7.

The Figure of Sarastro:

Some Considerations

When late in the first half of Mozart's Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute),
1791,1 Sarastro arrives, in a procession of attendants and riding in a
triumphal chariot drawn by six lions (nowadays he usually enters on
foot), he immediately takes his place as the presiding central figure,
comparable to the king in a Shakespeare comedy or to Prospero in The
Tempest. Lions are royal beasts, 2 and Sarastro is returning from the kingly
sport of hunting. By that point we are coming to understand that the
authority figure we met earlier, the Queen of the Night, is, so to speak,
an imposter, who with her passion and pathos has misled both the hero
Tamino and us in portraying Sarastro as an evil demon preying on a
respectable family. His dignity, wisdom, and compassion, at least to-
wards the characters we care about, are from that later point never in
doubt. As Judith Eckelmeyer has said, he is 'a spiritual prince/ 3
Evidently, though it is never exactly stated, Sarastro is the high priest
of Isis and Osiris at an unnamed Egyptian temple and leader of its college
of priests, but at the same time a ruler who deals out justice and who
also, though briefly, allows the possibility of love to cross his mind. This
last is just hinted, in his first words to the heroine Pamina: 'Stand up,

1 All references are to Die Zauberflote: Max Slevogts Randzeichnungen zu Mozarts

Handschrift (drawings in the margins of Mozart's ms.), mit dem Text von Emanuel
Schikaneder, éd. Friedrich Dieckmann (Frankfurt: Insel, 1990) [henceforth
Dieckmann]. Text references are to act and scene.
2 To these lions (they return momentarily in 2.19) Schikaneder evidently sacrificed the
original opening, where Tamino expected to fall victim to a fierce lion ('dem
grimmigen Lôwen') rather than a crafty snake ('der listigen Schlange'): see
Dieckmann, 13.
3 The Cultural Context of Mozart's 'Magic Flute' (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1991),
1:78.

LUMEN XXV / 2006

1209-3696 / 2006 / 2500-0083 $20.00 / © CSECS / SCEDHS

84 Jay Macpherson

take comfort, dear girl! / Without pressing you for information / I know
more of your heart [than you are telling me]; / You dearly love another. /
I will not force you to love ...,4 Two diverging texts still to be mentioned
vary that fourth line: 'This [my] heart is subject to your love'; Tt [your
heart] is empty of love for m e / 5 If we take Sarastro's speech as these
writers do, it would link Sarastro to a standard topic of heroic opera,
where rulers from Handel's Xerxes to Mozart's Tito choose as consorts
women already committed to others, and then prudently or magnani-
mously change their minds. They do so mainly in order not to disoblige
the men concerned. Similarly, Sethos, whose story in Jean Terrasson's
1731 novel so titled helped shape the Flute's act 2, hands the princess
whom he loves, and who loves him, to his (half-) brother. 6 Schikaneder's
different handling here reflects perhaps both his special regard for this
heroine and his more bourgeois-modern attitudes.
Sarastro's priestly function is the one most in view, reinforced by his
name, which derives from Zoroaster, most ancient of the great religious
teachers — called 'Zoroastro' in an earlier opera I shall mention shortly.
Twenty years before, in 1771, Anquetil-Duperron's translation of the
Avesta had shed new light, if not on Zoroaster himself, on the religion he
founded or refounded; but that was hardly of concern to Schikaneder,
any more than it was to Mozart when on February 19th, 1786, he bor-
rowed the name for a Carnival masquerade in the court ballroom in
Vienna, where he handed out printed leaflets containing riddles and

4 'Steh auf, erheitre dich, o Liebe! / Denn ohne erst in dich zu dringen / weiss ich von
deinem Herzen mehr; / Du liebest einen andern sehr. / Zur Liebe will ich dich nicht
zwingen ...' (1.18).
5 'Dies Herz ist deiner Liebe Spiel' (C. A. Vulpius, Die Zauberflote, 1794, ed. Hans Lôwen
[Leipzig: Insel, 1911], 1.23, 43); 'Es ist fur mich von Liebe leer' (caption of the one
non-numbered, double-width print [see Figure 1 below] in the series of seven
unsigned engravings published by J. C. Zimmer and evidently based on F. L.
Schroder's four-act version staged in Hamburg from 19 November, 1793). These are
reproduced and discussed, along with most of the engraved illustrations of the opera
to 1826 and many later, by Friedrich Dieckmann in his Zauberflote edition (see 186-90).
This line and other divergences in the Hamburg text, understood by contemporaries
to be the work of F. L. Schroder (see Julius Cornet, Die Oper in Deutschland 25, as quoted
by Gunter Meinhold, Zauberflote unà Zauberflôten-Rezeption [Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2001], 59), have been argued by Michael Freyhan in his 'Rediscovery of the
18th-century Score and Parts of 'Die Zauberflote' showing the text used at the
Hamburg première in 1793' (Mozart-Jahrbuch 1997, 109-147) to derive from a score
sold by Mozart's widow in 1792.
6 The reasons here are somewhat different: see Sethos, histoire ou vie tirée des monumens
anecdotes de l'ancienne Egypte (Amsterdam: 1732), vol. 2, chap. 10, 318, 385-86.
 The Figure of Sarastro 85

