to present his audience with an ironic reversal of this claim in the "Metalogue" by providing most of the Singspiel's main characters with mid-twentieth century American identities. Apart from highlighting the playful element in the revisionist project under discussion, the sage's experiment in "displacement"14 illustrates Auden's attitude to the conjunc­tion of archetypal material and "the ambiguities of real history".15 As the poet remarks elsewhere, quest stories and fairy tales centre on the "presupposition" that "one side is good and the other bad".16 The transference of this moral dichotomy to a geographically and historically identifiable context is therefore likely to present "sensitive reader[sj" with imagined situations clashing with their conceptions of probability and justice.17 As will be seen, Auden's Sarastro refrains from providing a mid-twentieth century identity for the villain Monostatos, thus rejecting the all-too-human penchant for demonisation.

Auden and Kallman further justify their adaptation by faulting Schikaneder and Giesecke18 on their treatment of the 'deep structure' of fairy-tale and arche­typal material underlying the events of the plot:

It is highly dangerous for a librettist, unless he knows exactly what he is doing, which Schikaneder and Giesecke certainly did not, to make use o f fairy-story material, for such material almost always expresses universal and profound human experiences which will make a fool o f anyone who ignores or trivializes them. (Lib, p. 129)

The charge of incompetence was undoubtedly inspired by the old idea of the plot of The Magic Flute having being changed halfway through its composition on account of the appearance of a rival opera, Kaspar der Fagottist.19 Signifi­cantly, it appears to have never occurred to Auden and Kallman that the drama­turgy of the Singspiel was the joint work of both Mozart and Schikaneder.20 As a

162 Ludmilla Kostova

result, they overemphasise the "imperfections" of the libretto and state their own determination to "improve" it (Lib, p. 129). The first step towards that end is the "detection] of the basic elements of the story" (Lib, p. 129), that is, the identifi­cation of the plot's archetypal underpinnings.

One such element is the relationship between the Queen o f Night and Sarastro. In Auden and Kallman's opinion, it typifies, in gender terms, the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian principles, "Night and Day, the instinctive and the rational, the unconscious and the conscious" (Lib, pp. 129- 30). The tension is partially resolved as The Magic Flute concludes with the marriage of the Queen's daughter Pamina and Prince Tamino, which stands for the advent of a 'New Order' of light and universal happiness.21 According to the two revisionists, the libretto fails to make clear the full import of this ending, which also signifies the replacement of Sarastro by Tamino, with the former abandoning the scene of power in the manner of Prospero in The Tempest (Lib, p. 130). They attribute the lack of clarity to the Masonic persuasion o f the origi­nal author(s) and go on to express their surprise at the fact that the Queen was granted a creative role in the libretto (Lib, p. 130). Apart from being "untypical of [...] Enlightenment doctrines", this causes structural problems as the audience has to "switch its sympathies at the end of the First Act", without any warning (Lib, p. 130). Auden and Kallman further object to the improper use o f the gen­dered division between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles for sexist jokes at the expense of women (Lib, p. 130). As Sarastro is to claim in the "Meta- logue", the misogynist element in The Magic Flute, alongside with the racist representation of Monostatos, identifies the Singspiel as the product o f an earlier age of the "barbaric dark" (Lib, p. 154).

Auden and Kallman's analysis of the organising structural principles of The Magic Flute likewise reveals the important role that spiritual and moral educa­tion plays in its plot. Both Tamino and Pamina have to learn certain lessons and undergo ordeals in order to acquire maturity. This process is masterminded by Sarastro in his capacity as an interpreter of the supreme will of the gods. The revisionists claim that they had to rearrange the Second Act in order to make Pamina's behaviour appear psychologically convincing, and the plot itself more orderly and logical (Lib, p. 131). In addition, the rearrangement brings out the contrast between Tamino and Papageno. Tamino is "the Quest Hero, who has to become authentic" (Lib, p. 131; emphasis in the original). Papageno, on the other hand, is "the uncorrupted child of Nature" (Lib, p. 132). In their view, he also possesses a heroic status because he successfully passes a trial in humility: asked whether he is ready to undergo the ordeals by fire and water, he replies that they are not "for the likes of him" (Lib, p. 132). The bird-catcher is thus aware of the difference between himself and Prince Tamino and never desires

W. H Auden's "Metalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 163

"the rewards o f heroism" that are the Quest Hero's due.22 In this respect, Papageno markedly differs from Monostatos, who is said to be "his corrupted twin" (Lib, p. 133), insofar as "he lacks the humility to forego the rewards of heroism"23 and demands Pamina herself. By foregrounding the difference be­tween Papageno and Monostatos in symbolic-archetypal terms, Auden and Kallman manage to evade the racism implicit in the original.

