Die Zauberflöte Response

Reading this Libretto was something new for me because I had never attended or read an opera before. It was interesting for me because i never really knew that operas had story lines, I thought they were just music. I found the story to be very interesting, entertaining, and succinct. It was not a drawn out story and it was really fast paced and exciting.

The entire time while reading I kept thinking about the power that love played in the story. The story showed that love can do both creating great things, as well as destroying things. For Tamino, his love of Pamina leads him to conquer his fears and become brave and eager to take on any challenges. For Pamina, it is quite the opposite, her feelings of love for Tamino almost cause her to kill herself and the same happens for Papageno.

These conflicting ideas of love are very realistic and relatable. Although they may be used on an extreme scale in the opera, the same holds true for real life. Love can make people do great things but also do terrible things. That is one of the main reasons why love is a topic that is used so much in literature, because anyone can relate to it, and also because the feelings are very strong. As with most strong feelings, they can lead people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. That is the major thing that I took from the opera. Overall though, I was interested to see that there is more to opera than just the music being composed.