epigrams headed 'Bruchstucke aus Zoroastens Fragmenten (Scraps from

the Fragments of Zoroaster)/ written by himself. There is nothing even
pseudo-oriental about the content, which is mostly sarcastic comment on
contemporary social types and attitudes, though Mozart's father enthu-
siastically reported to his daughter, 'The riddles are just for amusement,
but the "Fragments" are really for the encouragement and improvement
of morals, which every rational person must work at his whole life long/ 7
Zoroaster is an ancient enough figure to have been mentioned by
Plato, and Plutarch briefly outlines what the Greeks understood of his
doctrine. 8 Tradition from there to the eighteenth century associates him
with the Magians or Magi, with the worship of fire as a symbol of the
Divine, and with belief in two opposed principles of good and evil,
symbolized by light and darkness. If, as I take it, the light-darkness
opposition in the opera comes mainly out of familiar Enlightenment
imagery, reinforced by the common awareness that the Sun was a prime
representative of the divine in many early religions, it seems that
Schikaneder was using none of that specific-to-Zoroaster background.
Apart from the references to Isis and Osiris and the Egyptian décor,
which all come from Sethos, Sarastro is more of an all-purpose sage. We
could compare him to the Zoroastro in a work that — regrettably for
my purposes — probably neither Schikaneder nor Mozart knew (though
both accumulated substantial collections of libretti): Handel's opera
Orlando of 1733. Imported into Ariosto's story to replace Astolfo and
Saint John, Zoroastro opens the opera with an aria on Orlando's sad
case — gives him ample advice and warning — rescues both him and
the heroine from physical danger by partly magical means — and
eventually cures him of his madness. Besides the hermits of Ariosto and
Tasso, Handel's Zoroastro descends from devin figures like D'Urfé's
Grand Druid Adamas in his pastoral romance L'Astrée, 1627. As a
priestly essence of wise old man, Zoroastro, I find, is closer to Sarastro
than a figure sometimes cited, the Zoroastre of Rameau's opera so titled
(1756), who does carry a bit of Magian mythology with him. Schi-
kaneder's rather eclectic Sarastro not only brings a Persian name into
the priesthood of Isis, but in the last scene introduces hero and heroine
into what is evidently a temple of the Sun. Rather than speculate that

7 W. A. Bauer, O. E. Deutsch and J. H. Eibl, eds, Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen

(Letters and Records) (Kassel, 1962-75), 3: 506, 521, 524-5; Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart,
A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble
(London: Simon & Schuster, 1990 [cl965]), 265.
8 Alcibiades, 122; On Isis and Osiris, 46-47.
86 Jay Macpherson

Schikaneder—never a great reader—has either seized on one of Osiris's

allegorical identifications or confused Terrasson's brilliantly-illumi-
nated Osirian temple of Memphis with the not-far-distant temple of Ra
at Heliopolis, we can guess that he noted the popularity of sun-temple
settings at the time and added one of his own.

Schikaneder; Vulpius; Wieland

The Magic Flute was first performed on September 30th, 1791, at the
Vienna theatre run by Emanuel Schikaneder, who had written the li-
bretto (though probably not alone) and commissioned the music. In
January 1794, it was produced at the Weimar theatre, in the third year
of Goethe's directorship. Christian August Vulpius, whom Goethe em-
ployed there as writer and translator, decided that 'It was absolutely
impossible to bring the original version of the Zauberflôte... here to this
stage before our refined audience/ 9 a not untypical response to the
libretto at this period when an increasingly educated public prided itself
on 'taste' and its own distance from the traditional popular theatre. 10 To
Schikaneder's indignation Vulpius recast the two acts into three, largely
reworked the dialogue, and slightly altered the plot — or, as he said,
supplied a plot since the original lacked one. His plot changes are small;
the most notable is making Sarastro 'ruler of the Empire of the Sun' and
brother and successor to the heroine's father — the heroine, of course, is
Pamina, but her father continues nameless. Thus, in the early exposition,

