Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Foreign.

Podcast Host

Welcome to behind the Curtain, LA Opera's official podcast. Each week we dive deep into the creative process with the artists, creatives and scholars who bring opera to life. Get ready to decode the drama, dissect the music and hear the heart behind the high notes. From backstage laughs to history making moments, every opera starts with a story. In this episode, LA Opera Connects affiliated scholars Dr. Tiffany Kuo and Dr. Christy Brown Montesano discuss the Magic Flute. Lighting up the LA Opera stage. They tackle the tough issues of gender raised by depictions of the Queen of the Night. Is she good or is she evil? Empowered or beholden? Or is it far more complicated than any binary? They also touch on the influence of Freemasonry in Mozart's magical fairy tale with plenty of musical interludes to whet your appetite. Enjoy and then get your tickets to the Magic flute@laopera.org Welcome everyone and welcome

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano. I'm sure many of our listeners already know you, but today we have the absolute pleasure of learning from your incredible expertise on women. Women in Mozart's Operas. For those who might need a quick reminder, you are the author of the 2007 book Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas. It is now available in both paperback and in digital print, so be sure to check it out at a public library near you. Today we're going to dive into one of the most famous and controversial figures of all operas, the Queen of the Night from the Magic Flute. So, Christy, you've devoted an entire chapter in your book exclusively to this fascinating character. So let's begin. All right, so the Queen of the Night seems to attract more critical hostility than any other character, often depicted as evil rather than as a caring mother. What keeps drawing you back to her? And what do you feel critics have consistently gotten wrong?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Thanks, Tiffany. Yeah, she's definitely one of my faves because I find her so interesting. Let's start with the obvious. She arguably has the most enduringly famous aria of the show, Deher Lurocca. I mean, I'm teaching this Intro to Opera class at UCLA and I was able to show them commercials that are fairly recent, including a 2019 Volvo commercial that was called Aria de Herloracha as kind of this exciting call out for opera. Like everybody knows it's operatic and it's like, oh, I know that one. Even if they know nothing about the Magic Flute. And any soprano who is singing Dear Racha, is taking on a make or break challenge. We're all waiting for those stratospheric bell tones up to the high F, as a highlight of the opera. And it is terrible if you hear a soprano not quite get it. It's not one of those that you can forgive. No, you can't nuance your way through it. It's just. There's no way. So it's really the ultimate diva moment of the Magic Flute and really throughout the repertoire, in a lot of ways. The Queen of the Night is also incredibly charged as a character in terms of gender politics. She breaks all the rules of the Enlightenment's ideas about women, how they should behave. And these rules have been laid out pretty explicitly in the libretto, in the voice of Sarastro and his priests, and even later, Tamino, who's now going to be an initiate in this organization. Good women need to behave this way more than anything. They must follow the direction of an enlightened man, or enlightened men. The highest echelons of thought and governance are beyond a woman's mind. Women talk a lot, but don't say anything really of merit. They're gossips, they're deceitful. Zoroastros tells Pamina explicitly that a woman who does not submit to a man's guidance will go beyond her prescribed sphere of activity, of influence. Now the queen is a monarch, but she's a regent in some ways, because she's the widow of a king who we hear about only once in a dialogue that's often cut, and we'll get to that. And she has a daughter, not a son, so her power is not equal to Zoroastro's. And she says that as well. And even so, she is proudly, even militantly resistant to this prescribed gender role. So she just will not settle down and, like, stay in her place.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

So it's a complicated situation, right, because she. We know her as the queen, which means that she has some sort of, at least title that designates some sort of sovereignty. And yet, the first time we meet her, she is singing to Tamino and she tells him that she doesn't actually have power. Did I get that correct?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yes, she says it very clearly. She says, look, I heard my daughter calling for help, but I couldn't do anything. And the words are literally because my power is too weak, my power is not sufficient. And that's borne out by her position. She doesn't ever successfully storm the castle or mount a real resistance. Even by choosing, frankly, this boy, man, she's relying again on a male to be her champion. She is not able to do that directly. And on top of this, besides her weakened position which is felt as existential threat. Critics and producers often just skip straight to she's evil, Zoroastro's good. They don't look for any possibility that the Queen has a legitimate reason or reasons for her anger or for this resistance, this attack against Zoroastro. And in the same way, critics and producers don't often think about whether there are problems with Zoroastro's position as enlightened good, whether maybe some of his political and social philosophies are themselves repressive and even hypocritical.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

