The Devil's Pleasure Palace (17 page)

Light and darkness figure prominently in many works of art, both visual and on the stage, but Mozart's
The Magic Flute
is paradigmatic. The composer's penultimate or even last opera, depending on how you count (
La Clemenza di Tito
was mostly written after the bulk of
The Magic Flute
but beat it to the stage by a few weeks), was composed for Emanuel Schickaneder's Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, to a Masonic libretto by the impresario himself. Schickaneder also appeared as Papageno in the first performances in the fall of 1791, just a few months before Mozart's death in December of that year.

Conducted by the ailing composer, and sung in German with spoken dialogue in the same language, it was more akin to what we might
regard as musical comedy, as opposed to the more “operatic”
Tito
, sung throughout in Italian. It was instantly popular, combining folk elements (the “bird man” Papageno and his mate, Papagena) with the more ethereal main story of Prince Tamino's love for Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, and the trials the lovers must endure to earn their happiness at the opera's end.

So far, so conventional. But what distinguishes
The Magic Flute
as the opera par excellence of the Enlightenment is the very moral issue we have been discussing throughout: the masking of evil as good, the shrouds of illusion that the forces of darkness cast upon the innocent and the unwary. As the opera opens, Tamino (a “Japanese Prince”) is lost in a strange land, pursued by a giant serpent, which causes him to faint in fear. The unconscious man is rescued by Three Ladies. They show him a picture of the beautiful Pamina, telling him she has been kidnapped by the evil sorcerer, Sarastro. Tamino immediately vows to rescue her, both in gratitude for his deliverance and because, like Faust with Gretchen, he has instantly fallen in love with her image.

The reality turns out to be quite the opposite. Before the three temples of Wisdom, Reason, and Nature, Tamino encounters Papageno and the lovely Pamina, but he is quickly separated from her by Sarastro and his cult of high priests, who are actually servants of the Light. (In storytelling parlance, this is known as “the reversal.”) He learns that Pamina's mother, the high-flying (both dramatically and musically) Queen of the Night, and her attendants are creatures of Darkness, and that he and Pamina must undergo biblical trials of fire and water, to be purified and made worthy of each other before they may unite.

The trials symbolize the path to Enlightenment that only the strongest and most worthy may undertake. Though he fainted dead away in the face of adversity at the story's beginning, Tamino finally becomes a man, while Pamina is cleansed of whatever sins she may have inherited from her mother, who is vanquished and cast down by the power of the Sun: “
Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht,
” proclaims Sarastro near the end of the opera as he defeats the Queen of the Night. “
Zernichten der Heuchler erschlichende Macht.
” (“The streaming rays of the sun drive away the night / Destroying the hypocrites' conniving power.”) As the Queen and her Ladies sink into the earth, they exclaim, “We are all fallen into Eternal Night!” And this from the character who sings, in one of
opera's most challenging coloratura arias, “The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart.”

Remember,
The Magic Flute
was popular entertainment. Perhaps it was popular because of, not in spite of, its elemental nature.
Tito
, written nearly simultaneously, was a throwback to the
opera seria
, or “serious opera,” of Mozart's youth, tales often set in ancient Greece or Rome.
Tito
contains some marvelous music but is less often performed than
The Magic Flute
today. The Mozart operas that form the cornerstone of the contemporary operatic repertory all deal with human beings and human emotions; beside them, Handel's gods-and-monsters
opera seria
are excruciatingly dated and (thanks to the dreaded
da capo
arias) very long sits. We can practically date the full flowering of the Enlightenment from Mozart's
Marriage of Figaro
,
Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni
, and
The Magic Flute
.

Still, were
The Magic Flute
merely didactic or some form of special pleading for the Masonic values that informed the lives of Mozart and Schickaneder (and several other figures involved with the composition and production of the opera), we would probably see it today as a curiosity, an artifact of a vanished civilization. Naturally, it has come under attack from politically correct leftists, who view the depiction of the lonely, treacherous Moor, Monostatos, as “racist,” mostly because of the libretto's now often-censored lines: “
Weil ein Schwarzer haesslich ist . . . Weiss ist schön, ich muss sie küssen / Mond, verstecke dich dazu.
” (“Because a black man is ugly . . . White is beautiful! I must kiss her / Moon, hide yourself so I can.”) As early as the 1970s, opera house were already altering these lines to protect delicate sensibilities. I saw a production in that era that made Monostatos fat rather than black—which of course would be equally un-PC today.

Such “sensitivity” is just another hallmark of the attack on Western culture, and in particular that aspect of the attack that employs the wormwood of guilt as a weapon. Never mind that the figure of the Moor in the late eighteenth century was well recognized as a villain, the embodiment of a literally existential threat to Christendom. One of Mozart's earlier operas,
The Abduction from the Seraglio
(1782), dealt with the then-topical problem of Turkish Muslims employing captured European women as harem concubines. (The opera ends with a notable act of mercy from Pasha Selim, no doubt confounding modern expectations.) But in a world
that filters everything through the lens of Critical Theory, no sin of the past may go unnoticed or unpunished.

If you can attack Mozart, one of Western Europe's greatest geniuses, then you can attack anybody. But that is precisely the point of Critical Theory. There is no need to consider the sum total of the artist's life and works; instead, all that is necessary is to find a single politically incorrect remark, attitude, or letter with which to discredit him, and the task is complete. The totalitarian Left (and its impulse is and must always be toward totalitarianism in the name of “compassion”) cannot brook the slightest deviation from its self-proclaimed norms. As with satanic darkness, there cannot be a single point of light to disturb the suffocating blanket of orthodoxy, lest someone somewhere see the light.

