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These are a pair of papers concerning Mozart's Masonic Musical efforts.
They are submitted by George S. Robinson, Jr., PM, Mt. Pickering Lodge, No. 446,
Upper Uwchland, Pennsylvania, Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania georger@voicenet.com
BROTHER MOZART AND "THE MAGIC FLUTE"
by Newcomb Condee 33 deg
Downloaded from Hiram's Oasis
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was twenty-eight years of age when, in
the autumn of 1784, he joined a Masonic Lodge. As a pianist, little
Wolfgang had been an infant prodigy, exhibited by his father
throughout Europe, but he was now a recognized and admired composer
living in Vienna. The very year of his initiation his first great
opera, The Marriage of Figaro, had been produced in Paris. This was,
however, before the days of copyright law and the earnings of genius
were meager.
During the eighteenth century, Freemasonry in Vienna had a
political as well as a benevolent side. It counted as its members
many highly placed politicians and ecclesiastics whose ideal was the
regeneration of humanity by moral means. It was hated by the Catholic
Church and certain despotic political authorities who deemed it
dangerous, both to religion and the well being of the state. The
Church, however, even as today in certain Latin countries, did not
consider it expedient to challenge high-placed persons nominally its
members but also of the Fraternity.
The Empress Maria Theresa had been one who was opposed to
Masonry and, in 1743, had ordered a Viennese Lodge raided, forcing
its Master and her husband, Francis I, to make his escape by a secret
staircase. The Emperor Joseph II (1780-90) was favourably inclined to
the Fraternity, although the clergy did their best to get the Lodges
suppressed.
Such was the Masonic milieu when Wolfgang Mozart became a Master
Mason.He must have been greatly moved and inspired by his experience.
Almost immediately he composed his Freemason's Funeral Music and his
music for the opening and closing of a Lodge. He now composed his
opera, Don Giovanni, and his three great symphonies - the E flat, the
G minor and the C major, as well as a great number of concertos and
chamber-music works.
His last great opera, The Magic Flute, opened in Vienna on the
evening of September 30, 1791. Mozart conducted the first two
performances, when he was overtaken by his last illness. He lingered
on while the opera had an unprecedented run of more than one hundred
consecutive performances. It is said that in his sick bed, watch in
hand, he would follow in imagination the performance of The Magic
Flute in the theatre. Then he died after its 67th performance.
The Magic Flute makes no mention of Freemasonry as such, but it
has always been accepted as a Masonic opera. Musicians assert that
even the music has much Craft significance, beginning in the overture
with its three solemn chords in the brass.
In keeping with the fashion of the time, the plot is
half-serious, half-comic, a fantasy of magic and mystery laid in a
never-never land called Egypt. It depicts the ancient mysteries and
presents much Craft symbolism. To the Viennese of that day, The Queen
of the, Night was clearly the unfriendly Empress Maria Theresa; the
good Sarastro was Ignas von Born, an eminent scientist and Masonic
leader; the hero Tamino was the good Emperor Joseph and the heroine
Pamina, the Austrian people themselves.
The first program credited the libretto to the actor-producer,
Schikaneder, but it is now thought that it was written by Giesceke,
the friend and intimate of Goethe and Schiller, who probably desired
to remain anonymous for political reasons.
The opera has remained popular through the years and is included
in the present repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera Company.
Liner notes posted from a Compact Disk
Telarc #CD-80345
"Highlights from Die Zauberflute (The Magic Flute)
by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
commonly referred to as "The Masonic Opera"
Permission graciously granted to post
by
Telarc International Corporation.
The sources and influences of The Magic Flute are many, the most
obvious being Lulu, or the Magic Flute by Christoph Martin Wieland,
one of a collection of fairy stories published in 1786 under the
title Dschinnistan. This had already inspired several Singspiel
productions by various companies with such titles as Kaspar the
Bassoon Player, or The Magic Zither. But the oriental decor and
magical effects taken from this source provide only one level of
Mozart's work, for underlying them are pervasive references to the
mysteries of Freemasonry.