9 'Es war uns sehleehterdings unmôglich, die Zauberflôte nach dem Originale . . .vor
unser delikates Publikum hier auf das Theater zu bringen' (A2). In consequence
Goethe, who commenced a sequel, along with Herder, Hegel, and Wieland, who all
left sage comments, may well have never read the original.
10 See Branscombe 154, 158-59 for other early responses: 'altogether too wretched'
(Musikalisches Wochenblatt, Berlin, an October report published Dec. 1791); 'an
incredible farce' (Zinzendorf's diary, Nov. 6, 1791); 'This ridiculous, senseless and
stale product . . / (Vertraute Briefe zur Charakteristik von Wien (Confidential Letters
Characterizing Vienna) (Gôrlitz: Hermsdorf und Anton, 1793), 2: 50-53. Dieckmann
(173) quotes Hegel, who opens a defence of the text, 'How often do we not hear .. .
that the t e x t . . . is simply too miserable . . . ' (Vorlesungen tiber die Àsthetik [Lectures on
Aesthetics] 3 in Werke [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990], vol. 15, 206). The first
known rewriting — Passau, 1793, unsigned — eliminated the Egyptian references,
making Sarastro an unspecific 'Mystagog'; it reduced the part of the Queen of the
Night (now 'Karmela, eine Zauberinn durch Musik [an enchantress with musical
powers]') to a single line, and turned the trials theme into simply a test of love (Die
Zauberflôte: Eine grosse Oper in zwey Aufziigen [two acts], ed. Richard Pils [Linz: Verlag
fur Literatur, Kunst und Musikalien, 1991] — facsimile ed.)
 T h e Figure of Sarastro 87

one of the Queen's three Ladies tells Tamino, 'The gloomy, envious
Sarastro, the brother of h e r . . . husband, snatched from the Queen of the
Night her husband's crown, and stole from her . . . her beloved daugh-
ter/ 11 Sarastro's plan is that Pamina shall bestow the crown on Tamino,
his own choice for her husband; then, like Sethos before him, he will
retire to a life of study and contemplation. 12
This need to get relationships pinned down is typical of Vulpius, but
not of Schikaneder, who is happy to leave things rather loose and asso-
ciative. Parentage is certainly vague in Schikaneder's Flute. Tamino has
a royal father—who indeed has often mentioned the Queen of the Night
to him — but we do not learn in what realm, unless we are to draw
conclusions from his Japanese hunting-jacket.13 Papageno never knew
his mother, though he has heard that she once worked for the Queen in
her palace; he cannot tell whether the merry old man who raised him was
his father. Some of these pieces of information come from Schikaneder's
first-act source 'Lulu, oder Die Zauberflote/ 14 but have been fragmented
and recombined. In 2.8 we learn from the dialogue between Pamina and
her mother that her father loved and revered the initiates and left his
powerful talisman to their leader Sarastro rather than to his widow, who
hopes to use Pamina to get it back; that is almost all we hear about
Pamina's father, and all we are given about what connects the two men.
However, while Schikaneder drew the opening of his story from the
Kunstmarchen 'Lulu/ he made use of other material in the 'oriental'
fairy-tale collection from which 'Lulu' comes, Christoph Martin
Wieland's Dschinnistan (Genie-Land), 1786-1789. Poet, essayist, drama-
tist, novelist, review editor, and translator of twenty-two of Shake-

11 1.6,20.
12 2.1,47-48.
13 On Tamino's 'javonisches/ japonisches Jagdkleid' [Javanese/ Japanese hunting
costume] H.-J. Irmen in Mozart's Masonry and The Magic Flute (Zulpich: Prisca, 1996),
223 is certainly right: the letter is a broken 'p,' not 'v.' This exotic garment was perhaps
suggested by the 'japonischer Rock' of Prince Balacin, the hero of H. A. von Ziegler's
very durable novel about a captive princess, Die asiatische Banise, 1688 (ed. W.
Pfeiffer-Belli [Munich: Winkler, 1965]), 18 and passim. Gunter Meinhold (see n. 5
above) shares this opinion (75).
14 Christoph Martin Wieland, Dschinnistan, oder auserlesene Feen- und Geister-Mahrchen,
theils neu ubersetzt und umgearbeitet (Genie-Land, or Selected Tales of Fairies and Spirits,
in part newly translated and reworked) (Winterthur: Steiner, 1786-1789), vol. 3, 292-351.
'Lulu' is seldom reprinted: see English summary by Peter Branscombe, W. A Mozart,
Die Zauberflote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 — Cambridge Opera
Handbooks), 30-31.
88 Jay Macpherson

