I would say that your characterization of "perfectly straightforward and sensible" is also an exaggeration. ... it is not perfectly straightforward to open the drama with a kimono-clad Egyptian prince
Nothing the audience experiences marks him as Egyptian, for nobody ever says so on stage. He's a foreign prince in Japanese (Javanese?) costume, so for all any of *us* know, he's from there.
chased by a giant snake,
So much for Fafner. And every other fantasy with a dragon in it.
and it is not perfectly sensible that he sees a small portrait of a princess and instantly falls in love with her. Yes, we accept these things because that's the sort of story it is, but that doesn't make it sensible or straightforward.
If love at first sight were not sensible and straightforward, those four words would never have become an English idiom. Compare, in that regard, "they lived happily ever after"--which also happens very rarely in real life, but is perfectly comprehensible and even expected in this kind of tale.
It is surely not at all straightforward that most of the first act is devoted to setting up a dramatic situation in which the hero promises the virtuous queen that he will save the princess from the evil villain, only to have the scenario abruptly turned upside-down for the rest of the opera.
The queen is attempting to use Tamino as a cat's paw. Neither he nor the audience learn this until we have a chance to observe Sarastro in person. This is not even faintly unrealistic, and is 100% in character for the queen, whom we elsewhere observe being consistently ruthless, single-minded, and manipulative.
In fact, though, the music more than hints at the queen's real character long before the libretto reveals it: the vocal hysterics in "O zittre nicht" suggest something much more sinister than just a grieving mother.
It feels more like the librettist started writing one story and then changed his mind and morphed it into a different story (which, in fact, is exactly what happened).
There is not the slightest evidence for this. In fact, when I took the standard music history survey as an undergraduate, the professor specifically warned us against this as a 19th-century misinterpretation that no longer carried any credibility. Schikaneder testifies that he and Mozart planned the libretto *together* with great care ("den Text mit dem seligen Mozart fleissig durchdacht").
there is a difference between a story like this one (or, eg, Love for Three Oranges), as opposed to a story like Traviata or Otello.
The _Love for Three Oranges_ is a deliberate sendup of its genre, while _The Magic Flute_ is meant to be taken seriously. A better comparison would be with Shakespeare's _Tempest_, which Mozart's contemporaries would have known as _Der Sturm oder die Zauberinsel_, and which could be (but isn't) accused of even more inconsistencies and improbabilities.
The libretto to _The Magic Flute_ was highly admired by no less a figure than Goethe, who even wrote a sequel to it; the opinion of an author of such stature is not, I think, lightly to be dismissed.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/
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