It's true he doesn't get the scrutiny that the Queen always gets in every sort of interpretation since the beginning. So let's go back to this question of good and evil, because it is a common question that we encountered in particular when the Magic Flute is produced during the holiday season, as this quote unquote, fairy tale opera that we should take children to, kind of like Hansel and Gretel. But we know that the Magic Flute was composed in fact a century before Hansel and Gretel. And it's produced as a fairy tale opera, not in the same way that we think of what a fairy tale is today. A fairy tale opera in the 18th century actually just means thought characters. And in fact, fairy tale offers can even have sort of lewd and sexual innuendos in them. And they are not meant to be for children, in fact, however, we have adopted many centuries of interpretation in which it has become like a children's genre, so to speak. And so we know that children will encounter the Queen of the Night and ask the most innocent and direct question, which is, you know, is she good or is she bad? And in fact, your daughter asked you that exact question. So can you tell us how you were able to answer that?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yes, while I was writing the dissertation, I had two young kids during that time, very young. Katharina, my oldest, my daughter was only four. And I was watching Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute, which is a film presented from a child's point of view, meaning the camera keeps doing close up shots of a little girl's reactions. So she's watching this intimate small theater production of the Magic Flute and you see her look serious and she's smiling and different reactions. So Bergmann very much cues, oh, this is a child taking in this moral story about the Magic Flute. But Katharina, just very simply, this four year old little voice asked me, is the Queen a good lady or a bad lady? And I thought, well, kids are amazing. Like little children will Just, it just comes out very naturally and then you are in a position of answering a question in a thoughtful way. But she was very worried about another thing is she said, why did the man take the girl away from her mama? I talk about this moment in the intro of the book under the subheading out of the mouths of babes because of the way that children can just spot something and without any filters to, well, they have some, obviously, even at four years old, but they'll ask things without any guile or any sense of oh, you should already know this, I mean, she's bad because blah, blah, blah, right? But one of the reasons for which Catarina was confused about the Queen was that Bergmann shows her sometimes as young and beautiful and then other times she suddenly in a like holographic way shows up as old and ugly. So she goes between good queen or good witch and hag, right? And you see these two things and because of the kind of Disneyfication of signifying characters, ethical place in a story so ugly equals bad, pretty equals good, there's a tendency for children to accept what they're seeing as the truth. Like, oh, the Queen of the Night is appearing as ugly. I mean, let's think about the Barry Koski. Let's get to this particular production. The Queen is showing up as a big huge spider that's really ugly and awful. There's no way for a child to get into the deeper psychology of what might be happening. So had Katarina seen this production with the Queen of the Spider, I don't think she would have asked that. The decision would have been made very strongly for her. In fact, it would have been ridiculous in some ways to expect that a child would see anything sympathetic about a queen who is an enormous spider. At the same time, Caterina was not happy about the answers. I was trying not to tell her exactly what to think, but I said, sarastro, the man thinks he needs to take the little girl because he doesn't like her mother and thinks her mother is a bad woman. And that did not get a oh, okay. Of course, many years have gone by since then, so I don't remember exactly, but I do remember for her there was a real concern about, wow, can just some guy decide they don't like your mom and take you away from your mom? Who gets to make these decisions? Like, even in her little four year old brain there was a disconcerted look on her face. And, and I think that actually is the better thing for a child to actually ask about and wonder as opposed to telling them very contrary to real life, oh, bad people are punished and they look terrible. And good people will always save you from bad people. And they're always good because they say they're good and everybody says they're good. Like, we know that is not the truth today. And so I thought it was a very important moment for me to consider, why am I writing this book? And in the simplest way, I'm writing this book for my children, or I wrote it for my children. If I had to answer those questions in the larger sense for anybody who loved these operas, singers that were singing these female roles and not automatically accepting, oh, this is what I'm being told. This is what it is. But maybe thinking more deeply about the character they're playing, particularly if that character has been relegated strongly and categorically to the realm of bad. Evil.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Yeah. And this simple good versus bad dichotomy, I have to admit that the opera doesn't give the Queen of the Night very many Aryas. In fact, she only gets two, really, right? One in act one and another in act two. And the good, bad economy is very easily played into this Act 1, Act 2 dichotomy too, because you can have Act 1 where, you know, maybe since she's pleading to Tamino, you know, my daughter has been taken away from me, Will you go save her for me? Like, she's actually manipulating him to do something for her. So that in Act 2, then a lot of interpretation is that she really, truly unmasks herself in Act 2. She's singing to Pamena, how dare you go onto the other side and not be on my side. And how could you possibly go and join. What do they call it? The initiates? But she can't actually join the initiates, right? Because I know it's just Tamina who gets to join the initiates and she gets to watch from the sidelines. And so it's been interpreted, once again, like not only is this economy good versus evil, and she is. Then that is the Queen of the Night is evil and Zoroastro is good, but that Act 1 and Act 2, which is presumably like, she's good and then she's evil. And that, hence the question, you know, is she good or evil? Is now played into, she is, in fact evil because she's this unkind mother who would tell her own daughter to kill somebody. You have a completely different take on this. In fact, it's the two arias that are telling the same story. Could you share that story with us?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yeah, I really have to Give musicologist Carolyn Abate a shout out here and give her credit for first taking on this question about these two theories. The idea that the queen is meant to be portrayed as deceptive in the first aria and then showing her real evil self in the second or the other theory, that there was a change in the libretto at some point, that the creatives decided to shift gears and went from portraying a good queen to portraying a bad queen. And there's some evidence that one of the fairy tales that they were influenced by actually had a good queen and a bad wizard. Abate basically says about both these theories. No, she calls them equally hollow and.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Oh, I like that.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yeah, equally hollow. And and about it is like, listen, this. The deception theory just plays into old sexist ideas that women are inherently deceitful, which is exactly what Sarastro and his crew in the off in the Opera often claim. Right. And as for the idea that maybe they changed the libretto, there's no real evidence. The libretto is a slapdash job in a lot of ways. It was written very quickly and kind of in a formulaic cut and paste. Throw it together. And there are things that don't connect. Narrative, dramatic logic is challenged in many ways, not just in terms of the Queen's character. So Avate Said proposed this idea. What if she's genuinely the kind regent and the monstrous mother? She's chimerical and brings together both male and female attributes in a way. And I think she said very, very hot. Radioactive. Yeah, like that is. She seems to touch on something that makes people super uncomfortable, that the mother could be a queen and act first as queen. So after reading what Abate had to say about the Queen of the Night, I began to think about the character in terms of the aesthetic categories of the sublime versus the beautiful, and specifically how this character manifests these two aesthetic ideas as they were understood by 18th century philosophers.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Tell us more about the sublime.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