speare's plays (into prose), Wieland was at the time one of Germany's
most admired writers. While Dschinnistan has minor contributors, no-
tably A.J. Liebeskind who wrote 'Lulu/ Wieland himself supplied two-
thirds of it: largely by translations and adaptations from the French, but
also two stories he claimed as entirely his own — 'Der Stein der Weisen
(The Philosophers' Stone),'15 and 'Die Salamandrin und die Bildsàule
(The Salamandress and the Statue),' which latter provided Schikaneder
with those two older-generation figures, Sarastro and his friend.
There is no equivalent to Sarastro in either of the libretto's two
major sources. In 'Lulu/ the 'radiant fairy' Perifirime who charges
Prince Lulu with recapturing her magic talisman, a gilded tinderbox,
from an evil (but unimpressive — mainly comic) magician and gives
him the magic flute remains a powerful benevolent figure throughout
— characterized, in contrast to the Queen of the Night whose opening
function corresponds to hers, by her association with light. However,
she does not carry anything like Sarastro's substance, social function,
or moral weight. In Terrasson's Seihos, the novel that supplies the
Flute's Egyptian and initiatic material, while various unindividualized
priests offer instruction, the only figure much resembling a sage is the
young prince's wise tutor, who has no equivalent in The Magic Flute.
One might guess that Schikaneder called up Sarastro to serve the needs
of his story — specifically, to provide an opposing focal figure to the
Queen of the Night as the story shifts from fairy-tale to a more
impressive kind of ethical fable.
Wieland's 'The Statue and the Salamandress' describes the meeting,
in a half-ruined castle in the forests of Brittany, of two young men who
confess that they love respectively a statue and a salamandress or
female fire-spirit. It is a typical Wieland narrative about youth learning
to prefer reality to fantasy. The young men's educational process has
been invisibly stage-managed, by means of various prearranged epi-
sodes, by their two fathers, who happen to have been friends since
long before the birth of their respective sons and, you might guess,
also happen to have daughters, both quite human; their sons' encounter
in the tower brings on the denouement, which very shortly draws

15 Schikaneder's first 'magic opera' Der Stein der Weisen (1790) derives from the first story
in Dschinnistan, 'Nadir und Nadine'; here, promoting the story's rival-magician
brothers to divinities linked respectively with sky and underworld, he lets Nadir and
us at first darkly suspect the good one, who has snatched Nadine. See Schikaneders
heroisch-komische Oper 'Der Stein der Weisen,' ed. David J. Buch and Manuela
Jahrmàrker (Gôttingen: Hainholz, 2002).
 The Figure of Sarastro 89

everyone together for the happy ending. These two genuinely wise old
men are respectively Kalasiris the high priest of Memphis and also
deputy of the Egyptian monarch, and Taranes the High Druid of
Brittany, or perhaps — it is not specified — of all of Gaul.
Both these characters have specific literary backgrounds. Lucan men-
tions in Book 1 of his Pharsalia, enumerating the many tribes that rejoiced
when Caesar withdrew his legions from Gaul in order to march on Rome,
'those Gauls who propitiate with human sacrifices the merciless gods
Teutas, Esus and Taranis/ and goes on immediately to several lines on
the Druids. This is the only reference to Taranis in Classical literature,
but the name is known in several forms from some eighty inscriptions,
some of them accompanied with sculptures: Taranis was evidently a
storm- and thunder-god, a Gaulish Jupiter.16 Wieland, usually a well-in-
formed Classical reader, probably had forgotten the bloody associations,
but insofar as Taranis is a Gaulish name from a religious context, it is
appropriate.
Kalasiris, priest of Isis at Memphis, plays an important part in prob-
ably the best-known of the Greek romances after Daphnis and Chloe, the
Ethiopica, or Theagenes and Chariclea, by Heliodorus; that Kalasiris even
contracts a cross-cultural friendship with a priest of Apollo at Delphi.
The romance was translated into most European languages during the
sixteenth century; it was much imitated and much borrowed from, by
among others Tasso, Cervantes, Racine — and there is a reference in
Shakespeare.17 Wieland knew the Ethiopica well; he used its plot when
shaping the later part of his verse romance Oberon, 1780; Oberon, inciden-
tally, is one of the remoter sources of the Flute, and not exclusively via
the version of it that Schikaneder staged in late 1789.
Wieland was much drawn to the late-Classical period that Helio-
dorus's romance represents, seeing it as an age of emancipation from
blind faith and ritual and of free philosophical enquiry. He shared the
common assumption of his age, combated but by no means finally de-
molished by Hume and others, that the religions of the ancient civiliza-
tions reflected the pure primal religion; thus they were monotheistic,
ethically lofty, and compatible in their essentials with one another — at
least as understood by their priests and other initiates, though the popu-