Our forefathers knew that the Darkness was always out there, just beyond the reach of the candle, the torch, the floodlight, that the night held terrors we feared even to dream about. When the Irish writer, Bram Stoker, set about to pen his speculative epistolary novel, drawing on Middle European folklore and the nickname of Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia (1431–1476), he tapped into one of Central Europe's most primal fears. (In Bulgaria, a 7,000-year-old grave with skeletons staked through the heart was discovered in 2014.) The novel was
Dracula
, whose gloomy resonance we continue to feel to this day. Indeed, as shown by the
Twilight
movie saga and the
True Blood
books and TV series, vampires are more popular than ever. Personified in the 1931 film by Béla Lugosi in one of the earliest talkie horror movies, the vampire is suave, seductive, and sexy (well-dressed, too). He promises eternal life in exchange for eternal death; he is often irresistible, especially to women. Having consigned his soul to Satan, he wanders the eternal darkness, searching for fresh souls, in no need of light. He is, in fact, deathly allergic to light. Folklore has it that the rays of the sun—“
die Strahlen der Sonne
”—will destroy him, just as surely as they destroyed the Queen of the Night and her attendants in
The Magic Flute
.

Often in vampire myth, it is the woman, the monster's main target, who confounds and defeats him. In F.W. Murnau's sleek, seminal, Expressionist
Nosferatu
(1922), starring the aptly named Max Schreck as (for copyright reasons) Count Orlok, the heroine Ellen willingly sacrifices herself to the Count, opening her bedroom to him and keeping him occupied with her blood until, distracted by lust, he is turned to dust by
the morning sun as the cock crows. (The sexual and religious imagery in the film comes thick and fast, up to and including an eroticized Agony in the Garden.)

At first, this might seem contradictory: Woman (except Pamina, freed from her mother's sin) is evil in
The Magic Flute
, while she is the victor over the vampire in
Dracula
. But it is all of a piece. Woman is closer to bloody, chthonic Darkness than is Man; she knows Evil more intimately. Made from Adam's hewn rib, she is the last and best thing in God's creation, the end point. Although the first to fall, she is also the
Redemptoris Mater
, the Mother of the Redeemer, the Woman Clothed in Sun whose final, transcendently vengeful victory over the Great Red Dragon—the Serpent who brought both her sex and mankind low—forms the climax to the great ur-Narrative implanted within our hearts and on the lips of our bards and storytellers.

How the most heroic tale in human history came to be transformed into an anti-myth of female enslavement is a wonder for the ages. But unless the Left can extinguish the Light of Woman and her godlike powers of human creation, it cannot hope to win. And so it hopes to convince Woman she is nothing more than an inferior man, to plant the seed of resentment, nourish it with bile, and hope it gives birth to reason's sleep—a monster.

The dark side is an essential aspect of the human character and psyche; no one denies that. Religion acknowledges this primal fact; so does storytelling. There can be no drama, no conflict, without good and evil, light and darkness, protagonist and antagonist. But storytelling also reminds us that while the darkness may win from time to time (as it does in
Chinatown
), it is a temporary victory. Everyone has a chance to see the light.

In 2007, the late novelist Doris Lessing published an essay in the
New York Times
upon winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Born in Iran to British subjects and educated in Rhodesia, Lessing embraced Communism as a young woman (her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, became the East German ambassador to Uganda, where he was murdered in 1979). She eventually settled in London, finally breaking with Communism after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, when the true nature of the Communist beast could no longer be disguised behind its humanitarian façade. In the essay, an adaptation of a
New York Times
op-ed she originally published in 1992, she describes her disenchantment with Communism:

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was by chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do. . . . It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. . . . I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

The search for “another dogma” to replace the Judeo-Christian message of darkness and light, of sin and salvation, is as old as religion itself. And yet, even in the folk tales that emerged long after Jesus of Nazareth, the same elements remain in play. And it is remarkable, upon reading the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius, how closely they foreshadow various Christian tenets, which were not to come for more than a hundred years after the emperor's death. The moral consistency contained in the world's collected folk wisdom bespeaks some primal source that no amount of mid-nineteenth-century Viennese pseudoscience can explain away.

In 1988, Joseph Campbell sat down with PBS's Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson, to discuss his book
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
. The topic was the power of myth and legend, and their continued importance in our modern lives. Referring to Prometheus and Jesus, the prototypical Light-Bringers who delivered the world from darkness, Moyers offered a solipsistic analysis: “In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.”

To which Campbell replied:

But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there's no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules. . . . No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The
thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

As we have seen, Life is Light. Darkness is Death and the world of the undead: Stoker's vampires; Meyerbeer's nude nuns; the “willies” of Puccini's early opera
Le Villi
(set, fittingly, in the Black Forest of Germany during the Middle Ages), vengeful, wronged female spirits who force the opera's hapless hero to dance himself to death to atone for his infidelity with a seductive siren and for abandoning his lover, who died of a broken heart in his absence. Darkness envelops the Devil's Pleasure Palace, is home to Weber's Black Huntsman and Wagner's Flying Dutchman, stalks London in the unholy form of Dracula, and dates your daughter in
Twilight
. He can only be defeated by the Light, which is Love.