People interested in aesthetics and art and philosophy, people like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant and Jean Jacques Rousseau, all a generation or generation and a half ahead of Mozart. They all wrestle with the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime. And the way they talk about these aesthetic categories tells us a lot about their world. And it ties pretty convincingly to the world of the Magic Flute and the case of the Queen of the Night. Burke, who was writing at mid century, laid out a pretty stark contrast between the two categories. So beautiful things, in Burke's view, are small and smooth, round, delicate, light and sublime things are vast and rugged and dark and jagged. And almost threatening. And he then says this is like a kicker. He says beauty is something we love, but sublimity is something we respect and admire.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

So the queen is sublime, but it's a like a different category of sublime, right?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yeah, I call it, you know, in scare quotes, the bad sublime. And part of that is that there is a real mapping of gender on this. The beautiful is feminine and the sublime is masculine. And Kant talks about the sublime is always great and very simple in the sense of clear. There's no decoration, no ornamentation, while the beautiful can be very small and modest and decorative. And he says, you know, really the sublime things inspire esteem. Argues that women are defined by beauty and men by sublimity and then says, and this is a quote, night is sublime, day is beautiful.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Right. But here in the magic flu it's the queen is of the night and Sarastro is really of the light in the day.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yes, exactly. Not only is she the queen of the night, which Kant sees as a sublime thing, darkness as sublime, because we're all a little bit afraid of the dark. I mean darkness is beautiful. I am a night person, I love being up late, but if I were out in a forest by myself in the night, then night becomes potentially scary. So context is huge. The Queen of the Night lives in a place that is also sublime. When Tamino first enters her realm, the libretto description says, you know, rocky mountains, wild landscapes, and then the mountains split open and she appears and it says veiled and glittering against the stars. Papageno is trembling and everybody's supposed to be it's shock and awe. And she is not called the Queen of the Night at first, that takes a while. Most people call her initially Stern Flamenden Kunigen, the star flaming Queen. So she has this brilliance that completely blinds you. The stark contracts between the stars and this dark background and craggy mountains that open up. And she comes out, she is both, I think the beautiful and sublime. So let's say she would qualify aesthetically as non binary right or occupying Both. Right. In the world of the Magic Flute, which is not just fairy tale but is late 18th century Viennese masonry, very bro culture. I mean this is a male only organization. Women are allowed to take part in certain things as the partners of men so they can come in and follow their husband through kind of some tests, lead him through one of those, just as a note for listeners is called a conjugal avowal. And this is closest to what that final wedding is of Tamino and Pamina, basically the Initiates, for the Masons would go through something, and their wife was meant to lead them as a symbol of her support for his Masonic journey. The expectations of behavior and morality that go with that. But she's an adjunct to this, supporting him, not an initiate. So for the Queen to be showing aspects of both male and female properties, manifesting both aesthetics, that is absolutely not going to go anywhere in Zoroastria's realm.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Yeah. So let's dive a little deeper into who she is at that moment. She's the sublime and the beautiful. She's the Queen of the Night. Her daughter's been stolen. And in Act 2, we find out more about her.

Podcast Host

Right.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

There is this long dialogue, and maybe I say long because most times it's been cut, so anything is longer than nothing. But there is a dialogue between the Queen and Pamina before she sings the famous aria. And it's this little crucial dialogue between these two that really reveals who she is and what has been taken away from her, and for her to explain the entire backstory of how they got there. And so can you tell us more about this dialogue?