#detto questo la trama in sé è davvero invecchiata male

[harrowscore]

final judgment: the opera is sexist but oddly the female characters (besides papageno but i may be biased) get the best writing. tamino, the supposed hero, is weirdly passive; in italian, i'd say he's like a banderuola who goes from one side to the other and doesn't take one decision for himself. pamina is the one who takes chances and bold choices and weirdly enough saves herself. the queen of the night has the best and most impressive aria of all, and idc about how she's supposed to represent either the obscurantism/ancient regime opposed to sarastro's (literal) enlightenment/the catholic church (represented by a woman lmao? aren't sarastro&co. the priests, even though they worship pagan gods?) against the freemasonry, she's got a point. like, imagine your enemy kidnapping your daughter because he thinks you (a powerful woman who dares to reign without a man's guide) are too proud, and he initiates her to his weird religious cult lmao. (i mean, sometimes in new productions the queen gets painted in a sympathetic light and pardoned and they all live happily ever after etc. but personally i would like for an ending where she vanquishes them all and gets her daughter back lol) having said that, the opera heavily implies that light cannot exist without darkness/sun without moon/man without woman (see papageno who's seeking for a female companion and in the end finds the wonderful papagena, whom he showed kindness to when she was dressed up as an ugly old woman) but sarastro's Rationalism and supposed Wisdom are put against the emotional chitchat of women, represented by the queen and her thirst for vengeance (which again. she's right to feel in the first place lol)

tl;dr: is the opera sexist and racist (the racism here is even worse than the misogyny tbh)? yes. is it freemasonry propaganda? at least partly, yes. can be "fixed" by a new modern approach? somehow. is it still worth a watch/listening? even just for the heavenly music, a resounding yes.

i love the magic flute's music more than any other opera's i've watched/listened to so far, it's absolutely beautiful. but oh god, the values dissonance + mysoginy/racism combo are something else