The revisionists seem preoccupied with the character o f Papageno. For them he is definitely not a vulgar "descendant of the Viennese Hanswurst tradition",24 but a figure superior to both Sarastro and Tamino: "he is [an] unlettered aristo­crat" whereas "they are but learned clerks" (Lib, p. 132). For this reason, Papageno's diction should be rendered by means of the stylistic devices of pas­toral rather than through the demeaning idiom of "low farce" (Lib, pp. 132-3). The positive valorization of Papageno as a noble representative of the people reveals Auden's ideological conditioning in the 1930s and, specifically, the lasting influence of the tendency among middle-class intellectuals such as him­self to idealize members of the proletariat.25 As will be seen, though, this idealization is by no means absolute. Like the Singspiel's other major characters, Papageno gets his share of comic deflation in the "Metalogue".

Overall, the "Preface" shows Auden and Kallman repeatedly violating what Lawrence Venuti has identified as the translator's "code of invisibility".26 Venuti detects a Platonic metaphysics behind the view of translation that this code pre­scribes, privileging the original as "an unchanging monument of the human imagination" over the "derivative, simulacral, [potentially or actually] false" translation.27 What made Auden and Kallman question this metaphysics was the received status of the text they were commissioned to translate: the much maligned libretto of an opera that was undoubtedly stamped with the mark of musical genius but had supposedly been composed by Mozart because of finan­cial difficulties caused by extravagance.28 The emphasis on Mozart's fallibility in personal matters was in tune with the markedly anti-romantic conception of the creative personality that was characteristic of Anglo-American modernism.

While this view of Mozart plays an important role in the "Metalogue", the "Preface" is primarily concerned with the 'errors' of the original librettist(s). As we have seen, Auden and Kallman made a point of stressing the symbolic- archetypal nature o f the Singspiel's plot and introduced a number of changes in the original libretto to alert readers and spectators to this particular trait. From their perspective, such interventions belong to a radically different order from the modifications undertaken by the 'Dixifiers' of Carmen, Aida and The Cherry Orchard. Whereas they themselves strove to maintain an atmosphere of mythi­cal purity, the 'Dixifiers' 'hybridised' the operas and the play, without paying suf­ficient attention to the uneasy coexistence, in their experiments, of "the ambi-

164 Ludmilla Kostova

guides of real history"29 and the "basic elements" (Lib., p. 129) of the original works' plots.

In all fairness, it must be pointed out that there was a nineteenth-century precedent for Auden and Kallman's 'mythicising' manoeuvres. Thus Soren Kierkegaard, arguably the most critical of the European Romantics' progeny, stressed the importance of separating "the essential from the accidental" in The Magic Flute and specifically favoured the "conjur[ing] up [of] the mythical Papageno" while forgetting "the actual person in the play".3 The uncovering of such a precedent is not surprising. The dialogue of specialized recipients such as Auden and Kallman with a canonical work of art such as The Magic Flute was bound to involve a revision of responses from the past as well as insights condi­tioned by both aesthetic and ideological concerns of the present.

This dialogue is continued in the "Metalogue". Apart from engaging with the reception of The Magic Flute and the posthumous image(s) of its creator in a variety of significant ways, the poem is also an ironic commentary on traditional and modern genres and styles. Some of Auden's irony targets the opera's 1956 audience, perceived in terms of the familiar motif of American youth as opposed to European experience. For instance, the "Metalogue" is said to exemplify a new form, "unclassed" by Aristotle and Boileau, proverbial legislators of 'old world' culture, (Lib, p. 153). An analogue for it is provided by the interventions of the "Paid Announcer," jocularly proclaimed a "new god" (a new deus ex machinal), who interrupts performances, "to name a sponsor or to praise a brand" (Lib, p. 153). Sarastro's intervention, however, belongs to an altogether different order, insofar as he does not aim to promote a product that would satisfy a purely material need: "a product [...] that you could wear or cook with or imbibe" (Lib, p. 153). Rather, the priest of wisdom wishes to confront a public inured to the strategies of consumerism with the specific mode o f consuming art. The 'recipe' for this seems fairly simple: "[y]ou cannot hoard or waste a work of art" (Lib, p. 153).