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yes, this is really crucial. And we have to remember that the Magic Flute is not an Italian opera buffa. It is not sung throughout. There is not what we call secco recitativ, which is a spoken style set to very reduced orchestration, usually just the harpsichord. The Magic Flute, because it's a singspiel, a song play. This German theatrical genre, it, like other comic idioms of opera that are not Italian, includes spoken dialogue, and that spoken dialogue is not extra. The dialogues of the Magic Flute offer important context and sometimes quite crucial information about the characters and their motivations. In fact, I think the dialogue is important enough in the Magic Flute that when it's produced, performers should give the dialogue in the language of the place where it's being performed in order for audiences to catch all the details of the dialogue, which go faster than sung text. So it's hard for supertitles to keep up with that, but the information is significant enough that audiences need to hear it. And this is especially true when it comes to the dialogue between the Queen of the Night and Pamina that precedes Deherlaracha, that precedes the Queen's rage aria. This dialogue tells you so much about how Pamina thinks about her mother and how the Queen feels about her daughter. And I'd like to read the whole dialogue because it is so often cut, and it is cut in the production that LA opera is presenting quite drastically. So let me Take listeners through this dialogue. The Queen has just come into the scene. She sees Monostatos who's trying to kiss Pamina while her daughter is sleeping. Monostatos flees and when Pamena awakens and sees her mother she calls out to her, muta, Muta. Mother, Mother. And the Queen answers rather oddly, she says, you may thank the power by which you were wrenched from me that I may still call myself your mother. Basically suggesting you can call me mother because you were taken from me, you didn't just leave me. So because I know you were kidnapped, I know that this was not your choice. Then the queen continues, where is the youth that I sent to you? And Pameena answers, oh mother, he has withdrawn forever from the world and humans. He has dedicated himself to the initiated ones. And the Queen says, the initiated ones, Unfortunate daughter, now you are torn from me forever. Pamita Surprise says, torn, let us flee, dear mother. And it's dear, under your protection I will brave every danger. And the Queen says, protection, dear child, again, dear child, your mother can no longer protect you. My power went with your father to the grave. And at this point, for the first time we hear about a father. It's not Sarastro, Amina says, my father. And the Queen interrupts, handed over of his own free will the sevenfold Sun Circle to the initiated ones Zoroastria wears this mighty Sun Circle on his breast. When I discussed this with your father, he spoke with a wrinkled brow, so he gave me a glare. Basically, wife, my last hour is here. All of the treasures which I alone possessed are yours and your daughters, not our daughters, but your daughters. The idea of women apart, the two of you can have the things I own, my castle, my lands, that kind of thing. The Queen interjects, saying, but what about the all consuming Sun Circle? And her husband replies, it's appointed to the initiates, Zoroastria will manage it in a manly menlich way as I have done so far. And now not a word more. Inquire not into affairs which are incomprehensible to the womanly mind. Your duty is you and your daughter to relinquish leadership to wise men. Now this is where the break actually happens. So the Queen has told her daughter, here's my situation. And Pamita's answer is dear mother, to conclude from all this. So what you're saying is, given the situation, the youth is also likely lost to me forever. Meaning, oh, I'm going to lose my boyfriend, my boyfriend Tamino. And the Queen says, lost if before the sun colors the Earth. So if before tomorrow morning you do not persuade him to flee through these subterranean vaults, the first gleam of day will decide whether he will be given holy to you or to the initiated ones. And here we get a further rupture where basically the relationship with Tamino is privileged over Pamina's relationship with her mother. Dear mother, am I not allowed then to love the youth as an initiated one as tenderly as I do now love him? My father himself was connected to these wise men, he often spoke of them with delight, praised their goodness, their understanding, their virtue. Sarastro is no less virtuous. So we've gone from mom, let's get out of here, I just want to get out of here. Oh, you know, I'm just remembering how much my dad liked these men, I mean, it makes no sense, It's a complete flip from her saying, just a little while before this, before Tamino entered, she was telling Sarastro, I just want to go home, my mother's name is sweet to me. And he says, absolutely not, I will not let you go. So now we see her saying, oh, I'm realizing that, you know, the patriarchal messaging here from my dad to Sarastro is positive, and if I go with you, I will lose the man I love. And now the Queen responds with, what do I hear you? My daughter could defend the infamous cause of these barbarians. To thus love a man who allied with my mortal enemy would with every moment prepare my downfall. Do you see this dagger? It is honed for Zoroastro. You will kill him and pass on to me the mighty sun circle. Pamina says, but dearest mother, so still dearest mother. And the Queen then says not a word, kine vort. Then we hear deherla racha. The estrangement, the rupture between mother and daughter is the entire point of that aria, all of those amazing arpeggiated coloratura moments. The firepower of that aria always center on the words about, it will be shattered, it will be ruptured, you will be my daughter, Nevermore. All of the big exciting moments, the emphasis is not on kill Sarastro, or it's instead, you will no longer be my daughter, this will be shattered, this will be ruptured, the bonds of nature will be broken if you don't kill him.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