16 Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Georg Wissowa

(Stuttgart: A. Druckenmuller, 1893-1972 — 34 vols, in 68), art. Taranis 7 in Series 2,
half-vol. 8, col. 2274-84.
17 Twelfth Night, 5.1.121-3.
90 Jay Macpherson

lace might well believe scandalous tales of 'the gods' and worship them
in grotesque forms. In 'The Salamandress/ Osmandyas, the son of
Kalasiris so to speak on his grand tour, completes his education in the
secrets of the primal world, gained at Memphis and Sais, with a period
in Greece being initiated into the Cabirian, Orphic, and Eleusinian mys-
teries, and two years of visits to assorted cult centres. This highly syn-
cretistic attitude to late-Classical religions helps explain how in the Flute
a figure named after Zoroaster turns up officiating in an Egyptian tem-
ple; and Wieland's Druid leaves his mark in the later scene (2.28) where
Pamina describes how her father at a magic hour in a howling storm
carved the magic flute out of the heart of a millennial oak — even though
when the Queen's ladies handed the flute in act 1 to Tamino, it was
described as 'golden.'

Sun-symbols and sun-temples

Another powerful talisman in the drama is the 'sevenfold sun-circle' that

Sarastro wears on his bosom, inherited from Pamina's father though
much desired by his widow. Its invention was evidently prompted by
Lulu's being sent on his quest first of all to regain Perifirime's stolen
'jewel,' her gilded tinderbox 'which the spirits of all the elements and all
the regions of the earth obey,' and which she received from Lulu's
ancestor the wise King Jamshid; only later does she mention the captive
Sidi, and with no reference to her being her daughter. While the Queen
of the Night, that destructive figure, calls the sun-circle 'all-consuming,'
its former owner spoke of Sarastro as one who would rightly wield its
powers. If he does so in the opera, it is in the form less of magic, the realm
of Perifirime's tinderbox,18 than of moral force — its role is to symbolize
his wisdom-based authority.
The symbol itself is not easy to explain. Once past the youthful Louis
XIV dancing with an embroidered sun spread over his abdomen, 19
illustrations of the period do not show priestly or kingly figures wearing

18 The magic tinderbox as folktale motif, most familiar in, but considerably older than,
Hans Andersen's 1836 'The Tinderbox/ is briefly discussed in Stith Thompson, The
Folktale (New York: Dryden, 1946), 71-72.
19 Reproduced, for example, in Claude Dulong, Le manage du Roi-Soleil (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1986), pi. 16.
 T h e Figure of Sarastro 91

suns (except for Confucius in Hogarth's 'Gormogons' print) 20 ; and rays

surrounding a sun are usually some multiple of four. Perhaps we should
envisage seven concentric circles representing the traditional seven plan-
ets.21 However, an ancient artifact may have prompted Schikaneder to
the invention of this symbol. The Abbé Terrasson drew most of his Sethos
portrayal of ancient Egypt from Diodorus of Sicily, who describes the
tomb of Ozymandias, known to us as Rameses II, as crowned with a
massive circle of gold, one cubit thick and 365 cubits around, on which
are inscribed the days of the year with their astronomical and astrologi-
cal indications: it was later looted by the Persians.22 Terrasson describes
this hefty calendar in Sethos, in a brief catalogue of the treasures of Egypt,
as an 'astronomic circle in massive gold' — he reports also the measure-
ments. 23 While this was hardly an object to be worn as a pendant, a fertile
mind like Schikaneder's, glancing through the text for useful hints, could
perhaps have transformed it into a small-sized vehicle of authority and
power.
The original Magic Flute libretto was, unusually, provided with two
engravings (by Ignaz Alberti); these show the temple forecourt described
at the end of 2.1 and Papageno with his birdcage. It is in the prints put
out by local engravers to take advantage of the interest created by local
productions that we must look for images of Sarastro; several of these
show him wearing a sun on his breast. No. 3 in the series that is probably
the earliest, six engravings by Joseph and Peter Schaffer published in a
Brunn journal of 1795 but believed to represent the Brunn production of
1793, or perhaps even the original Vienna production, show him enter-
ing in his lion-drawn 'triumphal chariot,' the sun-emblem visible under
his cloak.24 Its form is that of a sun-face surrounded with numerous