Having instructed the audience in the rudiments of aesthetic consumption, Sarastro proceeds to introduce them to Mozart, the producer of the artwork that is being performed. Just as aesthetic artefacts are different from 'regular' con­sumer products, so Mozart as the creator of such artefacts must be positioned outside the context of buying and selling in which 'regular' producers usually operate. Sarastro therefore explains that his intention is not to sell the composer but to praise him. The statement "I come to praise but not to sell Mozart" (Lib, p. 153) recalls Mark Antony's famous line in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act III Scene 2, 1. 79), "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." An allusion to a play by Shakespeare is certainly in keeping with Sarastro's character as a "learned clerk", but the significance of the reference goes beyond that. While

W. H. Auden's "Metalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 165

Antony's statement is an expression of his hypocrisy and desire to manipulate others through rhetorical ploys, Auden's Sarastro seems sincere in his wish to give Mozart his due and spare him the indignity of posthumous commodifica­tion. However, romantic idealization is equally out of place. As a result Sarastro's bi-focal commentary on Mozart's time and life in mid-twentieth cen­tury New York is organized through the strategy of levelling, which critics have noticed in some of Auden's other poems as well.31 Through this strategy, the dif­ference between 'high' and 'low' is dismantled and "a condition of universal horizontality [is established] where all things and events coalesce, none having the right to claim privilege."32 Thus, Sarastro announces Mozart's birth in Salz­burg in the mid-eighteenth century: a time when "kings were many and machines were few; / And open Atheism something new" (Lib, p. 153). He then abandons the grand topics of monarchy, scientific progress and the decline of traditional religious belief to remark on the indignity to which Mozart was exposed by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. This indignity is coupled together with the petty discomforts of Sarastro's own "servantless" existence in New York:

(It makes a servantless New Yorker soreTo think sheer genius had to stand beforeA mere Archbishop with uncovered head:But Mozart never had to make his bed.) (parenthesis in the original; Lib, p. 153)

Because of the strategy of leveling, the passage gives the impression of being "a collection of [ill-matched] fragments."33 Read in terms of Auden's modernist agenda, the ostensible lack of unity demonstrates the messy way(s) in which the human mind works. However, it likewise alerts us to the difficulty of Sarastro's task of presenting Mozart to a mid-twentieth century American audience, far removed from the composer's time and its mores. As we have seen, the sage's original intention was to produce a socio-historical interpretation linking Mozart's life and music to "kings", "machines" and the novelty of "open Athe­ism." (Lib., p. 153) He was presumably distracted from this undertaking by the intrusion into his mind of Mozart's relationship with the Prince-Archbishop. As a result, the broad social panorama is replaced by a vignette o f Mozart standing before his patron "with uncovered head". We may equally assume that the minor 'ordeals' of the speaker's "servantless" existence constitute yet another obstacle preventing him from carrying out his initial plan.

As Sarastro continues his reflections on Mozart's reception, he stumbles upon a major ontological problem: the impossibility of going back in time ("The his­tory of Music as of Man / Will not go cancrizans" [Lib, p. 153]) and recon­structing the way(s) in which Mozart's contemporaries listened to his music. For

166 Ludmilla Kostova

him, "each age has its own mode of listening" {Lib, p. 153). Taste is conditioned by a cultural environment, itself subject to change. Precise aesthetic judgement is therefore impossible. According to Sarastro, "no ear can / Recall what ... / Was heard by ears whose treasure-hoard contained / A Flute already but as yet no Ring" (Lib, p. 153). The Magic Flute, it would appear, is part of a "treasure- hoard" of canonical musical works whose aesthetic significance changes as the composition of the "hoard" is modified by the introduction of new pieces. Thus the advent of Wagnerian opera changed perceptions of Mozart's music.