And even then, there's still so many questions, right? And even then the backstory is not complete. Yes, many productions cut this entire dialogue, which is so important in understanding why she has these high notes and it sounds like she's screaming and then she's giving this dagger. So consider that this whole dialogue is cut and we get to simply, mom, mom, you know, because she's now coming to rescue her from Zoroastro's enslaved person there. And all we see is the words kill Zorastro, which is what the current production will have. And then you just hear this sort of quote unquote rage aria. Right, right. We usually call it. Yeah. What are the consequences there?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

These kinds of cuts, these changes that push the already reductive binaries of the story even more, might make for easier entertainment, but they also, in my book, take something away from this opera as a piece of dramatic and musical art, one that challenges us because the Magic Flute is more than stagecraft and great tunes. Right. I mean, obviously these are major draws for bringing the kids, for making it a family friendly presentation. The musical numbers are amazing. They're so catchy and not too long

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

singable melodies, those folk tunes.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yeah, all of that. You have such a variety of style and orchestration and magic flutes and magic belts. But if you cut that dialogue and let's add to this, you play down some major questions about good and bad vis a vis the characterizations of the queen and Sarastro, you've changed the story radically. And to me, the changing of that story does no service to the opera itself, but it also ignores major issues of how power works in our contemporary world. But let's flip to Zoroastro. This is a ruler who's greeted as though he's a God when in his realm, I mean, they say we love and worship Zoroastria. Long live Zoroastria. He's worshipped like a king. He comes in with lions drawing his chariot. He owns enslaved people. So within this 18th century enlightenment framework, women and enslaved people are subordinate and inferior. And in the case of Monastatos, the libretto basically suggest that his blackness is a sign of his immorality. All of that's in Zoroastria's realm. And while he doesn't actively say, here, take this knife and kill the queen, but at some point the initiates scream in chorus, to hell with the women. They have desecrated the sacred portals and they drop into a trapdoor before the final moment where the Queen Monostatos and the three ladies are vanquished and basically like light has obliterated the night. So I always think of this as like, okay, so she's old school, bringing a knife, asking for an assassination. And Zoroastria's using drones, right? Like it's Magical, Right.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Well he has the seven circles, right?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