20 Figure 2. T h e Mystery of Masonry brought to light by ye Gormagons/ the 1724 print

by Hogarth in which this figure appears, parodies the processions of the Freemasons,
whose Grand Lodge was founded in London in 1717. Confucius with sun-emblem on
his breast, a Chinese emperor, and two sages head the procession. While some other
figures in the engraving are derived from two or more Don Quixote illustrations by
C. A. Coypel (1694-1752), it seems no source is known for this one. See Ronald
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970-1972), vol.
1,107-08 and vol. 2, pi. 46; see 'Antimasonry: Gormogons' on the useful website run
by the Grand Lodge of BC and Yukon: freemasonry .bey .ca.
21 As known up to 1781, when Herschel discovered Uranus.
22 1.49.5.
23 2:57.
24 Dieckmann, 184.
92 Jay Macpherson

one-line rays. In the series of seven engravings produced in 1794 in

Hamburg following Schroder's production of late 1793,25 one shows
Sarastro's triumphal entrance, drawn in apparently by his attendants: he
and his fellow-priests wear horn-like mitres, and on his bosom he wears
a sun of some thirteen rays.26 The Sarastro of the Nuremberg artist
Abraham Wolfgang Kuffner, in one of eight more sophisticated engrav-
ings published in 1797 (though designed in 1795), also wears a sun,
attached to bands that cross his chest.27
Sun-temples have featured in European drama at least since Dry den's
Indian Queen of 1663, set in Peru; usually, as there, they serve as setting
for a climactic last act or scene. Illustrations of sun-temple stage sets or
costumed sun-priests are rare. However, Schikaneder's direction intro-
ducing the Flute's final tableau, 'Sogleich verwandelt sich das ganze
Theater in eine Sonne (The whole scene immediately changes to a sun),'
doubtless rests on past models reaching back into the Baroque. A theatre
print of 1791, the same year as the Flute, shows a sun-temple adorned
with colossal statues of priests and priestesses wearing sun-emblems,
while a sun fills the centre back.28 This represents a production in
Olmutz, then in Austria (now Olomouc, Moravia), of the four-act ballet
Cora and Alonzo (June 20, three months and ten days before the Flute
opened in Vienna). It was one of the several dramas descended from the
Peruvian episode in Rameau's Les Indes galantes, 1735 (text by Louis
Fuzelier), as reshaped into a brief subplot in Marmontel's Les Incas, 1778:
in both a maiden is caught between love and the cult of the divine Sun.
Marmontel dedicated his novel to Gustav III of Sweden, who charged
his secretary G. G. Adlerbeth and the Saxon composer J. G. Naumann
with a dramatization, to be performed 1782 at the inauguration of the
Royal Opera in Stockholm. Many translations, adaptations, and rework-
ings of this 'heroic opera,' Cora och Alonzo, were to follow. Its translation
by the Olmùtz ballet-master August Huber as Cora und Alonzo, oder Das
grosse Sonnenfest in Quito was the third known musical version of the
story; the first, Cora, was offered to Mozart by its author, von Dalberg,

25 See n. 5 above.
26 Figure 1.
27 Reproduced Dieckmann 199; see 193-201. Rather than reflecting a particular
production, these dramatically-focussed designs appear simply to follow the libretto
(and Alberta's accompanying 'Papageno' engraving).
28 Figure 3. Gustav Gugitz and Emil Karl Bliimml, Die Alt-Wiener Thespiskarren (Old
Viennese Travelling Companies) (Vienna: Schroll, 1925), 209.
 T h e Figure of Sarastro 93