Apart from innovations in music, new ways of thinking about it and its crea­tors have also impacted on Mozart's reception:

We know the Mozart o f our fathers' time Was gay, rococo, sweet but not sublime,A Viennese Italian: that is changedSince music-critics learned to feel "estranged";Now it's the Germans he is classed amongst,A Geist whose music was composed from A ngst... (Lib, p. 153)

Significantly, the Nazi propaganda machine of the 1930s and 1940s emphasised Mozart's 'Germanness' and proclaimed his music a genuine expression of the spirit of the Volk.34 However unobtrusively, Auden's Sarastro challenges the composer's Nazi appropriation by identifying a hyper-intellectual line of inter­pretation that similarly assigns him to a German cultural strand, albeit a very different one from the 'tradition' envisaged by the ideologists of National So­cialism. Ironically, Mozart's 'Germanness' is said to have been revealed by music-critics favouring the interpretive strategy of estrangement whose connec­tion with European avant-garde thought is indisputable.

On the other hand, sophisticated approaches to Mozart's music have led to undue seriousness. Thus even some of the composer's lighter pieces have ac­quired a canonical status: they are "heard in solemn silence, score on knees" (Lib, p. 153). For Sarastro such extreme cases of canonization show taste to be an 'anarchic' factor that frequently eludes rational control. In this respect he is fairly close to Pope's poetic speaker in An Essay on Criticism,35 Because taste is so often impervious to reason, it is impossible to predict how Mozart's music will be treated by the cognoscenti o f the future:

What next? One can no more imagine how,In concert halls two hundred years from now,When the Mozartian sound waves move the air,The cognoscenti will be moved ... (Lib, pp. 153-4)

For Sarastro the survival of Mozart’s music through the centuries is a mixed blessing. The passage of time has led to a re-evaluation of the ideology of The

W. H. Auden’s "Melalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 167

Magic Flute. The sage claims, tongue-in-cheek, that this re-evaluation is a cause of (posthumous) "vexation" to the composer: "[a]n opera composer may be vexed / By later umbrage taken at his text" (Lib, p. 154). "The status of the sexes in the play" attracts moral diatribes insofar as it reflects attitudes to women typi­cal of "the era of barbaric dark" (Lib, p. 154) in which The Magic Flute was (en)gendered. To make amends, the speaker jocularly "displaces" the Singspiel's mythical personages to mid-twentieth-century America and reverses power rela­tions between the Queen of Night and Sarastro, Pamina and Tamino, and Papagena and Papageno. In the modern context the Queen is a "highly paid and most efficient Dean" whereas Sarastro works under her (Lib, p. 154). Quite appropriately, his field is "the History of Ancient Myth" and he is "tolerated' (my emphasis), rather than admired, for his knowledge (Lib, p. 154). Pamina similarly pursues an active career as a researcher for Time while Tamino's "acquisition] [of] manly wisdom" (he is a Ph.D. student) is interrupted by duties that are traditionally gendered feminine: "changing diapers and doing dishes" (Lib, p. 154). We are not told what exactly Papagena does for a living but her job apparently keeps her very busy as she only occasionally "listens to Mozart operas on the air" (Lib, p. 154). Papageno, on the other hand, still retains his taste for popular culture but in the modem context he "[p]refers the jukebox to the glockenspiel" (Lib, p. 154). Auden's Sarastro thus empowers the female characters of The Magic Flute and ironically turns the tables on the tradition of patriarchal dominance, in which the opera originally participated.

However, the sage finds it impossibly difficult to "cast" the villain Monostatos without resorting to some form of negative discrimination. As a result, he does not even attempt to endow him with a mid-twentieth century identity but simply admits his defeat. Devising a character and a set of imagi­nary situations that connote evil without invoking race-, class- or religion-based prejudices is beyond his power:

And how is - what was easy in the past -A democratic villain to be cast?Monostatos must make his bad impressionWithout a race, religion or profession. (Lib, p. 154)

Despite the ostensible flippancy of the poetic speaker's tone, the statement is closely linked to a crisis of representation that writers, philosophers and social scientists tried to resolve in the years following the Second World War. The cri­sis in question arose from the difficulty of defining evil in the aftermath of the Holocaust and other excesses of hatred and violence in the first half of the twentieth century. Writing in the same historical context, Horkheimer and Adorno discovered hatred and resentment of the Other at the heart of "the rit-

168 Ludmilla Kostova

ualfs] of civilisation".36 By openly declaring his inability to portray a "democ­ratic villain", Sarastro refuses to provide fuel for those rituals. Auden's own un­willingness, in the "Preface", to "displace" the morally polarized universes of the quest story and fairy tale into the realm of "real history", which was noted earlier, should also be seen from such a perspective.