He's got the seven circles, he's got more weapon power.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Right. And yet he had to kidnap Pamina, which I never understood and it was never explained. Right. Am I correct? They need her so that. I think that's the most complicated bit.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Right?

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Like they just took her for what?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Oh, because every good mason needs a wife.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

But then how did they know that Tamina was going to be asked by the queen to go rescue her? I mean that's a lot of force thought there, right?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

No they don't. And in fact there's a scene where, you know, Pamina has tried to escape and she bows in front of Zoroastria and said, look, I'm going to tell you the truth. Yes, I tried to leave because that guy was molesting me and I needed to get out of here. But he says to her, I can tell you love someone else, so I'm not going to force your love. What he's insinuating is that Pamina would have been meant for him. Yeah, that's strongly borne out by a couple things. One of Mozart's other famous sienspiels is Die Infereng aus demsrel, the Abduction from the Seraglio. Right. And in that case there is somebody who's supposed to be a Turk, a pasha. Apasha Selim has taken this ship and kidnapped the people inside. And he treats Constanze, the noble woman, with a great deal of respect and admiration and he falls in love with her and basically says, you know, I want you to be my girlfriend. And she's like, I can't because I love somebody else. And he becomes very angry, but in the end he allows her freedom. So then fast forward to the Magic Flute and you have Sarastro, who exoticized slightly by the Egyptian stuff in the opera, takes a similar tack. I mean, he suggests that he understands that Pamena has fallen in love with someone else and so he won't force the issue and decides at that point to respect the will of the gods and make sure that Tamino in his stead, in a sense is united with Pamina. So for all the ostensibly progressive ideas that are assigned to this work by critics, let's be clear, it is very much informed by Masonic thinking, which is a brotherhood and has strong patriarchal hierarchy and even Masonic ideas about equality, not unlike, you know, the United States forefathers ideas about equality, still have a hierarchy. The Magic Flute, for all the ideas of people being judged on their merit and not by their social class, we still end up with a prince and a princess getting married. I mean, Zorasta says, well, even more important than being a prince, he's a man, but he's still a prince. And that's still your moral at the end, that it was the prince who was capable of sending to this power. And it was always understood that traditional marriage between a man and woman was to be a great aspiration that a good mason was not going to be a bachelor. The Magic Flute has an entire, I would argue the only love duet really where two people are singing about love together is by Menon. But basically the highest thing you can hope for is to be man und vaib to be man and wife. And that man and wife together ascend to the level of the godhead. So it's really understood that the couple which is not equal, just as sublime and beauty go together and are made more themselves by the contrast. Pamina is aligned with love and beauty and Tamino becomes wisdom, right? Basically a manly power. He's able to guide and lead. And several times there is a reference to Pamina being the reward of Tamino's successful journey through the trials, through the initiation.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