Mozart, a Freemason since 1784, and Schikaneder, a fellow Mason of a
different lodge, had embodied much of Masonic teaching and symbolism
in their opera. In using the symbols and, by many accounts,
references to the actual rituals of Freemasonry, they may have
intended to make subtle demonstration of the society's high-minded
purposes. It seems at least possible, in other words, that the opera
was intended in part as a defense of the Masons. (For two centuries
there have been rumors and speculation that Mozart was murdered by
the Masons for revealing their secrets, but this seems unlikely for
several reasons. His collaborator and fellow Freemason, Schikaneder,
lived for another two decades. Mozart's close personal identification
with Masonic tenets and his frequent contact with high-ranking
leaders of the society are well-documented in his letters, and it is
improbable that he would have defied the society's strictures, or
that he would have been unaware of what he could use in a public work
and what could not be revealed.)
The number three had a deep significance for the Masons, and it keeps
occurring throughout The Magic Flute: Three Ladies, Three Boys, three
temples, and so forth. A drawing of Schikaneder's revival production
of 1794 shows that in the opening scene the Three Ladies kill the
serpent by cutting it into three pieces. The opera's home key of E-
flat (redolent of virtue, nobility, and repose) was often used by
Mozart for his Masonic compositions because of its signature of three
flats. Prominent in the Overture is the three-fold repetition of the
Masonic rhythmic motto (short-long-long), also heard in Act II of the
opera itself.
Also Masonic in origin are the inscriptions on the three temples:
"Wisdom," "Reason," and "Nature." Freemasons in the audience would
have recognized the symbolic armor of the guardians during the
initiation trials, the earth-air-water-fire symbolism of the trials
themselves, the Ladies' silver spears, Papageno's golden padlock,
Sarastro's lion-drawn chariot, Tamino's death-like swoon, and the
Queen of the Night's defeat by the powers of light.
In his admirable book The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera, Jacques
Chailley makes a convincing argument that the trials of the opera's
second act (as well as much that leads up to them in the first act)
are modeled on actual Masonic initiation rituals. Even an apparently
unrelated incident like Tamino's fainting spell in the opening scene,
for instance, is interpreted as a reference to the beginning of such
rituals, when the initiate is made to lie face down as a symbol of
death to old habits of thought and action.
Brigid Brophy, in her fine study, Mozart the Dramatist, points out
the origins of Masonic practices in the Eleusinian mysteries and
Orphic myths of the ancient world. She documents the libretto's heavy
debt to The Life of Sethos, a novel published in Paris in 1731 by the
abb‚ Jean Terrasson. Purporting to be a translation from an ancient
Greek source, this book recounts the initiation of its Egyptian hero
into the mysteries of Isis. As Ms. Brophy points out, "Terrasson does
not (but then one would not expect him to) explicitly connect his
Isiac mysteries with Masonry; indeed, it is possible that the real
influence was the other way about and the Masons borrowed hints for
their own ritual from Terrasson's fictionalized Egypt."
Mozart and Schikaneder were also well-acquainted with the works of
Shakespeare. Many fascinating parallels between The Magic Flute and
The Tempest are noted in Mozart on the Stage, by J nos Liebner.
Sarastro, the opera's controlling force, is similar to Shakespeare's
Prospero. Each plans the union of two chosen lovers but makes the way
arduous in order to strengthen the bond. Monostatos and Caliban are
very similar creations, symbols of our baser nature to be overcome
and cast off. The unworldly innocence of the Three Boys finds its
counterpart in Ariel, Prospero's sprightly servant and messenger.
Each succeeding era has seen The Magic Flute in its own way, and each
of these interpretations has validity. Whether the opera is viewed as
a light-hearted fantasy, Enlightenment allegory, veiled Masonic
ritual, or a lost battle in the struggle for feminine equality, it
speaks anew of magic and maturation to each successive generation.
Freemasonry in Crisis
Since the Masonic lodges operated openly in Mozart's Vienna and
numbered among their members many of the highest officials of the
realm, we may ask ourselves why two Masons, Mozart and Schikaneder,
felt it necessary to compromise Masonic silence and portray so many
of the society's secret symbols and beliefs in a public entertainment
like The Magic Flute. If they, as the eminent scholar H. C. Robbins
Landon has written, "risked a long shot - to save the Craft by an
allegorical opera," what was the peril by which the once-powerful
society was threatened? What forces ultimately caused their attempt
to be futile, ending in the complete suppression of Masonry only four
years later?
