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The Queen Of The Night Analysis

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Opera is not verbally translatable, so, the interpretation process of the audience are influenced by revisions of a work. Music and libretto dictate the narrative and the action. Through this, they advance the action in in the limited period of time that they have; integrating the complex actions between real and dramatic time to deepen the narrative microcosm that is presented to us. The audience will identify with characters emotions and moods through an absurd medium but with such a rich empathy that it reaches us in a unique manner. Thus, there is a creation of this elite musical culture engrained into society and their values.

More than two hundred years after the premiere of The Magic Flute, audiences and critics alike are concluding …show more content…

The Queen is initially presented in the early scenes as distraught from loss and yearning for the retrieval of her daughter, Pamina. The initial image of her is of the white lit dress as the audiences’ sign of her sincerity. The libretto shifts quite violently during the second act right after Sarastro’s men have orientated the tone of this presented underground world, that women are deceptive and the reason for this segregation on the foreign world. This is a representation of the Queen of the Night as a rival of the true, progressive creed that Sarastro embodies. This dichotomy is paralleled on the musical plane. The original score of Mozart (1791) gives Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, the two most rhetorically powerful figures presented to the audience, distinct and conflicting personas of music. Sarastro's music is characterised by ideals of rational order where “one knows not revenge and should a person have fallen, love will guide him to duty”. The contrast of the Queen of the Night’s music is contained within two arias drawing on the expressive use of coloratura as well as Sturm und Drang to distinguish the divergence of the two entities. She has chromatic harmonies, abrupt and frequent changes, frequent intonation, melismatic content, and a vast vocal range embellish the significance of her values: “Gods of revenge, hear the oath I speak” (McCorkle et al., 1966). Where Sarastro's arias are constructed as rational and controlled vocalizations of greater principles, the Queen of the Night’s arias shadow the deviations of her passions, and the excessive means in the way she speaks becomes more apparent than the semantic content of her words. Implicated within the conflict of Light versus Darkness, operating at the level of both text and music, there is a linguistic coordination that configure woman in an

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