I'm just thinking about all the absence of dignity in this production, whether it be done incomplete and also when it's reinterpreted in many ways and the indignities that this production does to women.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Yes, the queen is turned into an enormous horrendous spider who somehow gave birth to Pamina but also gives birth to all these little spiders that she sends after Pamina. And as for Pamina and the three ladies, there's an enormous amount of charm in their portrayals in this production. Pamina as a kind of Louise Brooks silent screen ingenue and the three ladies as cheeky raccoon coat wearing flapper types. But this doesn't translate, at least in the case of Pamina, into rebellious strength. Even as Louise Brooks, she is still relatively fragile, girly, passive presence. Her strength, as they say, comes out of love. And that love is for Tamino. And I want to circle back to one point in terms of good and evil and the place of the queen and the three ladies in that framework, which is to point out that Tamino and Papageno only survive in Sarastra's realm and in Tamito's case, the final test of initiation because of the Magic Flute and the magic bells which are given to them by the three ladies in the service of the Queen of the Night. They say here our sovereign has given you these items to help you on your journey. So that's another complication in the libretto in terms of good and evil and how we think about the Queen and the other women, because they are part of this success story, but usually not given credit. While working on my chapter for the Queen of the Night, I rewatched a film I'd strongly recommend, if you haven't seen it, A Lion in Winter, from 1968, starring Katharine Hepburn. Eleanor was arguably the most powerful woman of medieval Europe. A queen twice over, married to two different kings, a patron of the troubadour tradition, someone who led her own contingent into battle, and she genuinely ran things when it counted. This film focuses on her imprisonment by her husband, King Henry II of England, after she backed her sons in a rebellion against him. She was 16 years under lock and key. And what makes this so compelling is watching two enormous personalities collide, a king and a queen, ostensibly equals, except that only one of them holds the keys. So that tension between power and powerlessness is exactly what drew me to Eleanor as a mirror for the Queen of the Night. But just as compelling and frankly, more moving is Eleanor's relationship with Alais, the half sister of King Philip II of France. She had been sent to the English court as a child and was meant to be the future wife of Richard the Lionheart. Eleanor's and Henry's oldest son, Alaise, was pretty much raised by Eleanor, but Henry intervened and made the grown Alaise into his mistress by the time Eleanor was imprisoned. Now loyal to Henry, Alaise turns against her mother figure. But in one incredible scene, the two women come together in a manner that just maps, at least for me, perfectly onto the story of the Magic Flute. Elise says to Eleanor, you know what I want for Christmas? I want you to suffer. And Eleanor responds very quietly, just for you. And the two women's eyes meet and Elise just collapses, crying into Eleanor's arms. And you hear Hepburn kind of murmuring, oh, ma petite, my little one. And Alice is sobbing and says, j' AI peur bama, I'm afraid, Mama. And Eleanor just holds her and begins to sing to her. And at that moment, King Henry walks in and he sees his mistress, the woman who's supposed to be on his side, in the arms of the wife that he has kept in prison. And all he says is, the sky is blue, pocked with stars. That scene became, for me, the whole key to the Magic Flute, in a way, like, if you want to understand, the Queen of the Night cast her as Eleanor of Aquitaine. And I would just prefer if producers didn't Put their thumbs on the scale so kind of ruthlessly, especially to the point that they dehumanized the queen by turning her into a bug. Julie Taymor's 2004 production does a very similar thing. She looks like the bad Mothra, basically. She's like this moth like creature, but they use red lights and she's got antennas and she looks like a skull. In both productions, Tamara and Polsky's, she looks like she's a skull. A singing.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Right. No hair.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

No hair.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

This idea of, like the ugly, you

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

know, that was really the motive behind wanting to write these things was to break the trend of thinking about these women characters through the filter of their relationship to the hero or how the hero, the male hero feels about them. So whether it's Donna Anna in Don Giovanni or the Queen of the Night, when it comes to Zoroastro, look at all the information there and then with a very open mind, without filtering out the bad. Look at Zoroastro, what he has to say and what his priests have to say and how Tamino changes as well in this male privileged world. And then start your production.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Yeah. Thank you for highlighting all of those aspects and facets of an opera. And second is to bring our attention to humanizing various characters, right? Those who have traditionally been outcast and marginalized and dehumanized, and to bring back, you know, the humanity in understanding characters. Right. This is. This is the work that I love to do, and I know you love to do, and that we love to do as musicologists, which is to dig deeper and not to play into stereotypes, because after centuries of that, what do we get? We get something. I want to say it's like, meaningless, you know, we shouldn't go to the opera to see something meaningless, Right?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Or just so determined that we don't even have to think. To me, it's the responsibility as creatives, as artists, as teachers, as scholars, always to push beyond that.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

So thank you so much, Christy, for this conversation, for doing the research and for just showing us so many different aspects of how we can be more intentional and responsible and musical too. Right?

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Let's just be very mindful and creative and clever about how we tell stories.

Dr. Tiffany Kuo

Thank you so much again, Christy.

Dr. Christy Brown Montesano

Thank you to you, Tiffany, as well. Always a pleasure talking with you. And I want to thank our listeners, too, for tuning in and sharing this time with us to explore the Queen of the Night.

Podcast Host

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Dr. Tiffany Kuo

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