The answers are to be found in the revolutionary cross-currents of
that turbulent era, and in the involvement of many of the Masons,
even many of the highly placed aristocrats, in activities that
threatened the thrones of Europe.
Freemasonry evolved from some of the craftsmen's guilds of the Middle
Ages (which helps explain its name and why its adherents refer to it
as the Craft), but its rise to prominence began in the mid-eighteenth
century. Its espousal of Wisdom, Beauty, Knowledge, and Truth made it
attractive to adherents of Enlightenment philosophies (with their de-
emphasis of traditional religion in favor of individual moral
advancement), which included most of the best minds in Europe and
America. Viennese Masons included Mozart, who joined in 1784, his
friend and admirer Franz Joseph Haydn, initiated in 1785, and
Mozart's father Leopold, who joined at his son's instigation in 1785
and advanced to the third degree of membership in just sixteen days.
The head of Mozart's lodge was Prince Nikolaus Esterh zy, Haydn's
patron and a high-ranking diplomat in the imperial government.
Freemasonry thrived in the empire despite the enmity of the Roman
Catholic Church (a Papal Bull condemning the Craft in 1738 was simply
ignored in Austria and its territories) and that of the powerful
Empress Maria Theresa (whose younger son, the future Leopold II, had
reputedly been elevated to the Eighteenth Degree of the Scottish Rite
of Masonry).
But although a succession of Austrian emperors took a benign view of
Masonry's espousal of the Enlightened notion that all men are
perfectible through Reason, they naturally smelled treason when
certain of the Masons went a step further and argued that in a fully
enlightened society there was no need for monarchs. Masonry's
insistence on shrouding its inner workings in secrecy worked against
it, for the code of silence allowed treasonous sects to flourish
within the Craft and at the same time caused government officials to
imagine Masonic excesses much greater that those that actually
occurred. In the end, the emperor felt he had no choice except to ban
Masonry outright.
Probably the most virulently anti-monarchic sect of Masonry was the
Illuminati, founded in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt, a university
professor, in 1776. Weishaupt joined the Masons the following year
and soon allied the Illuminati with them. The sect's original aim was
to fight evil and defend good causes, but this was soon expanded with
anti-clerical and anti-royalist sentiments. The Illuminati operated
for only a decade and probably never had more than 2000 members, but
they panicked the royalty, who became suspicious of all Masonry.
The crowned heads had good reason to connect Masonic Lodges with
revolutionary activities. Many of the leaders of the American
colonies' revolt against their British king in 1776 were Masons,
including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.
In France Masons were behind the push for republican government that
led to the French Revolution (which, incidently, went much further
than those high-minded aristocrats had foreseen and claimed most of
them among its victims). The Austrian emperor heard first-hand
reports of the uproar in Paris from his sister, the French Queen
Marie-Antoinette.
Austrian attempts to control the Masons included Joseph II's decree
of 1781, forbidding any order to submit to foreign authority. This
led to severing Masonic ties with the Grand Lodge of Britain and
setting up Austria's own governing body, the Grosse Landesloge von
™sterreich. In 1785 another imperial edict centralized the country's
lodges and limited their autonomy. The proliferation of local lodges
was reduced (only three remained in Vienna), and the members of each
were limited to 180. Regular reports of lodge meetings and attendance
had to be submitted to the Emperor's police.
In 1790 Joseph II died and was succeeded by his brother, Leopold II.
With the French Revolution in full cry, the Austrian government was
becoming exceedingly alarmed about treasonous sentiments in the land
and especially in the Masonic orders. That same year a lodge of
Illuminati was uncovered in Prague, and names of high officials were
increasingly mentioned in secret police reports to the emperor. As
Landon points out, Austria was fast becoming a police state.
This was the demoralizing situation for Austrian Freemasons when
Mozart and Schikaneder decided that their Singspiel would be more
than merely light and entertaining, that it would demonstrate the
probity and superiority of Masonic teachings. They may have had hopes
of saving the Craft from total suppression, but those hopes were in
vain. Leopold II died just six months after The Magic Flute's
premiere and he was succeeded by his son, Francis II. The imperial
government under the young and inexperienced Francis became dominated
by conservative advisors and consequently swung even further to the
right. In June of 1795 an order came down to close all Masonic lodges
and other secret societies and Freemasonry ceased to exist in Austria
for more than a century.
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