at Mannheim in 1778, but never found a composer. Most widely known

and translated of this Rameau-Marmontel group was the third play,
Kotzebue's Die Sonnenjungfrau (The Sun-Maiden), produced 1789 in
Reval (in Estonia, then a Russian province); by 1800 it had, for example,
English editions in Edinburgh, Dublin, London (two), and New York.29
A short-lived Mannheim periodical, Die rheinische Musen: Zeitung fiir
Theater unâ andere schône Kunste, 1794-1797, has drawings of characters
from The Sun-Maiden, its sequel The Spaniards in Peru, and the Flute: Cora,
the Peruvian hero Rolla, and Sarastro all wear similar sun-emblems on
their breasts. 30
In September 1790, just a year before the Flute, the Leopoldstadt
Theatre, the main rival of Schikaneder's Theater auf der Wieden, pro-
duced Karl Friedrich Hensler and Wenzel Miiller's comic opera Das
Sonnenfest der Brahminen (The Sun-Festival of the Brahmins), modelled
on Kotzebue's play and a considerable success.31 Fuzelier's text for
Rameau had involved only Peruvian characters; Marmontel's Les Incas
brings in the Spaniards, of whom one becomes the lover of Cora. Hensler,
while changing the locale to a colourfully-imagined Indian isle,' has a
young Englishman rescue his English beloved, though a native sun-
maiden also plays a part, along with a noble native 'Governor of the
Island' who embodies the drama's enlightened moral standards. The
Magic Flute narrative has some general resemblances to it,32 apart from
the concluding sun-temple scene usual in the progeny of Les Incas; at the
time when Hensler delivered Mozart's Masonic memorial eulogy (Janu-
ary 1792) and for a further year or so, the two works were seen as
somewhat similar and of comparable value. The great Hamburg director
F. L. Schroder staged the Flute in November 1793, with five performances
in the same month: he remarks, 'And yet only time has given it the

29 See Lawrence Marsden Price, The Vogue o/Marmontel on the German Stage (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1944), 87-93; he lists sixteen German versions.
30 Figures 3, 4, 5. 'Cora/ signed Mariane Kirzinger, from vol. 2 no. 1, 1794; 'Sarastro/
signed F[ranz] H. Wolf, from 2.2,1795; and 'Rolla/ likewise by Wolf, from 3.1,1795,
are reproduced by permission of the Ôesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.
31 Karl Friedrich Hensler and Wenzel Muller, both very prolific, were respectively house
dramatist and music director.
32 See Egon Komorzynski, Emanuel Schikaneder: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte (A Contribution
to the History) des deutschen Theaters (Vienna: Doblinger, cl951), 181-84.
94 Jay Macpherson

victory over Oberon, and even over The Brahmins' Sun-Festival; both
competed successfully with it for at least a year/ 33
Visiting Frankfurt in April 1791, Schroder saw Kotzebue's Sun-
Maiden, which he himself had staged the year before, and noted the
effectiveness of the sun-temple (it appeared again a few days later in
Wranitzky's Oberon): '... very fine, and put up fast enough. I'm missing
a set like that/ In May he reached Vienna in time to see the Sun-Festival's
fiftieth performance: clearly works of this kind were much in vogue. 34
They could all be described loosely as exotic rescue-dramas in which
(except for Oberon, which moreover has no sun-theme) the rescue is
achieved wholly or in part by conversion of the exotic society to a milder
interpretation of the will of its god. Several have grand priest or priest-
king figures modeled on Marmontel's Ataliba, the royal Inca who comes
to be persuaded that the law condemning unfaithful sun-maidens is a
human invention, not the will of the divine Sun. While it seems that
Schikaneder does have these dramas in mind — Tamino in the Temple
of Wisdom fears that Pamina may have been 'sacrificed'35 — resem-
blances to Sarastro remain quite general.

Conclusion

Sarastro has two splendid and dignified arias: 'O Isis und Osiris' at the
end of 2.1, and I n diesen heil'gen Hallen / Kennt man die Rache nicht
(Within these sacred halls revenge is unknown)' closing 2.12. The first,
a prayer to the gods to inspire the young couple with the spirit of
wisdom, was evidently suggested by the prayer uttered by the high
priest when Sethos, at the end of his ordeals, arrives at sunrise in the
temple at Memphis. 36 The second, in which Sarastro explains that re-

33 Oberon, Konig der Elf en, a Singspiel based on WielancTs 1780 romantic epic Oberon,
was first produced by Schikaneder in 1789, lightly adapted by K. L. Giesecke from a
previous stage adaptation and with music by Paul Wranitzky. The diary entry is from
F. L. W. Meyer, Friedrich Ludwig Schroder: Beitrag zur Kunde des Menschen und des
Kunstlers (A Contribution on the Man and the Artist) (Hamburg, 1819), pt. 2, sect. 2,115.
34 Meyer, 59, 65, 83.
35 1.15.
36 Sethos (bk. 3, 133): Isis, ô grande Déesse des Egyptiens, donnez votre esprit au
nouveau serviteur qui a surmonté tant de périls & de travaux pour se presenter à
vous. Rendez-le victorieux de même dans les épreuves de son ame en le rendant docile
à vos loix; afin qu'il mérite d'être admis à vos mystères/
 The Figure of Sarastro 95