As if to make up for his lapse into 'Dixification', Sarastro grows hypercritical of experimental productions in the next section of the "Metalogue". His judge­ment upon such productions is contained in the magisterial pronouncement a la Pope: "What greatness made, small vanities abuse" (Lib, p. 155). Above all, his strictures target "deep interpretive gestures"37 by latter-day conductors, directors and designers. Those gestures transform settings and characters in seemingly arbitrary ways and usually evoke contentious reactions from conservative com­mentators and audiences. 8 At first glance Auden's Sarastro appears to espouse such a conservative attitude. On closer inspection, his reaction seems more in tune with the contradictory spirit of mid-twentieth-century 'high' culture. While he can no longer subscribe to certain forms of romantic idealism whole­heartedly, he is not prepared to give up the romantic and post-romantic notion of aesthetic uniqueness altogether. This is borne out by his tongue-in-cheek cele­bration of the opera's genius as an indestructible essence, which has survived diverse forms of intervention from "deep interpretive gestures" to "translation[s] into foreign operese" (Lib, p. 155) such as Auden and Kallman's own adaptation. This essence, which is interpreted in a manner strongly reminiscent of Enlight­enment constructions of "genius",39 will also ensure the survival of The Magic Flute in the future. Despite changing lifestyles and the 'anarchic' nature of taste,

The crowds, two centuries from now, will press (Absurd their hair, ridiculous their dress),And pay in currencies however weird To hear Sarastro booming through his beard,Sharp connoisseurs approve if it is clean The F in alt o f the nocturnal Queen,Some uncouth creature from the Bronx amaze Park Avenue by knowing all the K's. (Lib, p. 155)

The passage provides yet another example of the strategy of levelling as crowds, connoisseurs and the "uncouth", but knowledgeable "creature from the Bronx" are all placed together and no attempt is made to privilege any of them. This omnium gatherum seems a suitable setting for the apotheosis of the "genius" of an artwork that is pronounced to be "tough" (Lib, p. 154), because it has sur­vived for two hundred years, despite diverse interventions by people in and out­side the opera world.

W. H. Auden's "Metalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 169

Having duly honoured the endurance of The Magic Flute, Sarastro re-directs his attention to its creator. In a manner recalling classical panegyrics, he stresses the "seemliness" o f celebrating Mozart's birth and goes on to list some of the reasons for it:

How seemly then to celebrate the birth O f one who did no harm to our poor earth,Created masterpieces by the dozen,Indulged in toilet humour with his cousin,And had a pauper's funeral in the rain,The like of whom we shall not see again ... (Lib, p. 155)

The deflationist impulse we associate with modernism is at work in this quota­tion, as is the tendency to consign the production of Mozart's masterpieces and "the toilet humour" he shared with his cousin to the same "condition of universal horizontality". However, it is the second line that is most remarkable: in it the sage urges the audience to celebrate Mozart because he "did no harm to our poor earth" (Lib., p. 155, my emphasis). We do not normally expect composers to cause harm to our planet or its inhabitants. In fact, music is usually associated with harmony rather than any form of destruction. Even Orpheus, the only musi­cian whose art is believed to have had a direct impact on the material world (legend has it that he tamed wild beasts and charmed rocks into dancing), was not tempted to use that power for destructive purposes. On the other hand, it would be unfair to blame composers, such as Wagner, for the posthumous incorporation of their work into repressive ideological schemes like Nazism. The idea that some elements in their oeuvres made the incorporation possible does not change the argument substantially.

