ozart which people have called frivolous, just because
in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of
Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything
in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but
it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with
the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems
to be not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints seem to be not
good, but merely charming. And there are people to whom his beauty does
not seem to be art, because it is just beauty; they think that he had
the trick of it and could turn it on as he chose; they prefer the
creaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are so purely gifts and so
lavish that they seem to be cheap; and _The Magic Flute_ is an absurdity
which he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd.

We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance of it on the stage
of to-day, but we must be grateful for any performance, for the life of
the music is in it. One can see from it what _The Magic Flute_ might be.
The music is so sung, so played that it does transfigure the peculiar
theatrical hideousness of our time. Tamino and Panina may look like
figures out of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines of opera
always do. They may wear clothes that belong to no world of reality or
art, clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up model. But the music
mitigates even these, and it helps every one to act, or rather to forget
what they have learnt about acting. It evidently brings happiness and
concord to those who sing it, so that they seem to be taking part in a
religious act rather than in an act of the theatre. One feels this most
in the concerted music, when the same wind from paradise seems to be
blowing through all the singers and they move to it like flowers, in
spite of their absurd clothes.

But what is needed for a satisfying performance is a world congruous to
the eye as well as to the ear; and for this we need a break with all our
theatrical conventions. Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptian
scenery--very likely the architecture of his temple was Egyptian at the
first performance--but, for all that, this Egyptian world does not suit
the music, and to us it suggests the miracles of the Egyptian Hall. But
there is one world which would perfectly suit the music, a world in
which it could pass naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in wh