venge has no place in the life of the wise, very probably developed from
the subtitle of an operetta performed in Vienna (presumably at the
Leopoldstadt Theatre) in 1790, Leopold Huber's Der unschuldige Betrug,
oder Aufdetn Lande kennt man die Rache nicht (The Innocent Deception, or
In the Country Revenge is Unknown.) 37 The disparity in period and
stature between the two sources once more illustrates Schikaneder's
resourcefulness and pragmatism. As he said in two prefaces, he wrote
not with an eye to literary values but for immediate stage effect.38
This attitude explains many apparent anomalies in the text. If we
along with Tamino are to recognize Sarastro as embodying wisdom
generally and in particular the just ruler, why does he keep slaves —
employ the very unsuitable Monostatos to watch over Pamina — and
treat his servant to crude irony and a racial slur while promising a
particularly cruel punishment? Because Schikaneder is filling in his very
vague sense of 'Egypt' from the familiar harem-rescue plays like
Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio whose pashas keep slaves and
comically-frustrated harem-watchers, and because this kind of savage
joking belongs to the Viennese folk-comedy that is another strain in the
work: effect, not consistency, is the driving force. And effects are care-
fully controlled: just as Monostatos is not actually punished (in 2.7. he
says he owes his whole skin to 'this day' — festal because of Tamino's
arrival?), there is no hint in Sarastro's arrival of weapons or animal
carcasses — the 'hunting' suggestion is confined to its first mention
(1.14.)
I suggested that Sarastro was perhaps brought in to balance the Queen
of the Night. However, that is working from the traditional assumption
that Schikaneder started with the 'Lulu' material — young prince sent
on quest by mother of abducted maiden — and then deepened it with
the Egyptian-initiatic material from Sethos. My own guess is that the
starting-point was rather that friendship in the older generation between

37 O. G. T. Sonneck, Catalogue of Opera Librettos Printed before 1800 (Washington:

Government Printing Office, 1914), 2:1293. The composer was Ferdinand Kauer. From
1789 Huber for many years turned out plays and operettas for the Leopoldstadt
Theatre.
38 His statements begin '. . . ich schreibe nicht fur Leser, ich schreibe fur die Buhne . . .
(I do not write for readers but for the stage)' (preface to Der Grandprofos [The
Provost-Marshal], Regensburg, 1787), and I c h schreibe furs Vergnùgen des
Publikums, gebe mich fur keinen Gelehrten aus . . . (I write for the enjoyment of the
public, I don't profess to be a scholar)' (preface to Der Spiegel von Arkadien [The Mirror
of Arcadia], Vienna, 1794).
96 Jay Macpherson

high priest and High Druid, and that he deliberately loosened that up
by first subtracting two sons and one daughter, leaving Pamina as the
one child; and second, replacing Pamina's father in the present with his
angry widow — the surviving friend's antagonist. Deliberately, because
either the 'Salamandress's' two pairs of lovers or the two smirking
fathers at the end of both that story and 'Lulu' — where Perifirime
assembles both her old lover the king of Kashmir, father of her daughter
Sidi, and Lulu's father the king of Khorasan — would make his plot too
closed, too lightweight, too old-fashioned. Then for hero and opening
situation he draws on 'Lulu,' giving the fairy's role to the Queen of the
Night (a name complementary to her rival's Osiris = Sun connection39),
and for the remainder he brings in Sarastro, the surviving friend, and
develops around him a loftier tone and initiatic narrative deriving from
S ethos.
In this libretto, with all its shortcomings, Schikaneder surpasses his
previous successes, aided by experience both long and wide and a
fine-tuned theatrical sensibility. He is ambitious: he loves especially the
challenge of new, unhackneyed effects; and he knows that his friend
Mozart like him is eager and able to wed the comic-romantic with the
sublime.

JAY MACPHERSON
Victoria College

39 Diodorus says the early Egyptians called the sun and moon Osiris and Isis (Library of
History 1.11.1-2); witness Isis' starry robe in Apuleius (Golden Ass 11. 3-4). Thus Isis
could show herself as a Queen of the Night; some have found here a spur to ingenuity:
cf. Jacques Chailley, 'La Flûte Enchantée,' opéra maçonnique: essai d'explication du livret
et de la musique (Paris: Robert Laffont, cl968), esp. 105-09; Wolfgang Schmidbauer, Das
Geheimnis der Zauberflôte: Symbole der Reifung— Wege zur Integration (Freiburg: Herder,
1995), 21-23,63-67 (this is a respectable Jungian reading); Michael Besack, Which Craft?
W. A. Mozart and 'The Magic Flute' (Oakland, CA: Regent Press, 2001), 214-18.