To my mind, the line does not refer to any actual or potential power that Mozart as a composer possessed and might have used to the detriment of the earth or humanity, but rather alludes to the absence from his personal life of choices that might have led to acts of violence or destruction. Sarastro's insis­tence that this absence is worthy of celebration reflects the sense of historical crisis that was part of Auden's psychological makeup for the greater part of his writing career.4 Coupled with it was general scepticism about human nature and its capacity to recognize the truly valuable. Mozart's ability "to produce master­pieces by the dozen" was a gift to humanity for which no proper appreciation was shown: the composer was humiliated by "a mere Archbishop" and was eventually given "a pauper's funeral in the rain" (Lib., p. 155).

The "pauper's funeral" was one of the legends that, in Peter Gay's apt phras­ing, "obscured" Mozart's life and death and thwarted the subsequent attempts of his biographers to get at the factual bedrock underneath.41 However, Auden's Sarastro is not concerned with the demythologization of the composer's life and

170 Ludmilla Kostova

death but with the establishment of certain basic verities about human nature in its relationship to musical genius. He therefore touches upon the other bio­graphical legend: the story of Salieri's villainous plotting against Mozart and his supposed complicity in his death. Sarastro claims that the Italian composer should nevertheless be forgiven and even "remember[ed] kindly" and that Mozart, too, would have adopted such a moral stance towards him had he been alive (Lib, p. 155). The sage next warns the audience not to repeat the errors of the past by ignoring exceptional musical talent in the present: "Nor, while we praise the dead, should we forget / We have Stravinsky, bless him, with us yet" (Lib, pp. 155-6). Sarastro's performance of universal benevolence ends with an ironic prayer for reason and love to "assume their rightful sway" in all hearts as they do in the finale of The Magic Flute.

Responding to the predicament of art and artists in the decade following the Second World War, the "Metalogue" to The Magic Flute provides a seriocomic perspective on Mozart's life and its posthumous discursive productions as well as on the composer's magic Singspiel, itself the subject of debate and re-inter­pretation over the centuries. The poem enacts the complex process of presenting an eighteenth-century musical genius and one of his most controversial oeuvres to a mid-twentieth-century American audience accustomed to the strategies of consumerism but alienated from canonical art. As pointed out above, Auden's involvement in the NBC production of The Magic Flute was intimately linked to his aesthetic-pedagogic practice at the time. Inviting his American disciples and the broader public to consider a canonical artwork anew might at first glance appear an irredeemably elitist gesture targeted at the promotion and perpetuation of received cultural capital. However, a closer look at Auden's artistic output and theoretical writings in the 1950s reveals his concern with the balancing of elitism with inclusivity through the dismantlement of historically conditioned hierarchical distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture. It has been said of in- tertextual experiments such as the "Metalogue" that they "enter the cultural and historical world to change it and keep it going forward."42 Over fifty years later, Auden's seriocomic poem still performs this important cultural task for Mozart's reception.

Notes] The earliest draft o f this article was produced during a senior fellowship at the

Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna (1 October 2006-31 January 2007). I would like to thank the friendly staff o f the IFK for their help and the great atmosphere they provided for research.

W. H. Auden's "Metalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 171

2 On the genre and specific features o f The Magic Flute, see David Cairns, Mozart and His Operas (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 200-6. Subsequently abbreviated to MO.

3 For a commentary on The Magic Flute and its reception, see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "Whose Magic Flute?: Intimations of Reality at the Gates o f the Enlightenment", Nineteenth-Century Music 15:2 (1991), pp. 132-50. See also MO, pp. 194-228.

4 For a recent commentary on adaptation, see Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Sanders defines adaptation as "an act o f re­vision [which] parallels] editorial practice" and can also be "an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion and interpolation" (ibid., p. 18).

5 W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings by W. H. Auden: 1939-1973, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988), p. 634. Subsequently abbreviated to Lib. All references to this edition will be given in the text.

6 Aidan Wasley, "Auden and Poetic Inheritance", Raritan 19:2 (1999), pp. 128-57, p. 133. Subsequently abbreviated to "API".

7 On Auden's interest in Pope, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Impersonations of Alexander Pope: Current Views Within a Nineteenth-Century Perspective", Modern Language Quar­terly 34:4 (1973), pp. 448-61, p. 449.

8 For a commentary on Stravinsky's ideas on art, see Richard Taruskin, ”'Un cadeau tres macabre'", University o f Toronto Quarterly 72:4 (2003), pp. 801-16. Subsequently abbre­viated to "CM".

9 I owe this observation to Jean Starobinski. See his 1789: Emblems o f Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Cambridge, MA. and London: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 220. Subsequently abbreviated to ER.

10 Unlike most representatives o f 'high' modernism, W. H. Auden took a keen interest in different areas o f popular culture. Thus, he defended Tolkien's The Lord o f the Rings against charges o f "childishness" and "whimsicality" and pronounced it to be "the kind of work that shapes an enduring, universal mythic and psychological pattern in human culture and consciousness," Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, "Introduction to W. H. Auden's 'The Quest Hero'", in Understanding The Lord o f the Rings: The Best o f Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 31-51, p. 31. Subsequently abbreviated to "QH".

11 "CM", p. 805.12 Frye was favourably impressed with Auden's treatment of mythical and fairy-tale material

in his 1950 essay "The Enchafed Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea". The essay is mentioned in Frye's own article "The Archetypes o f Literature" (1951), which pre­figures most o f the Canadian scholar's arguments in the founding text o f archetypal criti­cism, Anatomy o f Criticism (1957). For Frye's reference to Auden, see "The Archetypes of Literature", in Fables o f Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 7-20, p. 12.

13 On the controversy following the NBC production, see Lib, pp. 640-4.14 The terms "displace" and "displacement" are used in Northrop Frye's sense throughout this

article. For clarification, see his Anatomy o f Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957, repr. 1973), pp. 136-8.

15 "QH", p. 40.

172 Ludmilla Kostova

16 Ibid.17 Ibid.18 Auden and Kallman attributed the libretto to both Emanuel Schikaneder and Carl Ludwig

Giesecke. The claim that Giesecke was the co-author o f the libretto is now generally discredited. See MO, p. 205.

19 For a commentary on the stories and speculations to which the genesis o f The Magic Flute has given rise, see MO, pp. 203-7.

20 On the tendency to ignore this, see MO, pp. 203-4.21 On the exclusion o f the Queen, Monostatos and the three ladies from the 'New Order', see

ER, p. 223.22 The idea is fully developed in "QH", p. 44.23 Ibid.24 MO, p. 21325 For a commentary, see Frank Kermode, History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1988), pp. 22-62. Subsequently abbreviated to HV.26 For a commentary, see Venuti's "Introduction" to Rethinking Translation: Discourse.

Subjectivity. Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-17.

27 Ibid., p. 3.28 On this view o f the opera's genesis, see MO, p. 9.29 "QH", p. 40.30 Seren Kierkegaard, "The Immediate Stages o f the Erotic or the Musical Erotic," Either /

Or, ed. Howard A. Johnson, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1959), vol. 1, p. 77.

31 See Joao Ferreira Duarte, "Auden's Icarus and His Fall. Vision, Super-Vision and Revision", in English Studies in Transition: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference, ed. Robert Clark and Pietro Boitani (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 238-247.

32 Ibid., p. 244.33 Ibid., p. 241.34 For a commentary on the appropriation of canonical German and Austrian composers by

the Nazi propagandist machine, see David B. Dennis, "'Honor Your German Masters': the Use and Abuse o f 'Classical' Composers in Nazi Propaganda", Journal o f Political and Military Sociology 30:2 (2002), pp. 273-95.

35 Mary Ellen Bellanca, "Alien Voices, Ancient Echoes: Bakhtin, Dialogism, and Pope's Essay on Criticism", Papers on Language and Literature 30:1 (1994), pp. 57-72, esp. p. 66.

36 For a commentary, see Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Litera­ture (Houndmills, Basigstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 165.

37 Michael P. Steinberg, "Die Walkure and Modern Memory", University o f Toronto Quar­terly 74:2 (2005), pp. 703-13, p. 707.

38 Ibid.39 For a commentary on Enlightenment conceptions o f "genius" and the semantic change of

the word's meaning in English, see Geoffrey P. Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1970), pp. 311-36.

W. H. Auden's "Metalogue" to 'The Magic Flute' 173

40 For a commentary, see HV, pp. 73-9.41 Peter Gay, Mozart (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 1. On the biographical myths surrounding

Mozart's death, see pp. 152-62.42 J. Hillis Miller, Versions o f 'Pygmalion' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP), p. 243.